Chapter 24 When Enzo Feels Unworthy
When Enzo Feels Unworthy
The parking garage stairwell smelled like old concrete and cold exhaust, the kind of air that stuck to the back of Enzo’s throat.
Somewhere above them, car alarms had started and died in half-hearted bursts, swallowed by concrete and distance.
Valentina’s heels clicked once, sharp and furious, then kept moving without slowing for him.
Enzo caught up in three strides and grabbed her wrist - just enough pressure to stop her from disappearing down the next flight. The moment his thumb brushed the inside of her pulse, he felt it: the tremor she was trying to hide. Not fear exactly. More like control stretched thin enough to snap.
“You’re walking away from me,” he said, low.
Her gaze cut to his hand like it was an accusation. “I’m walking away from what they’re claiming you are.”
He let go. The absence felt worse than the grip. “They can claim whatever they want. I didn’t do it.”
Valentina didn’t look back at him as she climbed the stairs two steps at a time. “Your name is in the confession. Your voice. Your methods.” She swallowed hard, and the movement in her throat looked like it hurt. “You were supposed to protect me, Enzo. Instead you’re the tool in their hands.”
Enzo tried to drag air into his lungs, but it came in wrong - too tight, too thin.
The campaign raid had already burned through every excuse he’d planned to use.
He’d watched guards turn their backs. He’d listened to people he’d fought beside for years treat him like a liability.
And now Valentina - Valentina, who’d looked at him like something real - was treating his existence like evidence.
He followed her into the stairwell landing, the metal door behind them slamming shut with a clang that sounded like a verdict. His shoulder brushed the wall; paint flaked under the pressure. “I need you to look at me,” he said. “Not at what they staged.”
Valentina whipped around. The overhead lights made her eyes look colder than the garage air. “I looked at you. I looked at you while you stood there and let them pull it from me like it was already yours to give away.”
“You think I let it happen?”
“I think - ” She broke off, jaw tightening. For a second, her composure faltered and something naked flashed across her face: betrayal sharpened into grief. “I think they knew exactly where I’d be. Exactly when I’d open that case. Exactly how to make you sound like the mastermind.”
Enzo’s mouth went dry. The sealed pact still lived in his mind like a wound. The resin cradle. The insertion seam. The chain-of-custody binder with signatures that had started to feel less like paper and more like fingerprints on a crime scene.
He’d been thrown into that elevator trap because the system believed the wrong thing. He’d been locked out of doors because protocols had been edited to say he was the threat. And now - now the public story had been stitched around his voice like a noose.
He took another step toward her, slow enough to be a choice rather than a demand. “The confession they recorded - ”
Valentina laughed once, humorless. “Recorded? It was played through a hidden microphone. Through my phone. They made it sound like I was confessing to you while I was trapped. Like I was begging you to keep me quiet.” Her eyes glittered under the lights, wet with anger and something worse. “Like I was your leverage.”
Enzo’s chest clenched. He wanted to tell her what he knew, to lay out the sequence, to prove the handler had used his own voice recordings to twist commands through his protectors.
He’d figured it out earlier, in the safe room, with his hands shaking around the burner phone.
He’d heard the telltale cadence - his own - threaded through the false orders.
He’d watched her mistrust turn into a weapon against her.
But in this stairwell, the truth felt too heavy to lift. Every time he tried, his mind flashed to the way the guards had turned away as if he was already guilty. To the way she’d looked when she’d realized the evidence wasn’t just legal - someone had made it personal.
He forced his voice steady anyway. “They used my voice. My recordings.”
Valentina’s expression didn’t soften. “How convenient.”
“Convenient?” Enzo’s temper flared, then burned down into something darker. He could feel it in his gut - the impulse to grab her again, to make her listen by force. He didn’t. He was learning, slowly and painfully, that force wasn’t protection. It was just another kind of control.
“They didn’t steal my voice,” he said. “They stole what I’d already given. The handler behind the assassination attempt used my recordings to manipulate my people. To create confusion.” His throat tightened. “I didn’t plan any of this. I didn’t plant anything.”
Valentina’s gaze dropped to his hands, as if looking for proof there too.
“Then why does it sound like you? Why does it match your cadence, your phrasing, the way you - ” She cut herself off, breathing out hard through her nose.
“Why does it match the way you protect me when you think I don’t know what you’re doing? ”
The question landed like a fist. Enzo’s stomach rolled.
That was the exact thing he’d never been able to explain without sounding like a liar: the way he’d always moved around her like a shield, the way he’d always watched exits and routes and signatures.
The way he’d always believed he could keep her safe by controlling what she couldn’t see.
Now she was holding that same instinct up to the light and seeing only manipulation.
He swallowed. “Because I know you. Because I know how they’d want you to feel.”
Valentina’s eyes sharpened. “So you admit you understand their plan.”
“I understand the mechanics,” he corrected, quieter. “Not the purpose. Not the mastermind.”
The word mastermind tasted wrong. Like the kind of enemy that didn’t show their face. The kind that hid behind paperwork and audio files and staged legal language.
Valentina took a step back, as if the air between them had become a barrier she couldn’t cross. “Then tell me why they wrote it like this. Tell me why they pointed at the sealed pact and used the same legal phrasing from the trapdoor clause.”
Enzo’s mind raced, then stalled. The trapdoor clause. He’d found the phrase buried in their earlier materials, the part of the pact that could be activated by a public filing. He’d tried to keep it from becoming public knowledge. He’d tried to keep it from being used as a weapon.
He’d also tried to keep Valentina from learning the full scope of what the pact meant - how one signature could kill empires, how the sealed agreement wasn’t just a shield against criminals but a binding chain that reached into politics and centuries of deals.
If she knew the breadth of it, would she still look at him like a protector? Or would she look at him like the man who’d brought her into a trap that had always been waiting?
The parking garage lights flickered once. The sound of a far-off elevator groaned in its shaft like a tired animal.
Enzo reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out the page he’d ripped free from the campaign safe room. Not the binder - he didn’t have that anymore. This was a different piece: a marked printout with a handwritten circle around a name line and a second note on the margin.
He’d kept it because it felt like the only honest thing he owned. Proof that the conspiracy left footprints.
He held it out, careful not to shove it into her face. “Look.”
Valentina didn’t take it. Her eyes stayed on the paper like it might bite. “What is that supposed to do?”
“It proves they’re wrong about me,” Enzo said. “It proves the chain-of-custody binder wasn’t just tampered with. It was directed. And the direction points somewhere else.”
Valentina’s lips parted, then pressed tight again. “Somewhere else.” Her voice cracked on the words, the tiniest fracture in the mask. “Enzo, you can’t just say ‘somewhere else’ when they’re using you like a puppet.”
He flinched at puppet. Not because it wasn’t accurate in the simplest sense, but because it carried a deeper insult: that he’d been acting without agency. That he’d been a tool waiting to be picked up.
He’d worked too hard to be independent for her to say that word and mean it.
“I’m not a puppet,” he said, too fierce.
Valentina’s gaze snapped up. “Then why do you look like someone who wants to disappear?”
Enzo froze. He hadn’t realized he’d been doing it - standing too still, forcing his breathing to calm down, letting his shoulders go rigid as if his body could become evidence. He’d been trying to hold himself together so she didn’t see the fear underneath.
Now she did.
“I thought if I explained,” he said slowly, “you’d understand the bigger picture. That I wasn’t manipulating you. That I was trying to stop the mastermind from using the sealed pact’s clause to trigger a filing.”
Valentina’s eyes narrowed. “You thought wrong.”
The words should’ve stung less, because they weren’t cruel. They were tired. That was what made them worse. She wasn’t accusing him with rage anymore. She was withdrawing with exhaustion, like she’d spent herself trying to trust.
Enzo lowered the paper to his side. “Valentina.”
She turned away again, moving toward the door that led to the next stairwell section. Her hand hovered over the handle, then paused. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t ask me to stay while you chase your own version of the truth.
” She pressed her mouth into a thin line.
“Because every time you get close to answers, something else breaks. People turn on you. Doors lock. My phone turns into a microphone.” Her voice dropped.
“And my name - my name ends up tied to your voice like I’m begging you to control me. ”