53. Chapter 46
Lorenzo
I can hardly sleep that night. It’s not for lack of trying. I lie there long after Dash passes out against my side, listening to the gentle rhythm of his breathing.
He is so open and vulnerable in his sleep, so innocent. His body is curled against mine, with no trace of the fear or resentment he had for me when we first met weeks ago.
He trusts me now.
And the thought of that trust is almost enough to break me.
The news Mila gave us over the phone is like an anvil on my chest.
It’s not him, I think. I know it, powerfully and intuitively. They got the wrong man. I don’t know how exactly my brother pulled it off, but I’m convinced that he got the Volkov man framed to get the heat off his own back. Giovanni definitely has the resources to do that.
My brother bought himself a case closed. I’m sure of it. It must’ve been easy for him, and he’s probably sleeping easily in his clinically cold house, having proven to himself that the law will bend however far his money requires.
I’m done trusting the law to do what I know must be done.
That thought arrives clean, white-hot, and once it’s scorched through my mind, I can’t get it out.
If the system won’t handle it, I will.
I have the resources.
The skills.
And finally, I have the will to do it.
What I don’t have—what, maybe, I’ve never had—is any right to bring Dash into this.
I know exactly what this will require of me. I know exactly what I’m capable of. I’ve seen the darkness grow in me all my life. The same darkness inside my brother. The same darkness inside my father. The darkness that is my family’s legacy and our identity.
I’ve spent this month with Dash trying to convince myself the darkness is contained. That it has a purpose. That it’s a tool I can take out when necessary, and put down whenever I choose.
But I was wrong.
I don’t believe that anymore. Maybe I never fully believed it. Maybe I just never looked at that darkness in me all the way, never accepted what it would allow me to do.
Finally, it’s time for acceptance.
The thought of accepting it, and what that’ll mean, is enough to almost tear me apart.
Not what I’m planning to do to Giovanni. No, he deserves this.
But what I’m planning to do to Dash.
He doesn’t deserve the pain I’m about to cause him.
But…I know that if, given enough time, I could love him.
That’s the unbearable, blistering coal at the center of this whole thing.
That’s what I haven’t let myself say. Not to him, not even to myself.
It’s true, though. Even thinking it to myself, in the quiet darkness of the night, is enough for me to know that it’s true.
I could grow to love him, in a way that I’ve never once let myself love anyone.
And the risk of loving him is exactly why I cannot let him anywhere near the thing I’m about to become.
Is there any good left in me? Was there ever anything good in me? Or was it always just a performance I put on—for him, especially, because I thought that was what he needed to see?
I don’t have honest answers to those terrible questions. I turn them over and over in my mind for a long time, waiting for anything good in me to argue back, to insist that it’s there and it’s real.
But it doesn’t.
Perhaps the darkness is the truth. Underneath everything I’ve let myself be this month, I’m just another Diamante.
The truth is, I haven’t found anything good in me. All I’ve found is someone worth being good for. That’s not the same as being good myself.
I understand the difference now, lying awake beside Dash, who deserves so much more than what I’m capable of giving him. He deserves someone whose goodness doesn’t depend on him.
He won’t get that from me. I can accept that now, fully, like a wound that has finally festered into a scar.
The aching, sickening decision arrives somewhere around five in the morning. I stare into the cool dawn light, which offers no answers. All I have left to do is the one genuinely selfless thing available to me.
I have to make absolutely certain that he leaves.
He won’t see it as selflessness on my part. No, to him it will be cruelty, but cruelty is what I must show him.
I can’t be gentle. If I am, he’ll fight me. He’ll try to stay, to reason with me, to love me through whatever it is that I’m about to become.
But I can’t bear the thought of him seeing that darkness, of him knowing just who it is I really am.
Instead, I have to make sure that he leaves in a way that closes the door between us completely. That no part of him ever, ever wants it to open again.
Only when he’s away from me will he be safe—not only from my brother, but also from me.
And all I can do is pray that he’ll understand.
When Dash wakes up, it’s slowly. He blinks at me in the gray early morning light, smiling softly. “Good morning, handsome,” he murmurs sleepily into my skin.
It almost breaks me.
Almost.
“Morning,” I whisper, fighting to keep the roughness out of my voice.
He still notices.
“Is something wrong?” he asks, stifling a yawn. He squints, looking at me more carefully. “You look like you didn’t really get much sleep.”
I won’t lie to him about this. “I didn’t.”
He props himself up on an elbow. “What’s up?”
There was a part of me that had hoped I could delay this terrible conversation. That part of me was a coward. “We need to talk.”
I watch something brace itself behind his beautiful eyes. An old instinct, sensing the awful shape of what’s to come.
“Okay.” Slowly, he sits up. “That sentence is never good.”
I sigh, hating what I’m about to do, but forcing coldness into my voice.
“The case is closed—officially, at least. You’re no longer in any danger.
” I keep my voice level and low, the exact same register I use with the capos, with enemies, with anyone I need to believe that I’m made of the hardest stuff in the universe.
I am, after all, a Diamante. “That means that there’s no longer a reason for you to be here. ”
His voice trembles when he answers, anxiety making it sharp. “But, we talked about that in the car. You don’t need to protect me. I thought we were going to decide what to do—”
“I’ve decided.”
“Oh.” He draws a little away from me. I can see in his eyes that he doesn’t want to ask what my decision is. “What does that mean?”
No doubt, he already suspects how awful it is.
Everything in me is screaming to stop. Tell him the truth! Tell him that I love him! That this is exactly what I never knew I wanted—never knew I needed.
But that love I have for him is the precise reason I’m doing this. I’m trying, the only broken way I know how, to save him from that blackhearted, hateful version of me that he refuses to see.
“It means that I was protecting you because I made a promise. That promise has been fulfilled.”
“Bullshit. Lorenzo—”
“Whatever else happened between us just happened out of necessity. We’re in close quarters. There’s danger. Things happen in situations like that. That’s not a foundation for anything real, Dashiell. I think we both know that.”
“Lorenzo, what the fuck?” His eyes are nearly wild—there’s real fear in them. “You know that’s not it.”
“I know what I know.”
He sits back, away from me, crossing his arms like they’ll protect him. “Okay. Say it. Whatever it is you want to say, say it.”
I force myself to look at him while I say it.
Though perhaps that’s the cruelest thing I can do, it hurts me too.
“I don’t want you here anymore,” I say, as firmly and coldly as possible.
“It was good while it lasted, but it was never going to be more than something casual. I’m sorry if you mistook it for something more. ”
His mouth falls open. “I mistook it? Jesus Christ.” Then he shakes his head and climbs off the bed. “Fine. Then I’ll go. I’ll get my things later.”
Better to give him no chance to return, I think. “I’ll have Wolfe send your things over.”
He scoffs. “Convenient, getting rid of me like that.” He’s already up, reaching for his clothes, his hands shaking and unsteady.
“Good to know that this is who you really are, Lorenzo. I just wish you’d told me sooner.
Maybe you did. Maybe I just didn’t want to see you for what you are.
” He tugs his shirt over his head, glares at me. “A monster.”
I accept it. I deserve every hateful thing he wants to call me.
He stops near the door, looking back at me with hurt and betrayal openly on his face. “I really thought—or hoped, at least—that you were better than this. I don’t know why I’m surprised. I think there was a part of me that always knew who you actually were. But I really, really wanted to be wrong.”
And with that, he’s gone before I can decide how—or if—to answer him.
I sit alone in the bed, naked and hating myself. I am an empty shell, a void of nothing but darkness and anger and grief. I push all those emotions aside, burying them in the darkness itself.
Because I have things to do.
I have a brother to destroy.