Chapter 34
The phone had been sitting in the locked drawer for three days.
I had put it there myself, turning the key and dropping it into my pocket like I was sealing away something dangerous.
I told myself it was because I didn't want to be disturbed, because the business required my full attention, because Romano had been asking too many questions and Alex had been looking at me with those eyes that saw too much.
But the truth was simpler and uglier: I couldn't trust myself with it.
Every time I looked at the screen, I wanted to call her.
I needed it back for a file Romano had been asking about, something about the eastern docks that Drago wouldn't stop complaining about. So I unlocked the drawer, pulled the phone out, and there it was, a voicemail notification, sitting at the top of the screen like a challenge I hadn't asked for.
I shouldn't have opened it. I knew I shouldn't have opened it. But my thumb moved before my brain could catch up, and then her voice was filling the room, small and broken and so fucking real that I couldn't breathe for a second.
Alex was standing by the door. I had forgotten he was there.
He must have heard it too, because when I looked up, his face had gone pale and his hands were clenched at his sides and he was staring at me like he was waiting for something.
Waiting for me to move, to grab my keys, to do something other than just sit there.
My hand drifted toward the key hook where the car keys hung. I could be there in twenty minutes. I could hold her. I could tell her I was sorry. I could—
And then I saw it. The car. The twisted metal, the glass shattered across the pavement, the blood.
My father's hand, still reaching toward my mother's seat even though she was already gone.
I had been in the back. I had seen everything.
I had learned, at ten years old, that love was a weapon people used against you, that the people you cared about became targets, that the safest thing you could do was never let anyone close enough to hurt.
I couldn't put her through that. I couldn't be the reason she ended up like my mother.
I opened her contact and blocked her number instead.
Alex didn't say a word. He didn't have to.
His face said everything, the disappointment, the disbelief, the way his jaw tightened like he was physically holding back words he knew he shouldn't say.
He looked at me like I was a stranger, like the man he had followed for years had just turned into someone he didn't recognize.
I told myself it didn't matter. Alex was soft.
Alex wore his heart on his sleeve, always had, and it was going to get him killed one day.
His mother had made him that way, soft and kind and unwilling to hurt anyone who didn't deserve it, and I had always considered softness a weakness.
He had always been soft, and I had never held it against him.
But right now, his face was a mirror I didn't want to look into. And I couldn't afford weaknesses.
I put the phone in my pocket and kept it there after that. No more hiding from it. I had made my choice.
The days that followed blurred together.
I threw myself into work, meetings, reports, decisions that usually required my full attention, but I couldn't focus on any of it.
Drago would be talking about territory disputes, and I would be thinking about the way she used to praise my cooking like I had just invented fire.
Romano would be updating me on shipments, and I would be remembering the way she scolded me for buying expensive olive oil.
I would sit in my office with the door closed and the lights low, and I would feel the empty space beside me where she should have been, the weight of her absence pressing against my chest like something physical.
No one called me Cas anymore. No one curled into my chest at night and fell asleep with their head tucked under my chin. No one looked at me like I was something good, something worth keeping. No one looked at me like I was anything other than the Devil of the Underground.
Romano noticed first, because Romano always noticed.
He didn't say anything, but I caught him watching me during meetings, his eyes narrowed, his jaw tight.
Alex noticed too, but he wouldn't look at me directly anymore.
He would stand in the corner of the room with his arms crossed and his gaze fixed somewhere on the middle distance, and I could feel the weight of his disappointment pressing against my chest like something heavy and unyielding.
I told myself I didn't care. I told myself I had done the right thing. I told myself she was safer without me.
I found myself in the kitchen one evening, cooking without really thinking about it.
The sauce was something she would have liked, tomatoes and garlic and basil from the plant she kept on her windowsill.
I had bought the ingredients without meaning to, my hands reaching for them in the grocery store before my brain could stop me, and now I was standing at the stove with a wooden spoon in my hand and her face in my head and no idea how long I had been there.
I hadn't heard him come in. I didn't know Romano was standing behind me until I lifted the spoon to my lips, blew on it to cool it down, and turned to offer it to her.
Romano's eyes went wide. His whole body went stiff, like he had been turned to stone, and I watched his face cycle through about seventeen different emotions in the span of two seconds—confusion, shock, horror,
and something that looked almost like amusement buried so deep he was probably trying to hide it.
I froze. The spoon was still in my hand, still raised, still hovering inches from Romano's mouth like I was about to feed him like a child.
I didn't notice at first. I was still somewhere else, still thinking of her, still waiting for her to take the spoon and tell me it was delicious and call me cocky for already knowing. But Romano didn't move, and the silence stretched, and then I heard the click of a camera.
Seraphina was standing in the doorway, her pregnant belly round and unmistakable, her phone already raised in her hand. She was grinning wider than I had ever seen.
"Did I interrupt something?" she asked. "Please don't stop on my account. I want a picture."
The camera clicked again, and the sound snapped me back to myself. I glared at her, then at Romano. "The sauce needed tasting," I said, my voice flatter than I intended. "You were in the way."
Romano blinked, recovered, and muttered something about having reports to file before he fled the kitchen like it was on fire.
Seraphina didn't follow. She stayed where she was, leaning against the counter with her phone still in her hand, grinning at me like a cat who had caught a very large canary.
"He was in the way of your mouth?" she raised an eyebrow. "Have you bent, brother? Finally decided men are easier?"
I turned back to the stove and switched off the heat. "Don't you have somewhere else to be?"
"Nowhere nearly as entertaining." She waddled closer, her eyes moving over my face with that sharp, assessing gaze that had always made me feel like she could see straight through me. Her smile faded.
"What happened to you? A few days ago you looked like a glowing bride. Now you look like a depressed love-rejected teenager."
I didn't answer. I couldn't. What was I supposed to say? That I had fallen in love with a woman who thought I was an unemployed escort and then left her with nothing but a note and three hundred dollars? That I had heard her tell me she loved me and then blocked her number like a coward?
Seraphina's gaze dropped to my neck. To the chain. The sun pendant, back where it belonged, warm against my chest.
"Is it the same woman?" she asked. "The one who had your chain?"
I didn't reply. My jaw tightened, and that was answer enough for her.
She huffed, irritated by my silence. "You're impossible, you know that?"
Then she launched into a rant I suspect she had been holding in for days.
"I'm so sick of all these big buff men. Your brother-in-law nags me about my blood pressure constantly. I can't even sneeze without him running a full diagnostic. I wished for a girl, you know? Just so we'd have some sweetness in this family.
Someone who doesn't grunt and brood and disappear into their own head for hours at a time."
I looked at her bump, then at her face. "We do have a female around," I said. "But not sweet."
She glared at me. Then she taunted, "You're not charming enough to impress any girl, you know. You should find someone before your future nephew or niece does." She patted her belly. "They'll be dating before you even hold someone's hand."
Something in my chest softened at that, at the thought of the baby, at the way she said it like it was a certainty, like there was a future worth planning for.
"I don't want to put someone's life at risk..." I said quietly. "By marrying them."
She stared at me like I had just declared the sky was green. Like I was the biggest fool she had ever seen.
"So you're saying I put my husband's life at risk by marrying him?"
Her voice had gone sharp, defensive. "You're saying I'm selfish for wanting to be with someone? For building a life? For having a child?"
She stepped closer, her eyes blazing. "You think I don't know the dangers? You think I haven't thought about what could happen to him, to this baby, to me? I'm not stupid, Caspian. I know exactly what our family is. But I refuse to live my life in fear.
I refuse to push away the people I love just because something bad might happen."
I didn't say anything. I couldn't. She was right, and we both knew it.
"And you—" she pointed a finger at my chest, "—you sit here in your big empty kitchen cooking food for no one, moping over a woman you were too much of a coward to fight for, and you have the audacity to act like you're protecting her."
She scoffed. "You're not protecting her. You're protecting yourself. Because if she got hurt, you'd have to feel it. And you'd rather feel nothing at all than risk feeling something real."
I opened my mouth to respond, but she cut me off.
"Maybe you're not strong enough to protect what's yours," she said, her voice cold now. "But I am. That's why I'm not scared of anything. And you are."
She stared at me for a moment longer, waiting for me to argue, to defend myself, to say anything at all. But I had nothing. She was right. And couldn't hold it against her. Pregnancy had made her worst demon rise.
"Poor woman," she muttered as she turned to leave. "Whoever she is, I feel sorry for her. Having you as a husband would be a nightmare."
She waddled out, grumbling about useless brothers and their emotional constipation, and the door swung shut behind her, and I was alone again.
I stood there in the quiet kitchen, the sauce still simmering on the stove, and I wished for some peace. Just a moment of silence. Just a minute where I didn't feel like I was drowning.
And then her face flashed in my mind, Elera, bright and smiling, the time she had smeared cream on my nose while we were baking, the way she had laughed when I tried to wipe it off and only made it worse.
I shook my head, trying to push the thought away, but it clung to me like smoke.
I looked at the food on the stove, at the sauce I had made for someone who wasn't here, and I felt no hunger at all.
I switched off the flame and pulled out my phone.
"Romano," I said when he answered. "Arrange someone for tonight. I don't want to be alone."
A pause. Just long enough for me to know he wanted to say something. Then: "Understood."
I ended the call and stood there in the darkening kitchen, the silence pressing in from all sides, and I tried not to think about the fact that I had just paid for a stranger to fill the space where she used to be.
I tried not to think about any of it.
But her voice was still in my head, small and broken and so fucking real.
I love you, Cas.
And I had blocked her number instead of telling her I loved her too.