At him.
At the aftermath of what I did.
He never asked me what I’d been doing just before. Why I was there, and breathless.
Maybe he couldn’t bear to know.
Or maybe he already did and chose to pretend.
He did his best. That’s the truth. He didn’t fall apart. He just… diverted. Built walls. Gave speeches. Took me to networking dinners and introduced me as a man long before I was one.
He was a father in mourning, and I became a son in performance.
And now here we are—sixteen years later, still playing the same roles.
He clears his throat across from me. “I wanted to talk about the Vegas situation.”
There it is. The turn. The safe ground. The clean ledger.
I nod, keeping my expression smooth even as my stomach twists.
Yesterday, I let the only person who’s ever really seen me—who’s ever gotten close to the rot—pull pleasure out of me in a public bathroom like it was a birthright. And I let him.
No—I wanted him to.
And still… it wasn’t enough.
Because no matter how far he goes, how deep he takes me?—
He hasn’t seen all of it yet.
Not the worst part.
Not the part my father screamed over.
The part I watched from the stairs, heart pounding and hands still shaking from what came before.
And if Dante ever finds out?—
If anyone ever does?—
They’ll never look at me the same again.
They’ll finally see what she saw in her last breath.
And I don’t know if I’ll survive that.
I knew he’d bring it up eventually.
The CEO title—dangling like a blade over my head, one wrong move away from slipping out of reach forever.
My father’s voice is calm when he mentions it. Not accusing. Not panicked. Just measured concern, like everything else he does.
“There’s… been talk,” he says, swirling the amber liquid in his glass. “Board members get nervous when they smell blood. Especially when it comes from the top.”
“I know,” I say, already slipping into the answer I rehearsed on the drive over. “Dante and I are working things out. We’ve brought in a specialized consultant—someone with crisis-negotiation experience. It’s… helping. Honestly. We’re in a better place than we’ve been in a long time.”
I can’t tell if I’m lying or not. Maybe both things are true.
