There he is. The rough man under the guilt. The one who hates being cornered because he is usually the one doing it.
“I’m not making her anything,” he says. “I fucked her. She got pregnant. She lost the baby. I stayed because she said it was mine, but I know she lies. But I stayed because leaving her aloneafter that would make me lower than the shit we scrape off our boots.”
The words hit brutal and plain.
Pretty would have made me hate him more.
“And after?” I ask.
His silence isn’t empty now. It is full of things he doesn’t want to hand me.
I smile without humor. “Careful, Shady. You already used your pause for the day.”
His mouth tightens. “After, she stayed close. I let her.”
“Why?”
“Guilt.”
“That’s lazy.”
His eyes cut. “Yeah.”
I wait.
He drags a hand over his mouth, leaving a smear of blood near his jaw. “Because if I let her hate me, then I had to admit there was something to hate. If I shut the door, then I had to stand there and look at the fucking grave. So I left it cracked. Not enough to promise her anything. Enough that she could pretend.”
My chest hurts.
Not for him.
Maybe a little for her.
I hate that.
Cherry’s grief had hands on my kidnapping. Her pain became a key code, a text message, an elevator door opening with sorry on her face. But before she was a weapon, she was a woman bleeding on a bathroom floor while Shady held a loss neither of them knew what to do with.
That doesn’t make what she did forgivable.
It makes it worse.
Because real pain does more damage than fake pain ever could.
“And after you were with me?” I ask. “Did you still see her?”
Darling sucks in a breath behind me.
Shady’s face changes.
The thing Boca didn’t say but the room already knows.
I hate rooms full of men and their secrets. I hate how silence can be louder than a confession.
“When?” I ask, softer.
Shady looks at Diablo once.
Diablo gives him nothing.