Chapter 31
The first thing I did when I woke up was reach for my phone.
It was instinct now, muscle memory, the same desperate hope that had been keeping me alive for days. I blinked against the grey light filtering through the curtains, my eyes swollen and heavy from crying, and I pressed my thumb against the screen and opened the voicemail.
My heart stopped.
The word was there, right there, small and ordinary and earth-shattering. He had listened. He had heard my voice, my sobs, my words. He had heard me say I love you for the first time, broken and desperate and ugly, and he had listened to every second of it.
He knew. He knew how I felt.
And he hadn't come back yet, but he would. He had to. He wouldn't just listen and do nothing. He wouldn't leave me like this.
He had heard it. He had listened to every word.
He knew how I felt, knew that I was begging him to come back, knew that I didn't care about the lies or the secrets or any of it.
He knew, and he hadn't called back yet, but maybe he would.
Maybe he was thinking about it. Maybe he was on his way right now.
My fingers were shaking as I opened his contact and pressed call.
The phone rang once.
Twice.
Three times.
And then the automated voice came on, but it wasn't the same one from before. This was different. Sharper. Final.
I stared at the screen.
Not in service.
Not unavailable. Not busy. Not out of range.
Not in service.
He had listened to my voicemail, heard me pour my heart out, heard me beg him to come home, heard me say I love you for the first time in my life, and then he had blocked my number.
The phone slipped from my hand and landed on the bed beside me. I didn't pick it up. I couldn't. I just lay there, staring at the ceiling, and felt something inside me crack open that I didn't know how to fix.
He wasn't coming back.
He had never been planning to come back.
And I had been sitting here for days, waiting for a ghost.
____________________________________
The estate was quiet when Alex walked in.
Quiet was never a good sign. Quiet meant thinking, and thinking meant Caspian was somewhere inside, staring at a wall or a window or nothing at all, while Romano stood nearby like a statue, waiting for orders that weren't coming.
Alex found them in the study.
Caspian was sitting behind the desk, his laptop open in front of him, but he wasn't looking at it. His eyes were fixed somewhere on the middle distance, his jaw tight, his hands still. He looked like a man who had made a decision and was trying very hard not to second-guess it.
He hadn't meant to hear it. Caspian had been sitting in the dark with his phone pressed to his ear, his face unreadable, his body completely still. Alex had been standing by the door, waiting for orders, and he had heard her voice through the receiver, small and broken and desperate.
Alex had looked away. It felt like something he wasn't supposed to witness.
Caspian had ended the call and set the phone down and not said a single word.
Not then, not when Alex asked if he was okay, not when Romano came in with reports and updates and questions that needed answers.
He had just sat there with that same unreadable expression, like a statue carved from stone, like nothing in the world could touch him.
But Alex had heard her voice. And he had seen the way Caspian's jaw tightened when she said his name. And he knew, with a certainty that sat heavy in his chest, that this was not going to end well.
Now he stood in the doorway of Caspian's office, watching his boss stare out the window at the city below. Romano was already inside, his arms crossed, his face set in that hard expression he wore when he was preparing for a fight.
"The woman.." Romano said. "She's been asking questions at the bar. The manager called. She's digging."
Romano shifted his weight. "You know what you have to do."
Caspian turned then, and his face was the same as it always was cold, controlled, unreadable. But Alex had known him for years, and he could see the cracks, small and almost invisible, in the set of his jaw and the tightness around his eyes.
"She's already blocked." Caspian said. "The number is gone. There's nothing left to trace."
Alex stared at him.
He had known Caspian for years. He had seen him cold, ruthless, calculating. He had watched him make decisions that left men broken and families destroyed. But this was different. This was a woman who had done nothing wrong except trust the wrong person.
"Boss....!" Alex said carefully, "maybe you should at least talk to her. Give her some closure. She deserves that much."
"Closure." Caspian repeated.
"She deserves that much at least, boss yo-"
"No."
The word was sharp, final, and it cut through the room like a blade.
Romano shot Alex a look that said shut up, but Alex couldn't. Not this time.
"She's probably hurting..." he said quietly. "Maybe she's been crying for days. She doesn't know who you are or why you left or what she did wrong. She thinks she did something wrong."
Caspian's jaw tightened. "That's not my problem."
"She loves you."
The words hung in the air, heavy and uncomfortable. Romano's expression darkened. Caspian went very still.
"Enough," Romano said. "This conversation is over. Alex, you're dismissed."
Alex didn't move. He looked at Caspian, searching for something, anything, that would tell him the man he followed wasn't as cold as he pretended to be. But Caspian's face was like stone, and his eyes were like ice, and Alex felt something crack inside his chest.
"Contact with her is a weakness," Romano continued, his voice hard. "If our enemies see him going to her apartment, if they find out he cares about her, she becomes a target. Is that what you want?"
"No" Alex said quietly.
"Then stop arguing. He made the right choice. The only choice."
Caspian turned back to the window, his shoulders rigid, his hands clasped behind his back. "Leave." he said. Both of them. "Now."
Romano left without another word, his footsteps echoing on the marble floor. Alex lingered for a moment longer, watching the man who had saved his life, who had given him a purpose, who had shown him that loyalty meant something in a world that had taken everything from him.
He wanted to say something. He wanted to tell Caspian that this was a mistake, that leaving her like this would haunt him, that love wasn't weakness even if his father had raised him to believe it was.
That this was not someone else's problem, that there was a woman out there whose heart was breaking because of them.
But the words wouldn't come.
So he left.
____________________________________
Some days later:
The car was dark and quiet, and Alex sat in the driver's seat with his hands on the steering wheel and his mother's voice echoing in his head.
She had been young when she met him. Rich family, important name, the kind of man who promised the world and meant it until he didn't.
He had said he would leave everything for her.
He had said they would build a life together.
And when she told him she was pregnant, he had walked away without looking back.
Her family disowned her after that. Unholy things, they called it. Shame on the family name. She was left with nothing, no money, no home, no one to help her raise a child. But she kept Alex anyway. He was all she had.
She worked herself to the bone, scraping together enough to keep them alive. She came home with cracked hands and tired eyes and still found a way to smile at him, still found a way to tell him that everything would be okay.
And then she died working herself to bone.
Alex was six years old, hungry and alone, with nothing but her words to hold onto. He had spent years surviving on scraps, on the kindness of strangers who looked the other way, on the sharp edges of a world that didn't care if he lived or died.
And then he met Caspian.
Caspian was only ten, but he had power even then. He had a name that meant something, a family that controlled half the city, and somehow, for reasons Alex never fully understood, he had taken Alex under his wing. He had given him food and clothes and a place to sleep. He had given him a purpose.
Alex owed him everything.
But that didn't mean he was always right.
He started the car and drove.
The apartment building looked the same as it had that night, when Caspian had handed him a container of food and told him to leave. Alex sat in his car for a long time, watching the windows, trying to figure out what to say.
He didn't have a letter. He didn't have a plan. He just had the weight in his chest and the memory of a woman's voice on a voicemail, begging someone to come home.
He got out of the car and walked to the door.
He raised his hand to knock, but before his knuckles could make contact, the door swung open.
She was standing there.
Her face was tear-streaked, her eyes swollen, her hair a mess. She was wearing a hoodie that was too big for her, and she looked like she hadn't slept in days. But her face, when she saw him, lit up with a hope so bright and so fragile that it made something in Alex's chest crack.
"Casp-"
Her voice died in her throat. The hope flickered, dimmed, and then went out entirely as she realized that he wasn't the person she had been waiting for.
"Who are you?" she asked, her voice hoarse. "What are you doing here?"
Alex opened his mouth, then closed it. He had rehearsed this a hundred times in the car, but now that she was standing in front of him, looking at him with those red-rimmed eyes, he couldn't remember a single word.
"It's better you don't know," he said finally. "And you need to stop searching for him."
Her jaw tightened. "Stop searching? He's been gone for days. I don't know where he is or if he's okay. I have a right to-"
"He's fine." The words came out harsher than he intended. "He's more than fine. He's a busy man, and he's already wasted too much time on you."
She flinched like he had slapped her.
"....W- wasted time?" she repeated. "He's a broke unemployed man living in my apartment. What could he possibly be busy with?"
Alex looked at her. At her tear-streaked face, at the hope that was slowly crumbling into something else. He thought about his mother, about the man who had walked away from her, about all the years she had spent waiting for someone who was never coming back.
He couldn't lie to her. Not about this.
"He's not broke." Alex said quietly. "He's not unemployed. He's not any of the things you thought he was."
He paused, watching her face shift from confusion to disbelief to something darker.
"He came here for a reason. You had something of his. Something important. A chain. He needed it back."
She stared at him.
"A chain....?" she said slowly.
"The one you accidentally took from him."
Her face went pale. He could see her mind working, piecing things together. The alley. Him asking for the chain. The confusion. The misunderstanding. And then the morning after, sweeping everything into her bag, not looking, not thinking, just running.
"The chain." she whispered. "He was there for the chain...."
Her voice was hollow. Empty. Like she was saying the words but not really hearing them.
Alex didn't answer. He didn't need to.
Her eyes went wide and then blank, and Alex watched as something inside her shut down. Her shoulders slumped. Her hands fell to her sides. Her lips parted, but no sound came out.
He had seen that look before. On his mother's face, the day his father didn't come home.
"Hey..." he said, softer now. "You're going to be okay."
She didn't respond. She didn't even seem to hear him. Her eyes were fixed on something he couldn't see, her mind somewhere far away, and Alex knew that she wasn't going to remember anything he said after this.
He stood there for a moment longer, unsure of what to do, unsure of how to fix something that couldn't be fixed.
And then he turned and walked away.
Behind him, the door stayed open.
She stood there for a long time after he left. Long after his car had disappeared around the corner. Long after the sun had set and the streetlights had flickered to life. She stood there in the doorway of her apartment, clutching the doorframe like it was the only thing keeping her upright.
She didn't cry. She didn't move.
She just stood there, staring at nothing, and let the silence swallow her whole.
The chain.
He had been there for the chain. Not her.