Chapter 29
Chapter Twenty-Nine
BASTION
Something had changed with her, and I wasn’t good with emotions to understand what.
She wouldn’t look at me.
Luca was quiet. She had pulled away from him too.
We didn’t talk about it.
We never had.
Not when it came to women. Not like this.
Because we’d never shared.
Not like that .
There were hookups. Swaps. Quiet arrangements. But it was never emotional. Never the same girl at the same time. That was the line. The unspoken rule.
But Emilia made everything blurry.
She made things feel possible —and dangerous—all at once.
“Maybe she thinks she has to choose.” Luca said, staring at the scar between his fingers, rubbing it absently like it still stung.
“No. She would know, wouldn’t she?”
I looked at mine too.
The same raised line. Same angle .
Left there from the rusted bars of that cage.
And suddenly, I was back there.
Two weeks. In the dark.
No light. Not even a crack beneath the door.
Locked in steel dog crates shoved into the basement of our father’s compound.
We were five years old .
Barely breathing.
They fitted us with collars—shock sensors that flared if we spoke.
If we cried.
If we called for each other .
We learned to be silent fast .
But Luca’s cage was close enough to reach— barely .
If we stretched.
If we curled on our sides and pressed our fingers between the bars, we could just touch. Just feel .
And that was it.
Two weeks of silence, with nothing but the cold bite of steel and the faint, trembling pressure of his fingertips against mine. Slowly starving to death.
I still remember the way the metal burned .
Not from fire.
From fear .
From friction .
From how long we held on.
The rusted bars eventually dug into our skin—left scars. They’re still there.
Across the tops of our fingers, right where we’d strained to stay connected.
The iron melded into us.
Branded us.
What it means when the light finally comes and it hurts .
When Vince kicked in the door and pulled us out of the cages—the light burned our eyes.
We screamed.
Because the dark had become home .
Because anything outside it was unfamiliar. Blinding.
After that, the lights never went off again.
Since the cages, we never slept in the dark.
Strip lights.
Lamps.
Glow panels.
Even at fifteen, even now—there was always something .
Until her.
Luca didn’t look at me, but his voice dropped.
“You remember the first night she moved into our room?”
I nodded once. “Yeah.”
“We freaked out.”
Not because of her.
Because of the dark .
We didn’t want her to ask why we kept lights on.
We didn’t want her to see us —the parts of us that never stopped being those two boys in metal cages.
But she was there that night.
And something shifted.
We were so focused on her —her breathing, the rustle of her sheets, the way she curled into the pillow—that we forgot to turn anything on.
And the lights stayed off.
For the first time in our lives—the lights stayed off.
And we slept.
We slept because we could hear her.
Because her presence filled the room in a way the light never could.
Luca was staring down at his scar, his voice a whisper now .
“She makes it quiet.”
I nodded, throat thick.
“She makes it… complete.”
This wasn’t about sex.
It wasn’t about pride, or rivalry, or who would win.
It was about her .
She was the only thing that made us feel like we weren’t still in that basement.
The only thing that made us forget the bars.
Forget the pain.
Forget the fear .
Because she didn’t just quiet the noise.
She completed us— both of us.
Luca’s silence.
My fire.
Two halves that never balanced right… until her.
She gave him stillness.
She gave me softness.
And somehow, she fit —right in the space between us.
Not by dividing us.
But by binding us.
And I knew it—I knew it in my bones—that the peace she gave me, she had to give him , too.
Because if there was ever one thing I could never take from my twin—it was that.
That feeling. That calm. That kind of quiet only she could give.
I’d burn the world before I’d deny him that.
And if that meant she was in the middle of us—if that meant the only way we both got to breathe was by keeping her right there ?—
Then I’d keep her there .
Right between us .
Not out of greed. Not out of power.
But because she belonged there.
If she thought she had to choose—if she left?—
We wouldn’t just lose her.
We’d lose the first peace we’d ever had.