Chapter 14
XAVIER
The bottle is empty.
I turn it in my hands for a moment, examining it with the careful attention of a man who has run out of other things to examine.
Bourbon — the expensive bottle I keep at the back of the cabinet for occasions that warrant it, for victories worth celebrating or disasters significant enough to deserve good liquor.
This qualifies as the latter. The most significant disaster of my life, in fact, which means I'm celebrating it with the best I had.
There's an irony in there somewhere, but I can't find it through the fog.
I reach for the second bottle. My hand shakes — not from weakness, not the injury, but from something coming up from deeper than my spine — and I knock it over.
The hollow impact of glass on wood echoes in the empty house, too loud in the way everything is too loud tonight, in the way silence amplifies everything it contains.
Silence.
The house is silent. The house is empty. The house, which three hours ago contained coffee and PT exercises and the domestic ordinary of Valentina moving through rooms I now can't look at without seeing her, is completely, fundamentally empty.
Because I kicked her out.
Because I said get out, no longer mine, done, over — I arranged the words with the deliberate precision of a man building a wall, putting them in the order most likely to do maximum damage, and I watched her shatter and I told myself that was what I wanted.
Good, I'd thought. She deserves to hurt.
But the anger that felt so hot and righteous in that clubhouse has burned itself out somewhere between the third and fourth drink, and all that's left underneath it is this: an ache so deep and structural it feels like it's come from the bones.
The hollow, gnawing awareness of a man who has destroyed something and cannot stop being aware of the destruction.
She killed Marcus.
Marcus, who I knew — have known since we were old enough for me to start cataloguing the things I didn't want to know — was not a man you left alone with women who hadn't chosen him.
Marcus, who I defended because loyalty demanded it, because blood demanded it, because admitting the truth would have required me to look at myself in the mirror and answer for what I'd chosen not to see.
Valentina didn't have the luxury of choosing not to see.
Valentina was in that alley.
The bourbon sloshes over the rim when I finally get the second bottle open.
I drink it anyway, let it burn, deserve the burn.
The pain in my lower back has been building for the last hour — I cut PT short, drove forty minutes to the compound, sat in a chair for two more hours, drove another forty minutes back here, and now my body is staging a very reasonable revolt — but I barely register it beneath the other pain, the interior one, the kind physical therapy has no protocol for.
She was scared.
That keeps surfacing, breaking through whatever I'm trying to think instead.
She was scared. She remembered something terrible about a night she'd blocked out, something traumatic and violent and entirely Marcus's doing, and instead of telling me, she was scared.
Of what I would do. Of what I would say.
Of exactly what I did.
Of exactly what I said.
No longer mine.
I said that. I arranged those specific words for maximum impact and sent them into her like shrapnel and watched her face do the thing that faces do when something essential gets knocked loose. I watched her break and told myself it was justice and knew even then that I was lying.
My phone buzzes. I look at the screen: Zay. I let it ring to voicemail, then stare at the ceiling while he presumably leaves a message I already know the content of.
He calls back immediately.
"What?" I answer, voice scraped raw.
"Are you drunk?"
"Extremely."
"Jesus Christ, Xavier." He sounds like a man who has been running on adrenaline and is now running on the fumes of it, exhausted in a way that goes past tired. "Where are you?"
"Home. Safe house. Alone." The word sits in my mouth with a specific flavor. "Like I demanded."
A beat of silence. Then: "Say it."
"Say what?"
"Whatever you're thinking. Just say it."
"You fucked up," Zay says bluntly. "Massively. Catastrophically. In a way that you're going to be working to fix for a very long time, if she gives you the chance to fix it."
"I know." The words come out of me like something extracted, something that has been lodged under pressure and finally given an exit. "I know."
"She defended herself—"
"I know."
"Marcus was going to—"
"I KNOW." The roar comes from somewhere below my throat, below my chest, from the oldest and most ashamed part of me.
"I know, Zay. I have known since the second Asher said it in that clubhouse.
I know my brother was going to rape her.
I know she had no choice. I know she blocked the memory because it was traumatic. I know all of it."
"Then why—"
"Because she lied." My voice cracks in the middle of it — an embarrassing, structural failure.
"She looked me in the eye every day for weeks and lied.
She let me fall in love with her while knowing—while carrying—" I stop.
Start again. "Do you have any idea what that does?
To find out that the person you trust most has been running a parallel reality inside your relationship this whole time? "
"She was scared," Zay says, quietly and without negotiation. "She was terrified of exactly what happened tonight. And everything she was afraid of came true, Xavier. You proved her fear right."
The words land and don't deflect. They just stay there.
"She should have told me. She should have trusted me," I say, but even as I say it I can hear what it sounds like — the self-justifying logic of a man building a case for himself.
"Trusted you with what?" Zay's voice is careful but unsparing.
"The fact that she'd killed your brother in self-defense?
We are a motorcycle club, X. We solve problems with violence.
She killed one of us and it doesn't matter that it was justified — she had every reason to believe this would go badly.
" A pause. "She had every reason, and she was right. "
I don't have an answer to that. I sit in the wreckage of it instead.
"Where is she?" I ask finally, because it's the only question I actually need answered.
"You don't get to know that tonight."
"Zay—"
"No." His voice is steel. "You don't get her location while you're this drunk, and you don't go after her until you've sobered up and figured out what you actually want.
Because if you're going to say more of what you said tonight—" A pause that is its own kind of warning. "I'd rather she have the distance."
"I don't want to hurt her," I say, and it comes out more broken than I intend.
"Then stop doing it." He hangs up.
I stare at the phone. Call him back. Voicemail immediately. He's made his position clear.
"Fuck." I throw the phone and hear it hit the wall and don't care about the screen, don't care about any of it except the hollow that's getting louder with every minute.
I try to stand — try to transfer, to get out of this chair and cross the room on some instinct that forward motion will help — but my legs are shot, the PT already too short, and I grab the wheelchair to catch myself from going over and end up just sitting there breathing too hard.
The house presses in around me. I've never found it oppressive before — the safe house has always been a base, a retreat, a place where I could be the version of myself that doesn't have to perform anything.
But tonight every room is wrong. The kitchen, where she made coffee in the morning and sang badly under her breath and didn't know I could hear her from the hallway.
The bedroom, where she slept ,folded against me on my left side because she'd figured out without asking that my right shoulder was the one that ached at night.
The couch, where we'd watched movies with her feet in my lap and Asher's arm behind her shoulders and Zay on the floor because he runs hot and didn't want to be too close to anyone.
All of it emptied out. All of it mine again, which is to say meaningless in the way ownership is meaningless when the thing you own is just the absence of what mattered.
I love her.
The thought arrives not like a revelation but like a fact that has always been present and is only now being allowed into the room: simple, structural, inescapable.
Not I'm attracted to her or I care about her or I don't want her to leave.
I love her. I am in love with Valentina Torres, who killed my brother in self-defense and lied about it for six weeks because she was afraid of me, and I broke her apart in front of seventy people and called it justice.
"What did I do?" I say it to the empty house. To Marcus's ghost, if he's listening. To whatever part of myself might still be capable of an honest answer. "What did I do?"
I sit there. Let myself think about Marcus — really think, past the walls I've built around the parts of him that were indefensible.
Think about the women who'd gone quiet around him at parties, who'd made themselves small, who'd left rooms when he entered.
Think about the times I'd told myself it was their misreading, his rough edges, just how Marcus was.
Think about the way I'd protected him not because he was good but because I couldn't afford for him to be otherwise.
Valentina went into that alley and my brother tried to destroy her.
And she stopped him.
And then she sat beside me in the hospital and brought me coffee and held my hand and fell in love with three men simultaneously while carrying a secret that must have weighed more every day, a secret made of trauma and terror and the impossibility of finding the right moment, the right words, for I killed your brother and I'm sorry and please don't hate me.
There is no right moment for that. There is no version of those words that lands gently.
I pour another glass. Set it down. Look at it for a long time. Don't drink it.
When the sun comes up — slow and grey and indifferent through the windows — I'm still in my chair. The bourbon is gone. My phone, its screen cracked, sits across the room where I threw it. My back has graduated from protest to something that will require serious management tomorrow.
The house is still empty.
She is still gone.
And I am still in love with her, which means I have no idea what to do with any of this, which means that sunrise is just the next part of the disaster rather than any kind of end.