Chapter Forty
TOREN
]I had to hit rock bottom to finally understand where I stand.
Not just emotionally… completely. Every version of myself I'd been clinging to had to crumble before I could see clearly. And standing in the rubble of everything I thought I wanted, I finally understood what I actually needed.
Leaving him on that beach was one of the hardest things I have ever done.
It felt like choosing to stop breathing, deliberate and painful and something my body fought against with everything it had.
But I did it. I turned around and I walked away.
I didn't let myself look back, because I knew if I did, I wouldn't be able to keep moving.
I'm choosing myself.
For the first time in my life, I am putting myself first, not out of selfishness, but out of survival. For me. For us. For the small, stubborn life growing inside me that deserves a mother who knows who she is.
But choosing myself doesn't feel the way I thought it would. It doesn't feel like freedom yet. It feels like grief wearing a brave face.
I stuff the last of my things into my duffle bag and pull it closed with a finality that settles in my chest like a stone.
I'm not the person I want to be. Somewhere between loving him and losing myself I became something I barely recognize, something with sharp edges and bloodstained hands. My father would be proud of who I've become and that thought alone is enough to make me sick.
I killed. The blood of my brother will forever live on my hands, embedded so deep no amount of washing will ever reach it.
I committed the worst sin a person can commit, and the fact that I did it to protect my child doesn't erase it.
It doesn't absolve me. I made a choice, cold and irreversible.
I will carry the weight of it every single day for the rest of my life.
There is no version of this story where I come out clean.
“Are you sure I can't make you stay?”
I look up at the sound of Carn's voice. He and Harper are standing in the doorway together, wearing matching expressions of uncertainty.
Worry and love they don't quite know how to put down.
They're holding it out to me like an offering—stay, we've got you, you don't have to do this alone—and it takes everything I have not to take it.
But they don't understand. I can't stay here.
I came back with a purpose, to stop a war, to do the right thing, to be someone I could be proud of.
Instead I fell. I fell straight into the arms of my enemy and chose the boy who broke me over my own flesh and blood.
And the part I truly cannot reconcile, the part that keeps me awake staring at the ceiling at three in the morning, is that I would do it again.
Over and over and over. I would choose him every single time, and I don't know what that says about me, but I know it's not something I can sit with while I'm still standing in his shadow.
“I need to do this.” My voice comes out steadier than I feel.
Carn exhales slowly, the kind of exhale that carries more emotion than most people express in full sentences and nods.
The sadness in his eyes is quiet and deep, the kind that belongs to someone who understands loss intimately.
He stayed back a few extra days instead of returning to CHU with Tate and the others, and I haven't let myself think too hard about why, because thinking about it makes it harder to leave.
“Darlin’,” he says, his voice low and unhurried, “the world is a big place. You can get lost in it if you need to.”
Something in those words loosens a knot I've been carrying in my chest for weeks. A small smile finds my lips before I can stop it.
“Don't get lost for too long though.” Harper's voice is thick at the edges, her jaw set in that way she does when she's refusing to cry. “I am not missing the birth of that baby.”
“You won't,” I promise, and I mean it with everything I have. “If I'm not back by then, I'll tell you exactly where I am so you can come to me.”
“And me.”
I blink. Turning to look at Carn.
He crosses the room before I can respond, eliminating the space between us with quiet, deliberate steps.
He takes my face in both his hands, gentle in a way that has always surprised me coming from someone who looks like him, then holds my gaze with a look of such complete, unwavering certainty that my breath catches.
“I will be there for you always. In whatever capacity you need me to be.” His voice is steady and low, like a vow being made in a church.
“My life may be rooted elsewhere, darlin’, but distance means nothing when it comes to you.
I'll drive through the night or catch the first flight out of Denver.
If you need me, I will come. Sometimes I'll come even when you don't want me to, because I know you better than you give me credit for.
I know when you need someone, even when you're convincing yourself you don't.” His thumbs trace my cheekbones with a tenderness that threatens to undo me completely.
“You hold a place inside me that no one else ever has.
I don't say that with expectation or agenda.
I say it because it's simply the truth, and you deserve to hear true things.”
My vision blurs. The lump in my throat makes it impossible to speak, so I don't try. I just place my hands over his and hold on, and let myself feel the full weight of what this man means to me.
Carnage De Santis came into my life sideways, unexpected and unasked for.
Somewhere along the way he became one of the most important people I have ever known.
I love him. Not romantically, not like a brother, not like a best friend but in some category that exists entirely on its own, one that doesn't have a clean name.
He is proof that love doesn't always arrive in the shape you expect, and sometimes the people who hold you together the most are the ones you never saw coming.
“When a man loves a woman,” he says quietly, “she becomes his weakness.” My breath hitches. “When a woman truly loves a man, he becomes her power. That is an exchange of power, darlin’.”
“What does that mean?” The words come out barely above a whisper.
His thumbs move softly against my face, and a gentle smile, rare and unguarded crosses his features.
“It means Devlin has a weakness.” His eyes hold mine without flinching.
“And she is currently standing in front of me, loving him from a distance.” A sound escapes me that I have no name for, something strangled and raw and completely beyond my control.
“You have the strength to put yourself first because he has become your power. He gave you that without knowing it. Maybe without meaning to.”
The words land like something physical, like a hand pressed flat against my sternum, holding me upright and cracking me open at the same time. They play on a loop long after he's released me and quietly left the room, leaving Harper and me standing in a silence so full it hums.
Harper is staring at the empty doorway with wide eyes, looking as undone as I feel.
After a long moment she clears her throat. “I had a speech.” Her voice is still thick but she rallies because that's what Harper does. “It wasn't anywhere near as good as that.”
A laugh breaks out of me—involuntary and desperate and exactly what I need. “Clearly.”
She smirks, and just like that the tension cracks down the middle and we can both breathe again. “All I was gonna say is Xaden needs to stop acting like a dicktim.”
I blink. “A what?”
“A dicktim.” She says it with the authority of someone who coined the term herself. “Acting like a dick while simultaneously playing the victim.”
Laughter bursts out of me so fast it startles me, loud and unrestrained and achingly normal. She grins, delighted with herself.
“What? It was either that or pointing out that you are thoroughly multifucktional.”
I choke. “Do I want to know?”
The glint in her eye answers before she does. “It means you are doing entirely too much and hanging on by a single, fraying thread.”
I snort. “That's…” I pause, genuinely considering it. “Actually devastatingly accurate.”
She takes a small bow. I roll my eyes. And for just a moment… just this one suspended, golden moment, everything is exactly as it used to be. Just us. Just this.
Then the silence comes back, softer this time. Honest.
“Harp—”
She raises her hand before I can finish. “I know, Tor.” Her voice breaks at the edges, just barely. “I know. I get it. I really, truly do.” She exhales shakily. “I just hate that finding yourself means leaving. I hate that starting over requires a departure.”
The air rushes out of me.
She crosses the room and wraps her arms around me and I melt into her completely.
Into the familiar warmth of my best friend, the person who has seen every version of me and loved them all unconditionally.
I hold her back with everything I have, screwing my eyes shut against the tears that are threatening to fall.
“I love you, Harp.” My voice cracks around the words. “Thank you for being my friend. Thank you for never judging me. Thank you for staying even when I gave you every reason not to.”
She squeezes tighter. Neither of us speaks for a moment. Neither of us needs to.
“Your ride's here.”
Carn's voice is quiet from the doorway. Gentle. We pull apart, both of us damp-eyed, both of us refusing to let the tears actually fall, smiling through it because that's the only way to survive a goodbye like this.
He lifts my bags without being asked and carries them out. Harper and I follow, stepping out into the pale morning light together.
I pause on the threshold and look around.
I came back to this place a different person than I left it.
I arrived cracked, searching and convinced I knew what I was doing.
I'm leaving with more questions than answers, more scars than I arrived with, and a life growing inside me that I didn't plan for.
But I'm also leaving with something I didn't have before.
Clarity.
As I say my goodbyes, a small and treacherous part of me…
a part I'm not proud of, a part I've been trying to silence for days keeps glancing down the street.
Keeps hoping. Some ridiculous, romantic, foolish sliver of my heart had constructed an entire scenario, that somehow he would know.
That he would come. That he would appear at the end of that street and give me the one reason I'd been begging him for on that beach, and I could stop pretending I was okay with leaving.
The street is empty.
Of course it is.
I swallow the disappointment—all of it, every sharp edge of it—and climb into the back of the car. I wave at my friends through the window, keeping my face composed until they disappear from view.
Then I stop pretending.
The tears fall quietly, without ceremony. I press my palm against the small swell of my stomach and try to anchor myself in the only certainty I have left. I may not have him. But I will always, always have a piece of him with me. Growing. Becoming. Entirely and impossibly real.
It doesn't make the ache go away. It doesn't stop my heart from reaching back toward a beach where a man stood and let me walk away without a word.
But it's enough to keep moving.
I can't save someone who doesn't want to be saved. And I can't keep drowning in water I waded into willingly, hoping he'd eventually pull me out.
So I face forward.
And I let myself grieve him in the back of that car, in the quiet and the dark, where no one can see.
Because some loves don't get a happy ending.
Some loves just make you brave enough to go find one somewhere else.