I rose from the chair, patting my growling stomach. “I’m hungry. Stay for lunch.”
“Alex is expecting me home soon. But I can spare another thirty minutes.”
Without Tate by my side, I only had Olivia. Except she wasn’t mine anymore. All because of my stupid fucking nightmares and the flashbacks that felt so real.
I broke my promise to Tate.
Financially speaking, I was taking care of Olivia. But she wouldn’t spend time with me that wasn’t work-related for us to get closer again. My chance of ever getting her to forgive me, let alone marry her, was looking slimmer by the day.
“You doing okay, Drake?” Marcello hit the button on the wall to call the elevator. “You don’t seem like yourself.”
“I don’t feel like it.” The doors opened, and I stepped inside the elevator. “My whole life is fucked now. I lost Tate. And now Olivia. What’s next? My company? I have nothing without her, Marcello.”
“She just needs time. Everyone grieves in their own way.”
“It’s not just Tate. I hurt her. It was never my intention.” I leaned against the wall as the car shot upward and sighed. “I lost control. The flashbacks happened while we were fucking. I could have killed her.”
“Shit,” Marcello muttered. “Yeah, that’s happened to me, too. But my brothers were there, so… You know. One of them stopped me.”
“I don’t trust myself with her. Or with anyone really. My brain keeps trying to sabotage me. I can’t tell what’s real anymore.”
“You should call Damian’s doctor. He’s helped him a lot.”
As the doors opened on the ground floor, I laughed. “Yeah, sure. Damian is a real psychopath. He enjoys killing people. No amount of therapy can save him.”
Marcello chuckled and followed me down the hallway. “Probably not. But he seems better since Alex had Sofia. I think being a father has changed him.”
“That’s good. Maybe there’s hope for me.”
Cameras panned the corridor as we walked into the kitchen. I doubled my security team as a precaution. Olivia’s life was too important to leave anything to chance.
In the kitchen, we bumped into Olivia, and when her eyes locked onto me, she scowled.
“Liv,” I said, moving toward her the way a small animal would a lion. With extreme caution. “It’s lunchtime. You should eat with us.”
She shook her head. “No, I’m not hungry.”
I clutched her shoulder. “You keep saying that. But you must be hungry.”
Since that night in my bedroom, she’d kept her distance. Whenever I tried to apologize, she walked away. She stopped coming to bed and refused to eat meals with me. We were nothing more than roommates and co-workers. She sentnotifications about my daily schedule to my phone and spoke to me through Lovelace.
Olivia tossed my hand off her shoulder and stepped out of my reach. “I feel sick to my stomach. And I don’t want to eat. I’ve been throwing up all week. I think I caught something.” With her head down, she sniffed back tears. “Go wait in the dining room. I’ll coordinate with the chef.”
We couldn’t heal together. That much was crystal clear. Our movie nights ended with Tate’s death. So did any semblance of normalcy. We used to joke and tease each other. Now, she couldn’t stand being in the same room as me.
I took my place at the head of the dining table and put my head in my hands. “I can’t do anything fucking right, Marcello. She hates me. I have all the money in the world. I can figure out any problem.” I lifted my head and hated that I had tears in my eyes. “But I can’t bring her brother back. It’s fucking killing me.”
He reached a hand across the table. “You did everything you could to save Tate.”
The butler’s kitchen door opened, and heels tapped on the tiled floor. “You could have told Tate to stay in the Marine Corps.” Olivia dropped our plates onto the table with a clang. “You could have refused to let him work for you. He’s dead, and it’s all your fault, Drake! I wish we had never fucking met you. We would have been better off on the streets.”
Before I could respond, she ran out of the room, crying.
“Fuck.” I shot up from the chair, dabbing at my eyes. “Do you see what I’m talking about? I can’t even breathe without her yelling at me.”
Marcello pulled me into a hug, and I wrapped my arms around him, sobbing on his shoulder. I hated being this out of control. A sobbing, stupid mess. I wasn’t much of a crier, not even when I got picked on throughout school. But almost dyingchanged me. Losing Tate turned me into a different person. Someone unrecognizable.
Marcello held me until I stopped trembling, and that was when the awkwardness on my part settled into my bones. This wasn’t normal for a man. I must have looked so weak and pathetic.
