Easy for him to say. Cast has never been rejected by someone he loves, has never had someone look at him with the kind of devastation I saw in Xavier's eyes and sayno longer minelike the words were a death sentence for both of us.
My phone is on the nightstand, screen dark because I finally stopped checking it every thirty seconds to see if any of them had texted. Zay called twice yesterday. Asher sent a messageasking if I was okay. But nothing from Xavier, which is fine, which is expected, which is exactly what I deserve, but a part of me thought after four months he would forgive me. He would remember that he loves me, and know that I’m?—
A knock on the door interrupts the spiral before it can really get going.
I sit up too fast, heart already hammering with something that feels dangerously close to hope. Zay promised he'd bring cake today—mentioned it in one of his voicemails, said something about not letting my twenty-third birthday pass without at least some kind of celebration even if I'm spending it alone in this depressing apartment. The thought of seeing him, of having someone who doesn't hate me sit with me for a few minutes, is enough to get me moving.
I pad across the apartment barefoot, not bothering to check my reflection because Zay has seen me looking worse and won't care that my hair's a mess and I haven't bothered with anything resembling makeup in days. My hand is already reaching for the deadbolt when some instinct—some old training from my cartel days about always, always checking before you open a door—makes me pause.
I lean forward and press my eye to the peephole.
The world narrows to a fisheye circle of distorted reality, and standing in my hallway, close enough that I can see the texture of his leather jacket in perfect detail, is Xavier.
My heart stops.
Actually stops for a full second before it restarts with a painful lurch that makes my chest ache. He's here. Standing outside my door in faded jeans and his Raiders vest, one hand bracedagainst the doorframe in a way that suggests his legs are hurting—standing too long without the chair, probably, pushing himself beyond what his body can handle because that's what Xavier does. His hair is longer than I've ever seen it, falling across his forehead in a way that makes him look younger, more vulnerable. There's a pink bag in his other hand—the kind of gift bag you get from fancy bakeries—and his jaw is set in that stubborn line I know too well.
He's here.
At my apartment.
On my birthday.
After everything that happened, after what he said, after the way he looked at me like I'd destroyed his entire world—he's here.
Panic floods through me so fast and complete that for a second I forget how to breathe. My hand is still on the deadbolt, frozen, while my brain tries to process what this means. He found me. He knows where I live. He came here, which means he wants something, which means he's going to finish what he started in that clubhouse—finally say all the things he held back, finally make it clear exactly how much he hates me for what I did to Marcus, for the lies, for all of it.
He's going to kill me.
The thought arrives fully formed and completely irrational, but my body doesn't care about rationality. My body just knows that I'm a killer standing on the other side of a door from the brother of the man I killed, and nothing good can come from opening that door. I should run. Should grab my keys and my phone and go out the bedroom window the way I used to when I neededto disappear, should put as much distance between myself and whatever Xavier came here to do as physically possible.
But I can't move.
Can't make myself step away from the door, can't stop staring through the peephole at the man who makes me feel more alive than anyone else ever has, even when feeling alive hurts this much.
He knocks again—three sharp raps that echo through the cheap hollow-core door. "Valentina," he calls, and even through the wood I can hear the exhaustion in his voice, the rough edge that suggests he's been sleeping as badly as I have. "I know you're in there. Your bike's outside."
Of course it is. I should have hidden it, should have thought about the fact that my bike is basically a neon sign announcing my presence to anyone who knows what to look for. But I've been too hollowed out to think about operational security, too busy just trying to survive each day to worry about covering my tracks.
I press my forehead against the door, still not opening it, still frozen in this awful space between wanting to see him so badly it makes my bones ache and being absolutely terrified of what he's going to say when I do.
"Val." His voice is softer now, closer, like he's leaning against the door the same way I am with just a few inches of wood between us. "Please. I just want to talk."
Talk. Right. Talk about how I'm a liar and a murderer. Talk about how everything we had was built on deception. Talk about how he's glad I'm gone, how the club is better off without me, how he's moving on with his life and I should do the same.
I should tell him to leave. Should tell him through the door that we have nothing to talk about, that he said everything he needed to say in that clubhouse, that I got the message loud and clear and he doesn't need to drive it home any further.
But instead I find myself moving back to the peephole, pressing my eye against it one more time just to look at him, just to see if the reality matches what my memory has been doing to his face over the past few months.
He looks terrible.
Not in a way that diminishes him—Xavier could never look diminished, that's not how he's built—but in a way that speaks to damage, to pain, to the same kind of hollowing out I've been experiencing. The circles under his eyes are so dark they look like bruises. There's a cut on his lower lip that wasn't there before, and his jaw has a bruise blooming purple and yellow across it. He looks like someone who's been in a fight, like someone who's been destroying himself from the inside out, like someone who's been suffering as much as I have.
The thought should make me feel better—shouldn't I want him to hurt the way he made me hurt?—but it just makes everything worse. Because I did this to him. I'm the reason he looks like he hasn't slept in days, the reason there's that particular kind of devastation in the set of his shoulders.
He shifts his weight and I watch the small wince that crosses his face, the way he adjusts his stance to take pressure off his left leg. He's in pain. Standing here in my hallway is costing him something physically, and he's doing it anyway because?—
Because why? What could possibly be important enough to make him come here, to make him seek me out after making it abundantly clear that he never wanted to see me again?