Chapter 29
MARCO
The rain hadn’t stopped since I got here. Thick sheets of it rolled over the windshield, blurring the lines of the city, drowning the headlights in endless reflections. I barely registered it.
My mind was somewhere else.
On Valentina.
She was getting to me.
Not with words—not even with the usual smart-ass commentary she threw around like confetti.
No. It was slower. Like erosion. She wasn’t yelling.
She wasn’t demanding. She was just there—everywhere.
Taking up space in the apartment, in my thoughts, in the corners of myself I’d long since decided I didn’t need to examine.
She did things. Subtle, small, maddening things.
Like putting up mirrors.
Two of them. One in the foyer, and one in the living room. I didn’t even know where she’d found them—some discount store, probably—but I came home one night and there they were, like they’d always belonged.
She didn’t know that was the first time I’d seen my reflection in years. Six years ago was the last time I’d let myself look long enough to focus. To see it.
Back then, it wasn’t the face that had scared me. It was what had come with it.
The memories were still there, more vivid than they should be.
I could smell the closet door. That old, splintered wood and whatever chemical Gerald had used to clean the floors.
It always lingered, burning the inside of your nose for too long.
The mirrors had been hung up unevenly, some crooked, some cracked, all of them aimed to reflect back every inch of you.
No matter how small you tried to make yourself, you’d see it.
Over and over again. Knees pulled to your chest, hands wrapped around your arms as if you were holding yourself together.
I used to sit in there and count.
First seconds. Then breaths. Then the spaces between them.
And when that got boring, when the walls got too loud and my eyes couldn’t stay closed anymore, I started to imagine other lives.
Lives where I didn’t wince when doors shut.
Where people’s voices didn’t start loud and end louder.
I used to imagine a kitchen. Nothing fancy.
Just one with noise: someone cooking, music on in the background, plates clinking.
A place where people knew you were home because they wanted you there. Because they missed you.
At ten, I imagined brothers. A mom who called me in for dinner. Someone who remembered my birthday.
By fifteen, I’d stopped imagining family. Family felt like another kind of trap. Like obligation dressed up as love.
What I wanted was simpler. Or maybe more complicated, depending on how you looked at it. I wanted someone to pick me. Not out of duty. Not because they had to. Not because someone had signed papers or told them I belonged to them now.
I wanted someone to choose me.
Eventually, the car door yanked open, and Jacob dropped into the passenger seat, soaked through, dripping all over the car’s interior.
I exhaled. “You ever heard of an umbrella?”
He ignored me, shaking water from his sleeve like a damn mutt. “You ever heard of a parking garage that doesn’t leak?”
I didn’t entertain him, just gestured my fingers toward the folder in his hands. “That it?”
Jacob hummed, tossing the file onto my lap, the paper already damp from his jacket. I flipped it open, scanning the contents while he spoke.
“Sebastian Callahan’s pushing in harder. Digging into Max’s shipments. Hitting them at the dock before they even hit distribution.”
My teeth clenched. I already knew that much. But what I didn’t know—what I needed to know—was how much longer Max was willing to wait before he ordered me to put Callahan’s body in a crate.
The Outfit was patient when it benefited them. Max Romano? Not so much.
Jacob wiped his face with the sleeve of his jacket, still dripping, still acting like he hadn’t just flooded my car. He nodded toward the folder as if it held the final nail for Callahan’s coffin.
“Word is, he’s using someone on the inside,” he added. “New face. Can’t pin down who yet.”
Of course he was.
Sebastian Callahan didn’t play by rules. He wrote his own. And lately, he’d been too loud. Too confident. Like he knew Max couldn’t touch him. Or wouldn’t.
My fingers tightened around the edge of the folder.
It wasn’t just about product. It wasn’t about territory. It was personal now.
Callahan never did anything without intention. He was strategic. The kind of man who didn’t poke unless he already had a plan for how to deal with the reaction.
And the last time he’d gotten involved with someone close to Max, it was Valentina.
Whether she wanted to admit it or not—whether she even realized how deep it went—she’d been a piece on his board once. Maybe still was.
I didn’t like thinking about that. Which meant I’d been thinking about it nonstop.
“I can pressure the docks again,” Jacob offered. “Put someone else on rotation. Start freezing routes.”
I shook my head. “No. That’ll tip our hand.”
“You want me to sit on it?”
“I want you to find out who Callahan’s feeding from.”
Jacob nodded, his face unreadable. “And if we do?”
“We make an example.”
The file sat open in my lap, pages filled with numbers, locations, and grainy surveillance shots. Things that should’ve been the only thing I cared about.
But then there was her.
Valentina.
My wife.
Not in the file. Not in ink. But in the spaces between words. In the details no one else would notice.
Sebastian Callahan was prying into Max’s shipments. Tracking, digging. He had eyes everywhere. And Valentina used to be one of them.
My fingers pressed harder into the folder.
Had she ever looked at him the way she looked at me—with fire, with challenge, with that maddening little smirk that made me want to shut her up with my mouth on hers?
Had she fought him the way she fought me?
Had she driven him insane with her backhanded comments, her unpredictable mouth, and the way she turned everything into a battle just for the hell of it?
Had she hated him first, before she wanted him?
The thought curled around my ribs.
She’d been with him. I knew that. I’d known that for a long time. And I’d spent just as long pretending I didn’t care.
But now? Now I’d had her—now I knew exactly how she sounded when she moaned my name, how she felt when she fell apart around me, how she looked when she was wrecked and dazed and fucking mine—the thought of his hands on her made my stomach twist violently.
I didn’t have a right to hate it. I knew that.
I wasn’t some lovestruck idiot clenching his jaw over a girl who’d never belonged to him.
But it didn’t change the fact that the idea of Callahan knowing what I knew—seeing what I’d seen, feeling what I’d felt—made me want to burn something to the ground. Maybe him.
I tried to push the thought out of my head. Tried to remind myself it didn’t matter. That she was here now. That whatever happened before didn’t change a damn thing.
But it did. Mostly because I didn’t share things well. I’d never had anything that was just mine.
Foster homes had been temporary. Beds were loaned.
Clothes were secondhand. Nothing had ever quite fit right.
Nothing had ever belonged to me. Not the rooms I slept in.
Not even my own damn name. In the military, everything was borrowed too.
Uniforms with someone else’s initials still stitched into the tags.
Schedules that told me where to be and when to leave.
I lived a life defined by other people’s rules, other people’s timelines, other people’s leftovers.
But Valentina—she didn’t feel borrowed. She felt real.
Mine. From the way her breath caught when I touched her to the half-asleep smile she wore in the mornings, to the marks on her skin I’d put there myself.
I wanted every piece of her. Every thought, every secret, every quiet, vulnerable moment.
I wanted her in a way I’d never wanted anything else—obsessively, irrationally. Possessively.
She wasn’t borrowed. She wasn’t temporary. She was mine, in every fucked-up, selfish way possible.
I wondered why I wanted someone who was so reckless. So chaotic. Someone who tore through life without thinking, who laughed louder than she should and argued even louder than that. Maybe that was why she got under my skin the way she did. Why I couldn’t let her go even when I knew I should.
Still, there was one thing I couldn’t stand. The drinking. I had no idea if she was still doing it behind closed doors. I hadn’t smelled it on her, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t indulging.
I’d never told her to stop, only that she couldn’t do it in my apartment.
Never grabbed the glass from her hand, and never lectured her, because I wasn’t that man.
I wasn’t the type to control people, to tell them what they could or couldn’t do.
That wasn’t my job. People made their own choices. They lived with their own consequences.
But that didn’t mean I had to fucking like it.
That didn’t mean it didn’t get under my skin like an itch I couldn’t scratch.
I’d seen it before. The way Valentina drank, it wasn’t for fun.
It wasn’t because she enjoyed the taste.
It wasn’t even to take the edge off. It was about something else.
Something deeper. It was about silence. About shutting out thoughts she didn’t want to sit with, about numbing out reality just enough to pretend like she had control.
And that? That was the part that fucked with me.
I’d lived with it.
I could still smell the vodka. Still hear the slow, fixed sound of ice clinking in a glass, the television buzzing with some show she wasn’t even watching.
I could still see her, the woman who was supposed to protect me, supposed to stand between me and the man who locked me in that mirror room and told me to take a good look at myself.
She never did.
She just sat there, slumped on the couch, a bottle at her hip, eyes glazed over, face blank.
She heard me crying, heard me screaming, but she never moved.
Never opened the door. Never pulled me out.
She let it happen. She let me sit in that room, surrounded by versions of myself staring back at me from every fucking angle, because she was too drunk to even notice me.
I’d press my palms against the glass, trying to find something real, but there was nothing. Just reflections. Just me, split into a hundred pieces, forced to look at myself the way he wanted me to.
Valentina wasn’t her. I knew that. But that didn’t matter, because every time I saw her with a drink in her hand, every time I smelled it on her, every time she got that look in her eye—that quiet, distant, hollow look—I felt like that kid again.
Sitting on the floor of that mirror room, screaming for someone who would never save him.
That was why it fucking bothered me.
Not because I wanted to fix her. Not because I wanted her to be different. But because I knew exactly what it looked like when someone let themselves disappear. When they took one step, then another, then another, until they were too far gone to find their way back.
I wasn’t going to stop her—that wasn’t my job—but I sure as hell wasn’t going to stand by and watch her fade away either.
That was the part I couldn’t stomach—the slow unraveling; the way she acted as if none of it mattered, like she wasn’t burning herself from the inside out. She’d laugh, roll her eyes, throw out some remark that was meant to cut deep but never quite reached me the way she wanted it to.
I hated seeing those echoes in Valentina.
Hated how every instinct told me to leave, to protect myself from repeating the past. But even more, I hated the part of me that kept hoping she’d change.
Because if she did—if she fought it and won—I wouldn't have to walk away.
I wouldn't have to keep my distance. I wouldn't have to choose between my sanity and the one woman I couldn’t seem to let go of.
I hated that she reminded me of something I’d spent my whole life making sure I’d never become. I hated that in the back of my mind I was always waiting—waiting for her to take that last step over the edge, to go too far, to reach a point where I couldn’t pull her back even if I wanted to.
The worst part was knowing she would, because that was what people like her did.
They didn’t stop. They didn’t turn around.
They didn’t just wake up one day and decide to be better.
They kept going until they had nothing left.
Until they’d lost everything. Until the only thing they had was the bottle in their hands, the weight of all their bad choices pressing down on them until they collapsed.
And I wasn’t going to watch it happen.
I kept my distance. I let her push. I let her provoke me, dig into me, claw at me, try to get me to crack, even though I never did.
If I cracked, she’d see what was underneath. And if she saw that—if she realized what she was doing to me—she’d use it. She would ruin me with it. She’d sink her teeth into it and drag me down with her, because that was who she was.
And the worst part? The absolute fucking worst part?
I’d let her. Because for all my judgment, all my resentment, all the fucking years I’d spent making sure no one would ever have that kind of power over me again . . . she already did.