CHAPTER 43
Roxanne
Healing doesn’t happen all at once. For some, it takes months. For others, years. And some people spend a lifetime learning how to live around what was done to them without ever escaping it.
I didn’t know which one I would be. All I knew was that a hollow ache had settled behind my ribs.
Maybe that was what death did. Not just to the ones who didn’t come back. But to the ones left behind with it. Because something had ended in that warehouse, and I didn’t know what to call it yet—whether it was him, or me, or something in between—but I felt it, heavy and irreversible.
I’d learned how to survive Darius. Not by fighting. By dividing. I became different things for different people—the version that laughed, the one that obeyed, the one that loved. And the version no one ever saw.
I told myself it hadn’t happened. That if I buried it deep enough, it would stop existing. It worked, until it didn’t.
I had thought ending him would feel like closure, relief, an end to a suffering that had followed me longer than I wanted to admit. I had imagined there would be a shift, a release, some sense of finality that would tell me it was over.
Maybe I told myself I was the hero. The saviour. The one who finally stood up for the twelve-year-old version of me that never got the chance. I killed the thing that had preyed on me and called it justice. I told myself the violence would make me safe. That it would keep Kyra safe—my family safe.
But it didn’t feel like safety. Because violence doesn’t undo violence. It just changes who carries it afterwards.
When I stabbed him, there was no relief.
No sense of balance. No moment where I felt like I had taken anything back.
There was only absence. A strange, weightless emptiness settled inside me, as though a piece of me had been carved away and left unfinished.
And beneath it was a harder truth. I had changed in that warehouse. I just didn’t understand how.
I didn’t ask about Santino. I couldn’t. Because if someone told me he was dead, I didn’t know if I would survive hearing it.
And if they told me he wasn’t—if he had lived—I didn’t know what I would do with that either.
Either truth felt unbearable in its own way, so I stayed where I was, suspended between both, letting the unknown exist because it hurt less than certainty.
Days passed. I think. Time didn’t feel linear anymore. It stretched and folded into itself until morning and night lost meaning, until the only thing I recognised was the hollow that had settled inside me—a heaviness that never seemed to lift.
My mother moved around me carefully, as though she understood without asking that whatever I was holding together would fall apart if she pressed too hard. She didn’t ask questions or force conversation. She just stayed, filling the house with normalcy I couldn’t quite step back into.
And I let her. Because it was easier than explaining the emptiness inside me.
By late afternoon, I found myself on the terrace, staring down at the familiar chaos of the street below—people walking in slow circles, children chasing each other between trees, dogs tugging at their leashes, life moving the way it always had.
It felt distant. Like I was watching a normalcy I no longer belonged to.
That was when I heard the door open.
At first, I didn’t think anything of it. The house wasn’t empty, and people came and went without announcement. But the weight of it felt different. Measured footsteps followed. Familiar in a way that made my heart skip a beat.
For a second, I thought I imagined it. Because that was what my mind had been doing lately—filling silence with things that weren’t there, letting me believe in hope for a moment, before taking it away again.
He was there. Standing at the entrance. For a moment, everything in me went quiet. I didn’t move. My body understood before my mind did, going still in a way that felt instinctive, as though it was bracing for an impact.
He looked the same—calm, controlled, with piercing green eyes that stalled my breath. And somehow, nothing felt the same anymore.
Marcello.
There had been a time—not even that long ago—when I would have crossed the distance between us without thinking, when my body would have moved without hesitation, closing the space between us as though distance had never mattered.
This time, I didn’t move. I stayed where I was, my hands still at my sides, my feet rooted to the ground in a way that felt unfamiliar and wrong all at once. And for the first time—I didn’t go to him. The distance between us felt unfamiliar even though it wasn’t much.
A shadow crossed his face. Almost imperceptible. He stepped forward, but I didn’t move. And somehow, that said everything.
“Marcello, I meant to—” The words died when his hand came up.
His hands cupped my cheek, firm but careful, grounding me before I could unravel any further. The contact wasn’t hesitant—it never was with him—but there was restraint in it this time. A control that hadn’t been there before.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked.
His voice was even. Measured. The same way it always was when something mattered more than it should. For a second, I didn’t understand. My mind lagged behind the question, trying to place it, trying to catch up.
“About Darius,” he added.
Understanding settled slowly. My stomach knotted.
“I didn’t know how to,” I said. “I didn’t know what you would see when you looked at me after.” My voice came out quieter than I intended, but steady in a way that surprised me. “I didn’t know how to give you those parts of me… even I couldn’t reach myself.”
He didn’t look away.
“I would have seen you,” he said. “I always do.”
The simplicity of it hit harder than anything else could have. Tears welled in my eyes. I needed to tell him.
“I— There’s something else—” I started, the words forming before I could stop them.
“I know.”
He didn’t let me finish. My chest tightened, breath collapsing into silence. His gaze never left mine. My eyes searched his face for anger or accusation. For confirmation.
“You… you know…?” I asked.
It came out smaller than I meant it to. My chest caved in. I stepped back, trying to get some distance, to understand what he meant. His eyes stayed pinned on me.
“I know enough,” he said.
The world didn’t shatter. It quietly gave way beneath my feet. The words settled into place slowly, like they were rearranging a truth I hadn’t realised I’d been resisting.
My shoulders drew in, making me feel smaller. My breath shortened, and the way the girl inside me braced for rejection that hadn’t come yet.
And then—he stepped closer.
“Do you know what people get wrong about love?” he asked.
The question caught me off guard. I didn’t answer.
“They think it’s about holding on,” he continued. “About keeping something contained. It’s not.”
My breath stuttered.
“It’s about what you feel when that person exists in your world,” he said. “What they become to you. What they change in you.”
His hand steadied against my cheek.
“You are that for me.”
Emotion lodged painfully in my chest.
“And I’m not giving that up. But I’m not blind either.”
His thumb brushed lightly beneath my eye, catching a tear that slipped.
“There are parts of you I don’t own,” he said. “And I won’t destroy them just to feel in control.”
The words rooted themselves inside me. The last wall inside me cracked.
“Is… is this your way of saying goodbye?”
The words came out in a small, fragile, helpless manner before I could stop them. His expression changed instantly.
“Amore…”
His hand came up, firmer this time, steadying my face like he needed me to understand.
“Only death could take me from you,” he murmured.
His thumb brushed beneath my eye again.
“And even then… I wouldn’t go quietly.”
My breath broke.
“We fight. We kiss. We make up. But I’m not leaving,” he added.
Silence followed. And somehow the lack of anger hurt more than rage would have.
“I hurt you,” I choked.
The truth of it felt unavoidable, sitting between us like a heavy iron curtain. He didn’t answer immediately. Then—
“Yes.”
I flinched as the word landed. My pulse thudded in my ears.This was where my life came crumbling down. This is what I walked into.
“I never meant for it to—” I shook my head slightly. “I’ll understand if you hate me.”
There it was. The thing I had been holding back.
“I’ll understand if you want nothing to do with me.”
He stepped closer and put his forehead against mine.
“I could never hate you.”
Tears blurred my vision. I shook my head immediately, stepping back half a step.
“You don’t know that,” I said quickly. “You don’t know what this makes me—”
“I do.”
That stopped me.
“Why?” I whispered.
It was the only question that mattered. He stepped closer then, closing the space I hadn’t been able to. Close enough that I could feel the heat radiating from him.
“Because I know one thing,” he said, his voice low, carrying a weight that settled deep. “You’re still mine. Even now.”
The words didn’t feel like possession. They felt like certainty. As though he had already decided long before this moment. My eyes closed for a second, the weight of them pressing into me. Tears now fell freely down my cheek, soaking his hand.
I had been hiding behind a version of myself I’d shown to the world. Softer. Kinder. Less dangerous. Loving people through edited versions of myself. But the cruellest thing I’d ever done was lie about who I actually am.
To myself. To the people who love me.
To him.
“I don’t deserve you,” I said, the truth slipping out before I could stop it.
It came down to one thing. That I would never be enough. His thumb kept wiping away my tears as they kept falling. I trembled because I’d finally been seen, and I no longer knew how to hold it together.
“That’s not your decision to make,” he said firmly.
I felt myself give way. Enough that I felt it in the way my body leaned into his hand, like I had been holding myself together for too long and didn’t have the strength to keep doing it anymore.
“You don’t have to carry this alone,” he said.
I shook my head, my breath unsteady, my chest tightening painfully like I couldn’t hold it in anymore.
“Come home, amore,” he murmured, his lips brushing my forehead—gentle, grounding, devastating in its tenderness.
“Come back to me.”
And that broke me in a way no amount of pain or guilt could.
Not even the truth of what I had done.
It was him. The way he stood in front of me when everything inside me had fractured beyond recognition.
I didn’t think—I just moved. My hands fisted in his shirt as I stepped into him, pressing my face against his chest like I needed to disappear somewhere safe. The sob came without warning, tearing through me—raw, uncontained, unstoppable.
Everything I had held back spilled out at once.
The warehouse.
The blood.
The man I had killed.
The one I might have lost.
The truth I had buried.
All of it. And he didn’t stop me, didn’t silence me, didn’t pull away. He just held me without trying to fix me. Without asking me to be less. Without asking me to become someone easier to love.
My hands pulled him closer to me, till I could only smell him, feel his heartbeat, grounding me in a way that all of this still felt real.
I didn’t feel like I was standing alone in the ruins of what I had become. I felt held. Loved. Understood.
And for the first time in my life—I didn’t feel like I had to earn being loved.