Chapter 16
KAIRO
Iwatch her walk away.
Every step she takes down that stone path carves an ache out of me. Her sundress catches the late afternoon light, Storm's arm is around her shoulders, and I want to rip it off him at the socket.
But I don't move.
She looks back once, and those eyes are red-rimmed, wet, searching my face for anything but I don't know how to give it to her. Instead, I give her nothing because if I open my mouth, I'll tell her she can't leave, and that's not what she asked for.
She turns away, and they disappear down the path toward the dock. I hear the boat engine start. I hear it pull away from the pier, the sound getting smaller until the jungle swallows it, and then there's nothing.
Just me, the pool, the island, and the silence where she used to be.
Day one without her
I stand by the pool until the sun goes down.
I don’t move. I just stare at the path she walked away on, like if I look hard enough, she’ll reappear at the end of it.
The same path where her sundress caught the light and her damp hair swung against her back.
The path where she looked back at me one last time with those red, uncertain eyes and tore my heart out.
I told the staff to stay away, I can’t stand the sight of anyone in my space at the moment.
The villa feels too big, too empty, too haunted by her.
Her coffee cup is still sitting on the kitchen counter exactly where she left it.
There’s a faint gloss smudge on the rim from her lips.
I pick it up and press my mouth to that smudge like a desperate addict, as if I could miraculously taste her, but instead, I’m greeted by cold ceramic.
It makes the hole in my chest bigger.
I pour myself a whiskey, then another, to chase these feelings away. By the time the bottle is empty, I’m sitting on the cold marble floor with my back against the cabinets, her coffee cup still clutched in my hand like a fucking teddy bear.
This is what I’ve become. A pathetic, broken man drinking alone in the dark because the woman I obsessed over for seven years finally saw me for what I am … and walked away.
Day Two
I pull up the cameras out of habit. Every screen is empty.
She’s not in the pool or the kitchen. She’s not curled up in the green chair with a book pressed to her chest. The villa feels like a corpse, cold, hollow, lifeless.
Just rooms full of silence where she used to be.
I keep refreshing the feeds like a pathetic junkie, praying the system is broken, praying I’ll see her walking across the lawn or reading on the lounger.
But nothing.
Her absence is louder than anything I’ve ever heard.
Andreas calls.
I don’t answer.
He calls again.
I throw the phone across the office so hard it cracks the monitor showing our bedroom, the screen fracturing like a spiderweb.
Her side of the bed is still crumpled from where she slept the night before she left.
The pillow still has the shape of her head.
I stare at it until my eyes burn and my throat closes.
I open the whiskey.
I don’t bother with a glass. I just tilt the bottle back and drink straight from it, the burn doing nothing to fill the gaping hole in my chest.
I end up on the floor again, back against the wall, surrounded by empty bottles and shattered glass.
This is what I’ve become without her.
A pathetic, drunk, broken man sitting on the floor of his own house. I press my forehead to my knees and whisper her name into the dark like a fucking prayer.
“Summer … please, come back to me.”
But no one answers.
Day Three
I end up in the closet.
I don’t know how I got here. One minute I was on the bedroom floor, the next, I’m surrounded by her clothes.
Every piece I chose for her is still hanging in a neat row, like she’s coming back.
The soft sundresses, the sheer black dress from the yacht, the red silk she wore the night I fucked her on the dining table.
I pull the red dress off the hanger and press it to my face.
I breathe in hard, champagne, coconut, her skin.
Her. It’s fading, but it’s still there. I slide down the wall until I’m sitting on the cold floor, the dress clutched in my lap like a security blanket.
That’s when I see them.
A pair of her dirty underwear, lying in the laundry basket, the pale pink ones she wore two days ago.
The ones I peeled off her before I fucked her slow on the lounger.
I stare at them for a long time, like a fucking animal.
Then I reach in and grab them, I bring the fabric to my face and inhale like a desperate addict.
Her scent hits me, musky, sweet, intimate.
The smell of her pussy and the smell of us.
My cock hardens instantly, painfully.
I hate myself. I hate how broken I am. But I don’t stop. I shove the fabric against my nose and breathe her in while I pull my cock out with my other hand. I’m already leaking. I stroke myself hard and fast, pathetic and frantic, face buried in her dirty panties like a sad, obsessed loser.
“Summer … fuck, baby …” I groan into the fabric, voice cracking.
I imagine her here, those soft thighs, her wet pussy, the way she clenched around me when she came. The little sounds she made when I denied her orgasms. I come hard, shame burning through me as I spill all over my hand and the closet floor, her name broken on my lips.
When it’s over, I just sit there, cock softening in my hand, her underwear still pressed to my face.
This is what she’s made me become.
Day Four
Everything is a blur.
I wake up on the floor of the bedroom with dried cum on my stomach and an empty bottle in my hand.
The security feed is still playing on the cracked monitor, looped footage of her riding me in the library chair, head thrown back, moaning my name.
I watch it on repeat, stroking my cock with a shaking hand until I come again, useless and empty.
I clean up and stumble to the kitchen, where I drink straight from the whiskey bottle until the room spins, then I go back to the tapes.
Her laugh, her voice saying my name, the way she looked at me like she was starting to love me. I jerk off three more times before I pass out again.
Day Five
I can’t tell if it’s day or night anymore.
I’m naked, stumbling through the villa like a ghost. I find her hair tie on the bathroom counter and wrap it around my wrist like a fucking bracelet. I sit in the green chair in the library where I fucked her while she read to me and press my face into the seat, inhaling the ghost of her.
Then I pull up the footage from the pool lounger on the day I spent hours inside her. I watch myself buried deep in her, my hand on her stomach, both of us lazy and warm and happy. I stroke my cock to it, rough and angry, coming with her name torn out of my throat like a curse.
I don’t eat or sleep, I just drink and watch her on loop, and hate the man who drove her away.
Day Six
I’m a delirious fucking mess.
I wake up on the closet floor again, surrounded by her clothes.
I’ve pulled half of them off the hangers and have been sleeping on top of them.
I’ve pulled up every tape I have of us fucking.
The dining table, the shower, and the library.
I watch them all from morning till dusk, jerking off until my cock is raw, my hand is sticky, and my eyes won’t focus anymore.
I keep whispering to the empty room.
“Come back … please, baby … I’ll be better … I’ll give you anything … just come back to me …”
No one answers.
I’m nothing without her.
Day Seven
Andreas shows up in person. He finds me on the pool deck, shirtless, sunburned, with empty bottles lined up along the edge like soldiers.
“What the fuck?” he curses, stumbling over the bottles.
Another voice in the villa pulls me from my hangover, and I sit up in the lounger.
"You look like shit," he tells me.
"Fuck off," I mumble while flipping him off.
"Kairo, you need to …"
I don’t need his lecture. "I said fuck off, Andreas."
He doesn't fuck off, instead, he sits in the lounger next to mine.
"Have you eaten?" he asks.
"Sure."
"Have you slept?"
“Yes."
"Have you spoken to her?"
I look at him, he knows the answer. "She asked for space," I say. The word still tastes wrong in my mouth. "I'm giving her space."
"You're giving yourself alcohol poisoning."
"Same thing." I shrug as I lean over and try to find a bottle that isn’t empty.
He sits with me in silence for a while.
"Go home, Andreas," I tell him.
"You’re pathetic. I'm not leaving you like this."
“Fuck you.”
Andreas rolls his eyes. “You’re such a whiney little bitch.”
And he’s right. I've killed men. I've burned buildings.
I've destroyed lives and empires and never lost sleep.
But letting that woman walk away with her brother's arm around her shoulders, that is the hardest thing I have ever done.
I should have stopped her. I should have locked the gates, told Storm to swim home, carried her to the bedroom, and fucked her until she forgot every word her brother said.
That's what the old Kairo would have done.
That's what every instinct in my body screamed at me to do.
But she asked me not to.
And I'm trying to be the man she wants.
Even if it kills me.
Andreas stays to look after me like I’m a fucking child.
He forces me to eat a sandwich I taste nothing of, and makes me drink water between the whiskey.
He doesn't lecture me again, he just sits there, scrolling through his phone, handling the empire I've abandoned for a week.
Every now and then, he looks over at me like he's checking I'm still breathing.
Eventually, the sun goes down.
"You need to shower," Andreas says. "You smell like a distillery fucked a gym bag."
"Charming."
"I'm serious, shower, change, and tomorrow we deal with the business you've been ignoring for a week. The Colombians aren't going to wait forever."
"I don't give a fuck about the Colombians," I tell him.
"You will when they start moving on your territory," he states with a raised brow.
I don't answer because I know he is right.
He glances at the screen and frowns before answering it. "Yeah."
I'm not listening. I'm watching the pool light ripple against the glass doors. I'm thinking about her humming in the kitchen.
"When?" Andreas's voice changes, it’s the same tone he uses when a shipment goes sideways.
I look at him.
He's standing now, and his face has gone white beneath his tan. He turns away from me and lowers his voice, but I catch the words anyway.
Every single one. "Where was this? How long ago? Who has her? Are you fucking sure?"
My blood stops moving.
Andreas turns back to me. His phone is still to his ear, but his eyes are on mine. I've known this man for fifteen years. I've seen him in firefights, interrogations, and standing over bodies, and his face has never looked like this.
"It's Summer," he says.
I'm on my feet before the second word leaves his mouth. "What about her?"
"One of our men is working the Castellano gala right now." Andreas puts the phone on speaker and sets it on the lounger between us. "Summer has turned up.”
“What? Why is she there? Fuck.” The Castellanos are one of our biggest rivals.
Victor Castellano, the man I've been at war with for three years over territory on the eastern seaboard.
The man who lost twenty million dollars when I undercut his supply chain last summer.
The man who has been looking for leverage against me ever since.
“With her brother and father.”
I stare at Andreas.
Fuck.
“But …” the man hesitates. “She doesn’t look right.”
“What do you mean?” My voice doesn't sound like mine.
"Her eyes are glazed, like she's been drugged. The men have her by the arms. They’ve just taken her through a side entrance, and she hasn't come back out. Something's wrong, sir."
“Thanks, Joe, you did good,” Andreas says, hanging up.
Storm didn't come to the island to save his sister, he came to collect her. He took her from me and delivered her to the one man in the world who would pay the most to hurt me. Her family sold her, again.
Andreas hangs up the phone.
The silence that follows is deafening. For a second, I just stand there, swaying on my feet, the whiskey still burning in my veins. Then the words hit me like a sledgehammer to the chest.
Summer.
At the Castellano gala.
Drugged.
My blood turns to ice, then immediately to fire.
“Fuck.” I run my hands through my hair. “I’m going to fucking kill them all if they touch her. I’ll burn their motherfucking empire to the ground. This is war.” I grab the nearest bottle and hurl it across the pool deck. It shatters against the stone, glass exploding everywhere.
I’m going to kill him.
I’m going to kill all of them.
I turn to Andreas, eyes wild, chest heaving. “Get the plane ready, now. I want every man we have. I want weapons. I want blood. I don’t care what it costs. I’m burning that fucking gala to the ground tonight.”
Andreas doesn’t argue, he just nods once, already pulling out his phone.
“Kairo …”
“Don’t,” I snarl, cutting him off. “Don’t you fucking say it.”
I look out over the dark ocean, the same ocean that took her from me just one week ago.
I was supposed to protect her.
Instead, I let her walk away.
And now she’s in hell because of it.
I’m coming, baby.
I’m coming to burn the whole world down to get you back.