Chapter 17
seventeen
Zach
The drive out sits badly in me from the moment we leave the apartment.
It isn’t just nerves, and it isn’t just the remains of everything I swallowed earlier still working their way out of my system.
It feels deeper than that, like my whole body knows this is the point where whatever line was left between before and after is finally going to disappear, and even with Lucian beside me and the second car following behind us, carrying Elijah and Christian, I can’t get any part of myself to settle.
I keep my hands flat against my thighs because if I let them move, if I let myself fidget or brace or pace the way I want to, I know exactly where my head is going to go.
Back to her.
It always goes back to her.
Not to some vague idea of her, not to the memory of her laugh or the way she fits against me in bed or the sound of her voice when she says my name.
It goes back to what I saw. It goes back to the bed.
To the cuts torn across her collarbone. To the way she looked too slow inside her own body, like she was there but not fully able to reach herself properly, like whatever that bastard gave her had dragged her under and left just enough of her above the surface to make it worse.
I can still see the terror in her eyes.
That’s the part that won’t move.
That and the cuts.
That and the way she looked helpless in a way Lia never should.
I should have held myself together.
That thought keeps circling back, not because I think I had anything to do with her being taken, but because I know exactly what I became once she was gone.
Weak. Useless. Another person in that apartment that needed carrying instead of being useful.
Another problem. Another body taking up space while she was still out there.
“Stop punishing yourself long enough to be useful.”
Lucian says it without looking at me. His voice stays level, easy, the same tone he’s used the entire drive, like he already knows exactly where my head has gone and isn’t interested in letting me stay there.
I let out a breath through my nose and keep my eyes on the windscreen.
“That easy?”
“No,” he says. “If it were easy, you wouldn’t have nearly killed yourself in her bathroom.”
That lands exactly where he means it to.
I don’t answer.
He glances at me for a second, then back to the road.
“You don’t get the luxury of collapse again,” he says. “Not while she’s still out there. Whatever shame you want to drown in, whatever disgust you feel toward yourself, whatever grief is sitting in your throat, you can have it later. Right now it serves no one.”
I look at him then, because there’s no pity in him when he says it, no softness, no attempt to dress it up as comfort.
“You think I don’t know that?” I ask.
“I think you know it,” he replies. “I don’t think you know what to do with it.”
I go quiet again because that part is true.
The city gives way gradually, the roads emptier out here, the industrial lots wider apart, the night swallowing more of everything between them.
The second car stays behind us at a clean distance, never too close, never too far.
I don’t need to see Elijah to feel him there.
I can feel his rage the way I can feel weather when it’s about to break.
It’s been sitting over the apartment for three days now, thick and heavy and impossible to ignore.
“I’m not him,” I say eventually.
Lucian’s mouth shifts slightly, not quite a smile.
“No,” he says. “You aren’t.”
“I can’t do what he does.”
“I know.”
That shouldn’t relieve me, but it does a little.
“Then what the fuck am I doing here?” I ask, the words coming out lower than I intend. “If I’m not him, and I’m not you, then what exactly am I supposed to be?”
That one makes him look at me properly.
“You are supposed to learn the difference between feeling something and obeying it,” he says. “Elijah obeys his body. It works for him because his body is where he puts everything. Rage. Fear. Grief. It all has somewhere to go. You don’t work like that.”
I stare at him, waiting.
“You go in the other direction,” he continues. “You don’t explode, you disappear. You numb. You fold in on yourself until there’s almost nothing left to hold onto.”
The words make my jaw tighten because hearing it said that clearly feels too close to looking in a mirror.
“So what,” I say. “I just stay miserable and call that control?”
“No,” he says. “You learn to keep your mind in the room even when your body wants to leave it.”
That’s all he says.
No lecture. No dramatic line. Just that.
And somehow that sits with me harder than anything else he could have said, because there isn’t anything grand about it. It’s not about becoming violent enough or hard enough or cold enough. It’s about staying in the room.
The lot comes into view a minute later, and the dealer’s car is already there.
Lucian slows and pulls in at an angle that leaves me a clean path toward him while keeping the second car behind us out of direct sight.
He doesn’t move to get out.
He just kills the engine and looks at me.
“Same rhythm,” he says. “You don’t act nervous. You don’t act brave. You don’t act like anything changed.”
I nod once.
“And if he spooks?” I ask.
“Then Elijah handles that.”
The way he says it makes clear there is no version of tonight where the dealer gets to walk away if he starts running.
I get out of the car.
The cold hits me harder than I expect, sharp enough to clear some of the static from my head as I walk toward the dealer.
He steps out to meet me slowly, and I can see the difference immediately.
He’s done cautious before. This isn’t caution.
This is nerves. His eyes keep moving, scanning behind me, over my shoulders, across the dark.
“You’re early,” he says.
“So are you.”
He studies me for a second, and I force myself to stay exactly where I am, not tense, not loose, just as I’ve always been with him.
“You look rough,” he says. “You really go through that much that fast?”
“I told you I needed more.”
He doesn’t come closer.
That’s wrong enough that it catches in my chest.
“Already?” he asks. “You just had a supply.”
I shrug one shoulder.
“I used most of them.”
He still doesn’t move.
“What’s wrong with you tonight?” he asks.
“Nothing.”
He lets out a breath that almost sounds like a laugh, but there’s nothing easy in it.
“Doesn’t look like nothing.”
For one second I think he might bolt.
Then Elijah comes out of the dark behind him.
There’s no warning. No dramatic pause. One second the dealer is standing there watching me, and the next Elijah’s hand is locked across the back of his throat and shoulder, hauling him backward so violently that his feet leave the ground for half a step before he slams into the side of the car.
He gets one half-formed curse out before Elijah drives him down again, the sound of metal and flesh hitting together cutting through the lot.
I stop where I am and watch it happen, the shock of it running through me so fast it doesn’t have time to settle into one clean thing.
Part of me goes cold. Part of me feels sick.
Part of me, and this is the part I don’t want to look at too closely, feels something ugly and immediate uncoil at the sight of his panic.
Good.
The word flashes through me before I can stop it.
Good.
Lucian’s voice reaches me from behind.
“You going back,” he asks, calm as ever, “or are you coming with us?”
I don’t turn.
The dealer is swearing, struggling, trying to wrench free, and Elijah is handling him like he weighs nothing, like he’s barely worth the effort.
“I’m coming,” I say.
Lucian doesn’t praise it. He doesn’t nod like I’ve passed something. He just gets out of the car and moves with me toward the second vehicle while Christian helps force the dealer into the back seat.
The drive to the warehouse feels shorter.
Or maybe my body has just chosen something new to focus on.
When we get there, Elijah drags the dealer out before the car has fully settled. The man is fighting properly now, all reflex and panic, feet slipping on the concrete as he tries to swing back.
“You’re dead,” he spits, blood already at the corner of his mouth. “All of you. You have no idea who the fuck you just grabbed—”
Elijah hits him so hard the rest of it dies in his throat.
The sound of it lands in the open space and stays there.
The dealer staggers and tries to come back with a wild swing that would barely have landed clean on a drunk man, and Elijah answers it with another hit that sends him to one knee.
Then another.
Then another.
There’s no rhythm to it, no measured control, no attempt to keep it neat. It’s all body. All impact. All the things in Elijah that have been trapped without a target for too long finally finding somewhere to go.
“Enough,” Christian says sharply. “Let us get information first.”
Elijah doesn’t stop immediately. His chest is rising too fast, his hands flexing at his sides, his entire body wound so tight it looks like it might split.
Then, slowly, he steps back.
Not because he’s calmed down.
Because he’s choosing not to ruin the chance.
Lucian moves forward and stops beside me for one second before he drops into a crouch in front of the dealer.
“Watch carefully,” he says, not looking at me. “I’ll show you that violence isn’t always the only way to get what you want.”
The dealer spits blood onto the floor and glares up at him.
“Go fuck yourself.”
Lucian doesn’t touch him.
Doesn’t threaten him.
He just looks at him with that same controlled attention he’s had all night and says, “You know they’re not coming for you.”
The dealer’s expression flickers, just for a second.
“You know exactly what this is,” he continues, still calm. “You’re not important enough to rescue. You’re not important enough to avenge. If they lose you tonight, they replace you tomorrow and keep moving.”
“Bullshit,” the dealer snarls, but it lands weaker than he wants it to.
Lucian glances toward Christian.
“Call one of our dock men,” he says. “Tell him to ring Carrero’s second and let him know we picked up a runner.”
Christian doesn’t question it. He pulls out his phone immediately.
The dealer’s eyes move.
Fast.
Back to Lucian.
“Why—”
“Because if Luis Carrero wants you alive,” Lucian says, cutting over him, “he’ll call back before I finish counting to ten.”
Christian is already dialing.
The dealer shifts on the chair, trying to hide it, trying to look defiant, but I can see the first crack in him now. It isn’t pain. It isn’t fear of being hit. It’s the possibility that no one is coming.
Lucian lifts one hand and starts counting.
He does it quietly.
Not dramatically.
One.
Two.
Three.
Christian has the phone to his ear, waiting.
The dealer’s breathing changes by four.
By six he’s looking at the phone instead of Lucian.
By eight his jaw is tight enough that I can see it shake.
Christian lowers the phone.
“No answer.”
Lucian nods once, then looks back at the dealer.
“There it is,” he says softly. “The exact amount you matter.”
The dealer says nothing.
He doesn’t have anything to say to that.
“Now we can do this the long way,” Lucian continues, “and Elijah can work through every part of his mood while you keep telling us nothing, or you can decide that dying for a man who won’t even pick up the phone is a stupid way to spend your night.”
The man swallows.
I can see it.
The decision is already in him, fighting with whatever’s left of his pride.
Lucian leans back slightly, giving him just enough space to think he has some.
“We don’t need everything,” he says. “We just need the first useful thing.”
The dealer looks at Christian’s phone again.
Then at Elijah.
Then back at Lucian.
Something in him gives.
“I don’t know where she is,” he says quickly. “I swear to fuck, I don’t know where they took her.”
Lucian doesn’t nod, doesn’t reward it.
“Who had people watching her?”
“A lot of guys,” he says, breath uneven now. “A lot of different guys. I never dealt with them direct.”
“Who did they answer to?”
He hesitates.
Elijah takes one step forward.
That’s enough.
“Luis Carrero,” he blurts. “They all answer to Luis Carrero. Houston side, that’s him.”
The name lands in the middle of us and changes the shape of the room.
Lucian gets to his feet slowly, like this part was always inevitable. He steps aside and gives Elijah the smallest nod.
Elijah doesn’t say a word.
He just moves.
This time there’s no stopping him. No one tries. Not Christian, not Lucian, not me.
The first hit takes the dealer out of the chair.
After that it stops being a fight and starts being an ending.
I watch it.
Not because I want to.
Because I can’t look away.
There’s something in me that recoils from it, and something else in me, something darker and harder and sick with everything that’s happened to Lia, that feels grim satisfaction every time the man tries to move and can’t.
By the time Elijah is done, the dealer is dead.
The silence that follows it feels different to the one before.
Lucian steps back beside me, folding one hand loosely over the other as if we’ve just finished a meeting instead of watched a man beaten to death on a warehouse floor.
“Elijah is a man who needs to work through his body,” he says quietly. “That’s how he survives what’s in him.”
I keep my eyes on the body.
“And you,” he continues, “already struggle with control of your body, which means if you try to survive the same way, you’ll destroy yourself.”
That lands too cleanly to argue with.
“If you are going to be with Lia,” he says, “then you are with Elijah by default, and in turn with the Bellandi family. That means you do not remain some soft thing on the edge of all this hoping it never touches you. It means you become an asset. It means you become someone who can protect what is yours.”
I finally look at him.
There’s no performance in him. No manipulation I can see. Just absolute certainty.
“I’ll show you how,” he says. “So you never have to feel that helpless again, and so when the time comes, you can stand equal to Elijah at his side instead of behind him. You will need to be a family. Not divided.”
The words sit there between us.
Heavy.
Real.
I know what yes means. I know the lines it closes. I know there is no clean version of my life on the other side of it.
Then Lia rises in my mind again, not soft or distant, but exactly as she was on that bed, drugged and cut and half-lost inside herself, and every other thought falls away.
“Is that what you want?” Lucian asks.
I don’t need time to think.
“Yes,” I say.
And this time it isn’t dragged out of me. It comes from somewhere solid.