Chapter 28 - JENNA
The couch dips beneath me as I shift, half-awake, half-lost. Sleep won't take me fully. It circles. Teases. Drops me back into myself over and over again. I stare at the ceiling, Massimo's ceiling, and let the truth settle where denial used to live. This is the second time I've killed someone.
The first time, I didn't have a choice. Survival stripped it down to instinct and aftermath and shaking hands. This time… this time I chose. I looked a man in the face and nodded, knowing exactly what would happen when I did. I watched him die. The thing that gets me is that I don't regret it.
That's what scares me. There is no line left.
Not really. No moral edge I won't step over if it means Amauri comes home safe.
If it means he sleeps without flinching.
If it means he never learns what the Oven smells like.
The thought settles, cold and absolute. With it comes something else.
Something I haven't let myself touch in ten years.
Massimo.
Not the man he is now. Not the monster Vegas whispers about. Not the fury and the violence and the way he looks at me like I am a liability and a weakness all at once.
The boy. The man who found me when I was shaking apart.
It comes back in pieces at first. Not scenes.
Sensations. The smell of citrus, bleach, and men's sweat.
And yes, death. I scrubbed my hands raw, convinced I could still feel him on my skin.
The way Massimo didn't touch me until I asked.
Didn't crowd me. Didn't ask questions I couldn't answer.
Just sat there. Present. Solid.
I remember how grateful I was. God, I was grateful. For his silence. For the way he looked at me like I wasn't broken, or dirty, or something to be pitied. Like I was still… me.
One night turned into another day. Then another day.
Grief doesn't respect schedules; it leaks.
It followed me. So did Coach's face, which was suddenly everywhere.
Missing posters taped to lampposts and grocery store windows.
His name scrolled across the bottom of the news like a prayer that wouldn't be answered.
Pillar of the community. Beloved mentor.
I saw his wife on TV. She clutched a microphone with shaking hands. I watched his children, too young to understand what missing really meant, only knowing that their father hadn't come home. I remember thinking he was a monster. I remember thinking he deserved everything he got.
And then—God help me—I saw their tears. The waiting.
The terrible, human not-knowing. It tore me open deep inside.
I would lie awake at night, staring at the ceiling, guilt pressing so hard on my chest I thought it might crack my ribs.
Some nights I couldn't breathe. Others, I couldn't stop shaking.
Massimo was there for all of it.
Not fixing. Not judging. Not giving absolution that he couldn't give.
He was there when the posters multiplied.
When the story shifted from missing to presumed dead.
When the world moved on, and I couldn't. He held me when the guilt wrecked me so completely that I forgot how to exist as anything but a wound.
We stopped talking about what happened because we didn't need to.
Words would have cheapened it. He didn't treat me like glass.
Didn't look at me like something fragile or ruined.
He treated me like a woman who had survived something ugly and was still allowed to want things.
Allowed to laugh. Allowed to touch. Allowed to feel good without earning it through pain.
At some point between the days and nights he stayed and the mornings he didn't rush away, between the weight of guilt and the quiet relief of being seen, I fell in love with him.
I remember laughing with him, real laughter, the kind that sneaks up on you and leaves your ribs sore.
Walking through gardens at night, neon bleeding into green, pretending the world wasn't sharp.
Him stealing food off my plate and smirking when I pretended to be offended.
I remember the first time he kissed me. Not hungry. Not careless. Reverent.
I had never been kissed like that before.
Like he was memorizing me. Like this wasn't just a moment, but a decision.
I fell in love slowly. Terrifyingly. The kind of love that doesn't crash so much as settles—quiet and deep and impossible to shake.
I let myself believe that maybe I was allowed that.
That maybe the worst thing that had ever happened to me wouldn't define the rest of my life.
Somewhere along the periphery, I remember breaking up with Carter.
Not the next day, I was too shaken, but soon after.
Then he had the accident. People looked at me like I should care. I didn't. There was only Massimo.
And then one day…
He was gone.
No warning. No explanation. Just absence where certainty had been.
I had folded that memory so tightly, wrapped it in anger and pride and survival, that I almost forgot how much it hurt to lose him.
Not just him, but the version of myself I was with him.
The girl who still believed someone could choose her and stay.
I swallow hard, chest tight. I didn't let myself grieve him back then. I didn't have time. I was pregnant. Terrified. Cornered by men who saw my body as a strategy. I became efficient. Practical. Hard.
I became a mother.
And now? Now I see what I did today. What I was willing to do. What I will do again if I have to. I finally understand something I couldn't at eighteen. Massimo didn't make me strong.
He just saw it first.
I turn onto my side, pulling the blanket closer, eyes burning but dry. Whatever we were… whatever we might have been… it mattered. Enough that it still echoes. Enough that I survived losing him and became someone capable of walking into hell and not looking away.
Ten years ago, I loved him. Tonight, I don't know what I feel. But I know this: if he thinks I'm the same girl he left behind? He's about to be very surprised.
Hours blur. I drift in and out, caught in that strange half-place where thoughts dissolve and the body keeps score. My limbs are heavy. My heart won't slow. Every time I close my eyes, I see fire. Ovens. Hands. Amauri's face on the night he was taken, frozen in shock that I couldn't reach through.
"Mummy!"
The sound slices straight through me. I don't move.
I don't open my eyes. I don't breathe. Because if this is a dream, I don't want to break it.
I don't want to lose the sound of his voice, bright and alive and here.
My lips curve into a soft, broken smile against my will.
God, it hurts. It hurts so much it almost feels good.
"Mummy!"
Closer this time. Louder. Impatient. Exactly the way he sounds on Sunday mornings when he thinks I've slept too long.
Suddenly I feel—weight. Unexpected and familiar.
Small knees digging into my stomach, arms flinging around my neck with reckless force.
I gasp. My eyes fly open. Impossible. He's here.
Amauri.
Real. Solid. Warm. His hair smells like soap and airplane and something metallic I don't want to think about. His arms are locked around me like he's afraid that if he lets go, I'll vanish.
"Amauri?" My voice breaks completely. It barely makes it past my throat.
"Mummy," he sobs into my neck, the word wet and desperate and whole. "I missed you. I missed you so much."
I wrap myself around him without thinking, pulling him closer, tighter, like I can fuse him back into my bones if I hold hard enough. My hands are everywhere—his back, his arms, his hair—counting, checking, proving. Alive. Breathing. Here.
"I've got you," I whisper over and over, my face buried in his shoulder. "I've got you. I've got you. I'm here. I'm here."
He's shaking. I realize I am too. His fingers knot in my shirt like he's afraid I'll disappear again. His tears soak into my skin, and I welcome every one of them. Let them burn. Let them hurt. This is the pain that means he's alive.
"They were scary," he hiccups. "But I knew you'd come. I knew you would."
That does it. I break. A sound tears out of me, ugly and raw and unstoppable. I rock him like I did when he was a baby, back and forth, pressing my mouth to his hair, his temple, his cheek. I don't care who sees. I don't care where we are. The world can burn down around us.
"You were so brave," I choke. "You were so brave, my love. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry I didn't get there sooner."
He pulls back just enough to look at me, his hands framing my face the way mine used to frame his when he was small. His eyes are too old right now. Too knowing. It shatters me.
"But you came," he says simply.
"Yes," I whisper fiercely. "I will always come for you. No matter what. No matter who I have to go through. No matter what I have to become."
He nods like this makes perfect sense, then burrows back into me, curling against my chest like he used to do after nightmares when he was little.
I hold him.
I hold him like letting go would kill me.
Around us, the penthouse is silent. The world waits. But none of it matters. Not the danger. Not the blood. Not the lines I crossed to get here. All that matters is that my son is in my arms. This time, I am not letting him go.
I lift my head. He's standing a few feet away, arms folded over his chest, posture rigid, face carved into something unreadable. No triumph. No relief. No demand for recognition. Just watchfulness. Like a man guarding something he doesn't quite trust himself to touch.
Massimo.
For a heartbeat, the room narrows until it's just the three of us; my son, warm and alive in my arms, and the man who brought him back, standing in the shadows like he doesn't know where he belongs in this picture. Whatever I feel for him right now—anger, grief, history, all of it—doesn't matter.
He brought my son back.
Our eyes lock.
There's too much in the look. Ten years.
Blood. Fire. Everything we broke, and everything that still refuses to die.
His jaw tightens slightly, like he's bracing for something.
An accusation, maybe. Or collapse. I don't give him either.
I mouth the words instead, because my voice wouldn't survive them.
Thank you.
It's barely a movement. Just breath and intent. Something shifts in his face then. Not softness, never that. But the tension in his shoulders eases a fraction, as if a weight he hadn't admitted to carrying has finally been set down.
He gives a single nod. Nothing more. No words. No crossing the room. No claiming space that isn't his to claim. Somehow, that restraint—that—tells me more than anything else ever could. I tighten my arms around Amauri, press my cheek to his hair, and let my eyes close again.
For this moment, at least, we are all exactly where we need to be. ####