Foster homes had been temporary. Beds were loaned. Clothes were secondhand. Nothing had ever quite fit right. Nothing had ever belonged to me. Not the rooms I slept in. Not even my own damn name. In the military, everything was borrowed too. Uniforms with someone else’s initials still stitched into the tags. Schedules that told me where to be and when to leave. I lived a life defined by other people’s rules, other people’s timelines, other people’s leftovers.
But Valentina—she didn’t feel borrowed. She felt real. Mine. From the way her breath caught when I touched her to the half-asleep smile she wore in the mornings, to the marks on her skin I’d put there myself. I wanted every piece of her. Every thought, every secret, every quiet, vulnerable moment. I wanted her in a way I’d never wanted anything else—obsessively, irrationally. Possessively.
She wasn’t borrowed. She wasn’t temporary. She was mine, in every fucked-up, selfish way possible.
I wondered why I wanted someone who was so reckless. So chaotic. Someone who tore through life without thinking, who laughed louder than she should and argued even louder than that. Maybe that was why she got under my skin the way she did. Why I couldn’t let her go even when I knew I should.
Still, there was one thing I couldn’t stand. The drinking. I had no idea if she was still doing it behind closed doors. I hadn’t smelled it on her, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t indulging.
I’d never told her to stop, only that she couldn’t do it in my apartment. Never grabbed the glass from her hand, and never lectured her, because I wasn’t that man. I wasn’t the type to control people, to tell them what they could or couldn’t do. That wasn’t my job. People made their own choices. They lived with their own consequences.
But that didn’t mean I had to fucking like it.
That didn’t mean it didn’t get under my skin like an itch I couldn’t scratch.
I’d seen it before. The way Valentina drank, it wasn’t for fun. It wasn’t because she enjoyed the taste. It wasn’t even to take the edge off. It was about something else.Something deeper.It was about silence. About shutting out thoughts she didn’t want to sit with, about numbing out reality just enough to pretend like she had control. And that? That was the part that fucked with me.
I’d lived with it.
I could still smell the vodka. Still hear the slow, fixed sound of ice clinking in a glass, the television buzzing with some show she wasn’t even watching. I could still see her, the woman who was supposed to protect me, supposed to stand between me and the man who locked me in that mirror room and told me totake a good look at myself.
She never did.
She just sat there, slumped on the couch, a bottle at her hip, eyes glazed over, face blank. She heard me crying, heard me screaming, but she never moved. Never opened the door. Never pulled me out. She let it happen. She let me sit in that room, surrounded by versions of myself staring back at me from every fucking angle, because she was too drunk to even notice me.
I’d press my palms against the glass, trying to find something real, but there was nothing. Just reflections. Just me, split into a hundred pieces, forced to look at myself the way he wanted me to.
Valentina wasn’t her. I knew that. But that didn’t matter, because every time I saw her with a drink in her hand, every time Ismelledit on her, every time she got that look in her eye—that quiet, distant, hollow look—I felt like that kid again. Sitting on the floor of that mirror room, screaming for someone who would never save him.
That was why it fucking bothered me.
Not because I wanted to fix her. Not because I wanted her to be different. But because I knew exactly what it looked like when someonelet themselves disappear.When they took one step, then another, then another, until they were too far gone to find their way back.
I wasn’t going to stop her—that wasn’t my job—but I sure as hell wasn’t going to stand by and watch her fade away either.
That was the part I couldn’t stomach—the slow unraveling; the way she acted as if none of it mattered, like she wasn’tburning herself from the inside out. She’d laugh, roll her eyes, throw out some remark that was meant to cut deep but never quite reached me the way she wanted it to.
I hated seeing those echoes in Valentina. Hated how every instinct told me to leave, to protect myself from repeating the past. But even more, I hated the part of me that kept hoping she’d change. Because if she did—if she fought it and won—I wouldn't have to walk away. I wouldn't have to keep my distance. I wouldn't have to choose between my sanity and the one woman I couldn’t seem to let go of.
I hated that she reminded me of something I’d spent my whole life making sure I’d never become. I hated that in the back of my mind I was always waiting—waiting for her to take that last step over the edge, to go too far, to reach a point where I couldn’t pull her back even if I wanted to.
The worst part was knowing she would, because that was what people like her did. They didn’t stop. They didn’t turn around. They didn’t just wake up one day and decide to be better. They kept going until they had nothing left. Until they’d lost everything. Until the only thing they had was the bottle in their hands, the weight of all their bad choices pressing down on them until they collapsed.
And I wasn’t going to watch it happen.
I kept my distance. I let her push. I let her provoke me, dig into me, claw at me, try to get me to crack, even though I never did.
If I cracked, she’d see what was underneath. And if she saw that—if she realized what she was doing to me—she’d use it. She would ruin me with it. She’d sink her teeth into it and drag me down with her, because that was who she was.
And the worst part? The absolute fucking worst part?
I’d let her. Because for all my judgment, all my resentment, all the fucking years I’d spent making sure no one would ever have that kind of power over me again ... she already did.
CHAPTER 30
MARCO
The office was empty, and I was still here.
