Chapter 16 #2
"We've all brought our wives into this world.
" His voice carries the weight of a man who has walked this particular road and found something worth the risk on the other side.
"Persia, Katriana, they know what we are and who we are.
They carry that knowledge and they've earned our trust with it.
" His dark eyes hold mine with an intensity that makes my chest tight.
"Ilona is one of us now. She deserves to know. "
Drake looks between Rafael and Kon, reads the room with the sharp perception that makes him invaluable at a negotiating table, and exhales slowly through his nose. "If she burns us with it, I'm blaming you."
"Noted."
Rafael adds, his voice dropping into the register that means the conversation is over and the verdict is final. "Make it count, brother. You won't get another chance."
That afternoon, I assemble the USB drive at my desk, something that holds all the potential of blowing up in my face.
The office is quiet as the late afternoon sun throws long rectangles of gold across the carpet. My coffee has gone cold for the third time today.
The progress bar crawls across my screen.
I watch it the way a man watches a fuse burning toward the charge he lit himself.
Every file transferred, every password documented, every access code verified and recorded.
The Marchetti dossier, the Syndicate operations, the intelligence networks I've cultivated across three cities, all of it flowing from my secured servers onto a device that weighs less than an ounce and carries the power to end everything I've spent a decade building.
When the transfer completes, I pull two sheets of heavy cream stationery from my desk drawer and grab a pen. This has to be handwritten because I know Ilona. When personal time goes into making something, she notices.
The first note takes three attempts before the words come out right, each discarded draft crumpled into the wastebasket at my feet. The final version is simple because the truth always is when you stop trying to dress it in strategy.
Everything I have. Everything I am. It's yours now. You hold the key to my kingdom in your hand. And my trust.
The second note takes longer. My hand shakes on the third sentence, and the ink bleeds slightly where my grip falters, leaving a small imperfection in the script that I don't correct because perfection is another mask and I'm done wearing those.
I'm outside. If you want me to leave, I will.
If you want to scream at me, I'll listen.
If you want to destroy me with what's on that drive, I understand.
But if there's any chance, any at all, that you could choose me, I'm asking.
No leverage. No games. Just me, asking to be chosen just one more time. - Your husband.
I seal both notes with the USB drive inside a package that I hand to Marco. Outside of my brothers, he’s the only one I would trust with this task.
"Luna Moone's safe house. Hand it directly to Ilona Valentina. No one else."
Marco nods without questions. I give him a fifteen-minute head start and then follow.
The converted warehouse sits in a neighborhood of tree-lined streets and modest brownstones, a part of the city where the wealth is old enough to be quiet about it and the residents mind their own business with a discretion born of having their own secrets to keep.
I park across the street beneath an elm whose bare branches scratch against the roof.
I turn off the engine. The tick of the cooling engine fills the silence, metallic and rhythmic, counting down to something I can't predict.
Hours pass. The sky shifts from pale gold to amber to deep blue, streetlamps flickering to life along the sidewalk as the evening settles in.
My hands rest on the steering wheel, the leather cold beneath stiff fingers, the viper's ruby eyes on my right hand catching the streetlight every time a car passes.
Shadows move behind the warehouse curtains. At one point a figure crosses past a second-floor window and my chest seizes. Dark hair, a posture I would know from any distance. She doesn't look down at the street.
I rehearse what I'll say if she lets me in and discard every version. None of them undo the file. None of them are good enough. No words ever will be.
I think about what happens if she doesn't let me in. The drive home to an empty mansion. Custody arrangements. Weekend visits measured in hours. My baby growing up knowing her father as the man who shows up on schedule rather than the one who tucks her in at night.
The front door opens.
Luna stands in the frame, her dark curls wild, her gray eyes hard as flint. Paint streaks her jeans and the oversized flannel she's wearing, which means she's been working, which means she's been coping the only way she knows how with the chaos my choices have brought into her life.
She doesn't greet me. Doesn't invite me in. Just studies me from the top of the steps with a look that says the jury is still out and I'm not helping my case by sitting in the cold like a stray dog.
Fuck it.
I cross the street. The cold air bites through my jacket and the pavement is slick beneath my shoes from an evening mist that has settled over the neighborhood like a veil. I stop at the base of her steps and wait.
"She saw what's on the drive." Luna's voice is flat, stripped of warmth, giving nothing away. A steel wire stretched taut between neutrality and the fury I can see coiled behind her eyes.
"I figured as much. Hoped."
"You handed her enough ammunition to destroy every person you love."
"I did."
"Why?"
"Because she deserves to hold the weapon I should never have pointed at her. What she does with it is her choice. Not mine."
Luna studies me for another long beat, her eyes boring into mine with an intensity that makes me understand, on a visceral level, why three dangerous men fell in love with this woman.
Whatever she sees in my face makes her jaw tighten with an emotion I can't fully identify, something balanced on the knife's edge between grudging respect and fury held on a leash so short it's practically a collar.
"She'll see you." Luna's chin lifts, and the streetlight catches the sharp angles of her cheekbones, turning her delicate features into something carved from stone and moonlight.
"But Luca? This is your last chance. You break her again and Jasper, Voss, and Shayne will make sure no one finds what's left of you.
" Her lips press together in a line that carries no trace of humor. "And I'll hand them the shovels."
I don't doubt her for a second.
She steps aside and I walk into the warehouse, crossing the threshold into a world that smells like oil paint and strong coffee and jasmine, my wife's scent woven through someone else's home.
She's been here long enough to leave her mark on everything.
The warmth thaws my fingers and my face but does nothing for the cold sitting in my chest.
Through a doorway to my left, warm light spills from a kitchen that smells like chamomile and toast. I glimpse Ilona's mother seated at the table with a cup of tea cradled between thin hands, her posture straighter than I remember from the estate, her eyes less vacant, as if three weeks in a house full of women who refuse to be silenced has begun to teach her that her own voice still exists.
She looks up as I pass and our eyes meet for a fraction of a second, long enough for me to see the complicated mix of wariness and something that might be hope flickering behind her expression before she returns her attention to her tea.
Three women under one roof, all of them rebuilding lives that men dismantled. The irony of being one of those men is not lost on me.
Luna leads me down a hallway lined with canvases in various stages of completion, some vibrant with color and life, others dark and brooding and streaked with the kind of aggressive brushwork that speaks to emotions too large for words.
She stops before a closed door at the end and knocks softly against the wood.
"He's here."
A pause that lasts a lifetime. I feel every heartbeat of it in my throat.
"Let him in."
My wife’s voice.
My heart rate spikes.The door opens, and Luna steps aside, and I walk through.
The curve beneath her shirt is unmistakable now. Our baby grew without me, and the evidence of everything I missed hits harder than any fist I've ever taken.
The window behind her frames the evening sky in shades of deep blue and amber, the last light catching her silhouette in a way that makes my chest ache.
Her hair hangs loose around her shoulders, the electric ends catching the lamplight.
Her hands rest on the curve of her belly with protective certainty.
She turns to face me, and her eyes are red but dry. She's done crying. Whatever comes next will be decided with clarity, not tears.
Just a man in a doorway, exhausted and aching from missing his wife, asking to be let back in.
The silence between us holds the weight of everything we've been and everything we might never be.
I let it press against my chest without fighting it, because fighting is what got me here, and the only move I have left is surrender.