Air seeps through the car's ventilation, carrying the sharp scent of wet leaves and cold concrete, and I drive with the windowscracked because the silence inside the car is the kind that suffocates.
The mansion greets me with darkness and the ghost of jasmine.
Her scent lingers in the hallway, faint but unmistakable, clinging to the walls and the curtains and the very air of a house she made her own in three short weeks. Her sweetness has been woven into every pillow, every sheet, every towel in this house until I can’t tell where she ends and home begins.
The kitchen is where her absence hits first. The coffee mug she used sits on the counter beside the grocery list, her handwriting neat and precise against the white paper.
The words stare up at me. She had every intention of building a life with me and our baby and I ruined it.
But the library is where it breaks me.
Her novel sits on the sofa, the pages fanned open to the spot where she stopped reading, a crease in the spine marking her place alongside the ultrasound photo from our first appointment. Our daughter's tiny profile sits tucked between the pages of a story she'll never finish in this house.
I sink into the armchair by the cold fireplace and sit in the silence that follows a detonation. The leather is cool against my back, the bourbon I poured earlier sits on the side table untouched because the numbness I need can't be found at the bottom of a glass.
Rafael told me to delete the file. I said I would and I didn't. I thought I knew best and look at the shit I’m in now.
Drake warned me that secrets get uncovered at the worst possible moment. And fuck if that man wasn’t right.
Instead I sit in silence and take inventory of exactly what my confidence cost me, the same operational certainty that kept the file intact, that dismissed the security breach as negligible, that trusted my own architecture over the advice of men who were on the outside looking in. They saw the cracks and told me but I was blinded by arrogance.
Now, the question is whether anything survives it.
The mansion settles around me, its old bones creaking. I stare at the empty sofa where my wife should be curled up dreaming about the beautiful life she was building inside these walls with me.
I'm not ready to accept that the woman who taught me what home feels like might never walk through this door again.
Sixteen
Luca
Fuck.
Three weeks, and the mansion has become a museum dedicated to a woman who no longer lives here.
Her jasmine scent faded from the pillows sometime during the second week, leaching out of the cotton thread by thread. I bury my face in the fabric searching for any sign she was once part of my life, but nothing.
The grocery list still sits on the kitchen counter where she left it. I haven't moved it. Moving it would mean accepting something I'm not ready to name, so the paper stays, gathering a fine layer of dust.
I maintain the exterior at Redthorne the way I've maintained every mask I've ever worn. Suits pressed, hair tied back, coffee in hand by seven every morning. The routine holds because routine is the scaffolding that keeps me upright when my internal structure has collapsed. But the precision is slipping in ways I can't hide from men who have spent years learning to read each other's tells.
Meetings I would normally dominate, I let drift. Intel I would catch first, Drake catches instead, his gray eyes flicking to mine with a concern he's stopped trying to hide. Decisions that used to take seconds now take minutes while my brothers wait and I stare at documents without processing a single word.
I'm dropping everything, and the men around me are too loyal to say it and too smart not to notice.
Kon shows up at the mansion on a Tuesday evening without calling first. I open the door to find him standing on my doorstep in a black overcoat, his dark hair loose, his breath fogging in the October air. He doesn't ask to come in. He just shoulders past me and follows the silence to the library where the bourbon I poured an hour ago sits untouched on the side table. The amber liquid catches firelight from a fire I lit because the cold in this house has nothing to do with temperature.
He settles into the armchair across from mine. The leather creaks beneath his weight. His dark eyes sweep the room once, taking in the novel on the sofa, the cold coffee on the mantle, the empty spaces where Ilona used to be. Whatever conclusions he draws, he keeps to himself.
We sit in silence for forty minutes. The fire pops and settles in the hearth. The old house breathes its creaks and sighs around us, and neither of us needs to fill the quiet with words.
He doesn't ask how I'm doing. Doesn't offer advice or platitudes. He just sits, his breathing slow and steady, his presence the only medicine he knows how to give.
When he leaves, he pauses at the door and rests one heavy hand on my shoulder. The grip tightens once, firm and grounding, the same silent communication we've shared since the earlydays when words between us were scarce and trust was built in actions rather than speeches.
“Moy brat, I wish you would have listened,” he says quietly, and the weight of those two words settles into a place no other words can reach.
“Me too.”