Chapter Thirty-Nine
XADEN
When my eyes finally focus again and I look at her, it's like seeing her for the first time, really seeing her, not just the version of her I'd constructed to keep myself at a safe distance.
I don't know how or why, but something has shifted irrevocably and it's fucking terrifying.
Like a lens clicking into focus that you can never blur back out.
She darts her tongue out to moisten her lips and swallows.
Normally I would have already pulled away by now, physically, emotionally, every way that counts.
Distance is the only language I've ever been fluent in.
But tonight I don't want to let go, and that want sits in my chest like a foreign object my body doesn't know how to absorb.
The notion scares the shit out of me in a way that nothing else ever has, not a loaded gun, not a man twice my size, not the prospect of dying.
This. Caring for someone. It costs you. It hollows you out and hands the empty space to someone else to fill or destroy.
It's a weakness I can't afford and one I apparently couldn't avoid.
For the first time, it isn't me who pulls away.
She eases off me slowly and stands, her back to me as she searches for her clothes.
I sit frozen, watching her, something locked tight in my chest. We dress in silence, the kind of silence that isn't empty but full, packed wall to wall with everything neither of us will say.
When we're both dressed I just stand here staring at the back of her, words forming and dissolving before they ever reach my tongue.
She can feel my gaze. I see it in the rigid set of her shoulders, in the way her hands have curled into fists at her sides like she's bracing against something.
I reach back and pull my hood up, stuffing my hands in my pockets, something to do with them when everything I actually want to do with them isn't an option anymore.
When she finally turns to face me, the walls are up.
I recognize them because I built the blueprint.
I invented that look, the careful blankness, the deliberate stillness that says I am fine with such conviction that most people believe it.
But I'm not most people. I can see through her if I look hard enough, and right now I'm looking harder than I ever have before.
Her eyes tell the story her mouth won't.
I brace. I wait for the screaming, the accusations hurled like weapons, the tears she always tries to outrun. I've learned her patterns. I know how she breaks.
Instead, she destroys me with a smile.
It's soft and small and utterly devastating because it doesn't reach her eyes.
It lives only on her lips, and beneath it is the kind of sadness that doesn't arrive overnight.
The kind that takes up permanent residence.
Somehow that quiet smile is so much worse than rage would have been.
Rage I know how to answer. This I have no defense for.
“To teach is to learn. To learn is to excel. To excel is to thrive. To thrive is to live.” The words come out quietly, like a prayer she's reciting one last time.
That phrase has haunted me since the first time she said it, I never understood why she carried it like a shield. “No one is born to be a monster.”
My jaw locks.
“They are created. Forced into that shape because someone needed them to be monstrous.”
“No one made me do shit.” The words come out harder than I intend, rough with something I refuse to examine.
She doesn't flinch. She doesn't raise her voice or look angry. She just looks... done. And done is so much more final than angry.
“You taught me about myself without meaning to.” Her voice is measured but I can hear the fault lines running through it.
“I learned to see the world for what it really is by your side.
I'm working on excelling but it's hard. So fucking hard, Xaden.” My name in her mouth sounds different tonight.
Like she's already speaking it in past tense. “I want to thrive. But I can't—”
“Why?” The word rips out of me before I can stop it. Too raw. Too close to a plea.
She doesn't answer the question. She just continues, and this time the pain bleeds through the carefully maintained calm and lands in my chest like a blade finding the gap in armor I didn't know I'd left exposed.
“I can't live the life I want. Not here. Not like this.” She swallows, takes a breath that shudders almost imperceptibly at the edges.
Tears build in her eyes but they don't fall.
She won't let them. And when her face goes blank, when the emotion gets locked back behind the wall in one smooth practiced motion, I narrow my eyes.
She's hiding something.
“Tink.” My voice drops in warning.
She smiles again, the same hollow, painful curve. “Small talk has never been our thing. Let's not start now.” A beat. One single breath of silence that somehow contains everything we never said. “Goodbye, Devlin.”
She's barely finished speaking before she turns and walks away. Every instinct I have fires at once, screaming at me to move, to close the distance, to say the words I've been swallowing for months and finally mean them out loud.
For what?
The question shuts it all down. I have no answer that's fair to her. So I stand there and I let her go, because letting go is the one thing I've always been better at than holding on.
I make my way back to the parking lot in time to watch her tail lights disappear around the corner, taking something with them I can't name.
Something tightens inside my chest, unfamiliar and merciless.
It makes it hard to draw a full breath. I press my palm flat against the hood of my car and stand there, jaw clenched, waiting for the feeling to pass.
It dulls. But it doesn't leave.
I get in and drive. Put my foot down like I can outrun what's sitting in my chest.
“Fuck.”
I try to redirect my mind, force it toward the things that have always anchored me.
Fiona is gone. Toren taking Masen out means the cartel will scramble for new leadership, and I'll burn the whole operation to the ground before I let someone else claim what I bled for.
Alex and his men are pulling out in the next few days.
The boundary lines are drawn. The deals are sealed.
There is still work. There is always still work.
So why does it feel like the ground just shifted under everything?
When I pull up to the mansion, I sit in the car for a moment and just look at it.
Home. The word doesn't fit, no matter how many times I try to make it.
It's too big and too loud and it reeks of ambition that was never mine to begin with.
This was his dream, built to his scale, designed to his ego.
I've been living inside someone else's vision for so long I forgot to ask whether I ever wanted any of it.
Why am I still fighting for something I never wanted?
The question follows me inside. Past my men, up the stairs, left at the landing and straight to the room I always end up in when I don't know where else to go.
My sister's room.
There is a specific quality to this stillness that is different from the ones I'm used to. The stillness before a kill is clean and purposeful. The stillness in Em's room is grief-shaped, hollowed out, defined by absence. This is neither.
This is the stillness of a man who just made a choice and is now inside its consequences.
She walked away on her own feet. I watched her do it. I did not call after her. Did not close the distance. Did not say the thing that has been sitting in my throat and every conversation before it.
I didn't say it.
I have been not-saying it for so long that it has calcified inside me, turned from something alive into something geological. Part of the structure. The thought of removing it is more frightening to me than anything I have faced in two years of deliberate, methodical violence.
That is a specific kind of cowardice.
I know that. I'm looking at it directly, standing in my sister’s room in my wet clothes, and I'm naming it accurately.
She told me she loved me in a warehouse with a blade at her throat.
She told me on a beach near where my sister died.
And I stood there and said nothing and watched her drive away and told myself it was the right choice.
I reach into my pocket. The ultrasound. I have been carrying it like a wound for days. I look at it and I let myself see it clearly for the first time. Not as a complication. Not as evidence of a mistake.
My kid.
The thought lands in a different place than it has before.
My kid.
She's gone and she's carrying my kid and I let her walk because I am more afraid of the softness required to keep her than I have ever been of the violence required to destroy things.
That is also a specific kind of cowardice.
I put the scan back in my pocket.
It is considerable.
It is the worst thing I have felt since Em.
I was not expecting that.
I used to be able to stand here and feel her. Some ghost of her warmth, some echo that hadn't faded yet. I used to close my eyes and almost believe she was just down the hall. That if I stayed still enough and quiet enough, I could hold onto the shape of her.
But tonight when I step inside, there's nothing.
Just walls. Just furniture. Just the hollow silence of a room that used to mean something.
I look around… really look, maybe for the first time in two years and I see it clearly. This isn't a bedroom anymore.
It's a shrine.
Built by a grieving, furious boy who refused to accept what had been taken from him, and maintained by a man who used revenge as a substitute for healing.
She's gone.
The grief hits differently when you stop fighting it, quieter somehow, and so much heavier.
No amount of blood spilled in her name will bring her back.
Not Steven. Not Meekan. Not Masen, Fiona, Kellan or Frank.
I kept every promise I made in the dark over her memory.
I called it justice. I told myself it would close the wound.
It didn't.