Chapter 36
The kind of quiet that pressed against my ears and made me hear things that weren't there, her voice, her breathing, the way she had said I regret all of it like she was reading my eulogy.
I didn't know how long I sat there. Minutes, maybe. Hours. The papers from Drago were still scattered on the floor, but I didn't pick them up. I couldn't focus on anything except the hollow ache in my chest and the way her words had carved themselves into my ribs.
You're worse than him. Oliver took three years. At least he gave me that much.
I had blocked her number to protect her. To protect myself. And now she thought I was worse than the man who had cheated on her with her best friend.
I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes and tried to breathe.
The knock came at the door.
I didn't move at first. I was still somewhere else, still trapped inside my own head, still hearing her voice echo through the empty spaces I couldn't fill. But the knock came again, more insistent, and I pushed myself up from the chair. I walked to the door and opened it.
She was young. Early twenties, maybe, with dark hair and wide eyes and the kind of face that had learned to smile when it didn't mean it. She looked at me for a moment, taking me in, and then her gaze dropped to the floor.
"Hello..." she said, her voice soft and uncertain. "I was told to come here."
I stepped aside without saying a word. She walked in, her footsteps quiet on the carpet, and I closed the door behind her.
She turned to face me, and then she started taking off her clothes.
I blinked. "What are you doing?"
She paused, her hands on the hem of her shirt, and looked at me like I had asked something stupid. "Uh... I'm taking off my clothes? The man who told me to come here said that you don't like beating around the bush. That I shouldn't make unnecessary talks. So..."
Romano. Of course. I pinched the bridge of my nose and let out a long breath.
"It's fine." I said. "You can just leave. I don't need it now."
Her face went pale. Panic flickered in her eyes.
"What? Did I do something to offend you? I'm sorry. I have already received half of the payment. I really need this money. Please don't do this."
She was trembling. I could see it in her hands, in the way she held herself like she was bracing for something bad. She needed the money. Of course she did. That's why she ended up in a place like this.
"You can go." I said. "You don't have to return what you already received. The rest of the money will be sent to you by morning."
She stared at me, her mouth slightly open. "What? Seriously? Is this... is this a test?"
"No."
"Really? Are you sure? And I'll get the full money without doing anything? For real?"
"Yes," I said. "Now leave."
She searched my face for something, a trick, a trap, some sign that I was lying. But she must have seen the finality in my voice, because she nodded slowly, pulled her shirt back down, and walked toward the door.
She paused with her hand on the handle. "Thank you," she said quietly. "I... thank you."
Then she was gone, and I was alone again.
I stood there for a long moment, staring at the closed door, and I thought about how easy it would have been to let her stay.
To lose myself in someone else's body, to pretend for a few hours that I didn't feel like I was dying.
But I couldn't. Because she wasn't Elera.
And every other woman in the world would always be not Elera.
The days that followed blurred together.
I returned to the estate, and I buried myself in work because it was the only thing I knew how to do.
Meetings, reports, decisions. I sat through all of them, nodded at the right moments, signed the papers that needed signing.
But I wasn't really there. My body was in the room, but my mind was somewhere else, trapped in a phone booth with a woman whose voice had been hollow and broken and so unlike her that I couldn't shake the memory.
Romano watched me. I could feel his eyes on me during briefings, during meals, during the long silences that stretched between us when there was nothing left to say. He didn't ask if I was okay, because Romano never asked. But he saw. He always saw.
Alex was worse. He wouldn't look at me at all.
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 didn't ask where he had gone that night after he dropped me at the hotel. I didn't want to know.
I tried to convince myself that I had done the right thing.
I told myself that she was safer without me, that my mother's fate would not become hers, that the blood and the danger and the constant threat of death were not things I had any right to bring into her life.
I told myself that the chain was all that mattered, and I had gotten it back, and now I could move on.
But the words rang hollow, even in my own head.
I missed her in the mornings, when I woke up alone and reached for a body that wasn't there.
I missed her in the evenings, when I stood in the kitchen and cooked food I didn't eat.
I missed her when I heard someone laugh on the street, when I smelled garlic and basil, when I saw a woman with dark hair walking ahead of me and felt my heart lurch before I realized it wasn't her.
I stopped eating properly. I stopped sleeping.
I would sit at my desk late into the night, staring at reports I couldn't focus on, and I would wait for exhaustion to take me.
But even when it did, even when my eyes finally closed and my body finally stilled, there was no peace.
Her voice followed me into the darkness, soft and broken and relentless.
I regret meeting you.
I would wake up with my chest tight and my hands clenched and her name on the tip of my tongue, and I would lie there in the dark and wonder how I had become this person, the kind of man who heard a woman say she loved him and blocked her number instead.
It was late, or early. I couldn't tell anymore. The clock on my desk said two in the morning, I had been staring at the same report for what felt like hours, the words blurring together into a meaningless jumble of ink and paper.
My head was heavy. My eyes burned. I blinked, and the room seemed to tilt slightly, the edges of my vision going soft and hazy. I told myself I wasn't tired, that I could keep going, that there was too much work to do to stop now.
But my body had other plans.
I don't remember putting my head down. I don't remember closing my eyes. One moment I was sitting at my desk, and the next, the room was different, softer, somehow, the shadows longer, the air thicker. I blinked again, trying to focus, and that was when I saw him.
There was a man sitting across from me.
He was in the chair where Romano usually sat, leaning back with his arms crossed, his expression unreadable. He was wearing a dark suit, the kind my father used to wear to meetings, and his face was the same one I had seen in old photographs, the same one I had tried so hard to remember and failed.
My father.
He looked exactly as I remembered him—the sharp jaw, the steady eyes, the quiet confidence that had made men twice his age respect him. He didn't look like a ghost. He didn't look like a memory. He looked like he had simply walked into the room and sat down, like he had never left at all.
"Dad...?" The word came out before I could stop it, small and uncertain, the voice of a ten-year-old boy who had just watched his parents die.