There's an irony in there somewhere, but I can't find it through the fog.
I reach for the second bottle. My hand shakes — not from weakness, not the injury, but from something coming up from deeper than my spine — and I knock it over. The hollow impact of glass on wood echoes in the empty house, too loud in the way everything is too loud tonight, in the way silence amplifies everything it contains.
Silence.
The house is silent. The house is empty. The house, which three hours ago contained coffee and PT exercises and the domestic ordinary of Valentina moving through rooms I now can't look at without seeing her, is completely, fundamentally empty.
Because I kicked her out.
Because I saidget out, no longer mine, done, over— I arranged the words with the deliberate precision of a man building a wall, putting them in the order most likely to do maximum damage, and I watched her shatter and I told myself that was what I wanted.
Good,I'd thought.She deserves to hurt.
But the anger that felt so hot and righteous in that clubhouse has burned itself out somewhere between the third and fourth drink, and all that's left underneath it is this: an ache so deep and structural it feels like it's come from the bones. The hollow, gnawing awareness of a man who has destroyed something and cannot stop being aware of the destruction.
She killed Marcus.
Marcus, who I knew — have known since we were old enough for me to start cataloguing the things I didn't want to know — was not a man you left alone with women who hadn't chosen him. Marcus, who I defended because loyalty demanded it, because blood demanded it, because admitting the truth would have required me to look at myself in the mirror and answer for what I'd chosen not to see.
Valentina didn't have the luxury of choosing not to see.
Valentina was in that alley.
The bourbon sloshes over the rim when I finally get the second bottle open. I drink it anyway, let it burn, deserve the burn. The pain in my lower back has been building for the last hour — I cut PT short, drove forty minutes to the compound, sat in a chair for two more hours, drove another forty minutes back here, and now my body is staging a very reasonable revolt — but I barely register it beneath the other pain, the interior one, the kind physical therapy has no protocol for.
She was scared.
That keeps surfacing, breaking through whatever I'm trying to think instead. She was scared. She remembered something terrible about a night she'd blocked out, something traumatic and violent and entirely Marcus's doing, and instead of telling me, she wasscared.Of what I would do. Of what I would say.
Of exactly what I did.
Of exactly what I said.
No longer mine.
I said that. I arranged those specific words for maximum impact and sent them into her like shrapnel and watched her face do the thing that faces do when something essential gets knocked loose. I watched her break and told myself it was justice and knew even then that I was lying.
My phone buzzes. I look at the screen: Zay. I let it ring to voicemail, then stare at the ceiling while he presumably leaves a message I already know the content of.
He calls back immediately.
"What?" I answer, voice scraped raw.
"Are you drunk?"
"Extremely."
"Jesus Christ, Xavier." He sounds like a man who has been running on adrenaline and is now running on the fumes of it, exhausted in a way that goes past tired. "Where are you?"
"Home. Safe house. Alone." The word sits in my mouth with a specific flavor. "Like I demanded."
A beat of silence. Then: "Say it."
"Say what?"
"Whatever you're thinking. Just say it."
"You fucked up," Zay says bluntly. "Massively. Catastrophically. In a way that you're going to be working to fix for a very long time, if she gives you the chance to fix it."