I almost didn’t answer, but something in my gut told me to.
“Grey.”
Silence. Then: “Oh, come on.” Valentina’s soft voice came through the phone. “You always answer like you’re about to take on a hit.”
“I’m at work, Valentina.”
I knew I sounded irritated. I was. Not with her though. It was Sebastian. He had a talent for crawling under my skin, threatening to tear down everything I’d built with Valentina.
Sebastian reminded me exactly why I’d drawn boundaries in the first place. Why I kept that hard, clear line between me and her. Valentina thought she knew me, but that was only what I’d allowed her to see. If she ever saw what was underneath—if she ever knew what I’d done in the name of loyalty, in the name of survival—she wouldn’t just pull back. She’d run. And worse than losing her would be seeing the way she’d look at me, her eyes stripped of that warmth, replaced by betrayal.
Keeping things casual, distant enough to be safe, was my best chance of protecting her. Maybe she’d never have to find out how deep my mistakes went. Maybe she’d never have to know the part I played in ruining her life, or that my loyalty to Remy had cost me a piece of my soul long before I ever met her.
“Yeah, well, you married me, so that makes me your problem,” she finally said.
If I kept things as they were, Valentina could keep believing in the illusion I’d built. She could keep liking the idea of who she thought I was. But if we moved past that line—if we got more intense—the truth would surface eventually. And when it did, it wouldn’t just sting.
It would destroy her.
Valentina deserved better, and for some goddamn reason, I wanted her to have it—even if that meant never fully having her myself. That was what a good person would do, right?
But I wasn’t a good person.
I was a selfish one.
Averyselfish one.
“What do you need?”
She made a small, frustrated sound. “A ride, Marco. Obviously.”
She had money for a cab, but she wantedmeto pick her up. I took a small note of that.
“You’re usually more resourceful.”
She let out a breath. “The subway smells like piss. Not metaphorically. Not ‘oh, the city is so dirty.’ Like actual human piss.”
I glanced at my watch. “Is that your way of saying ‘please’? You might want to work on that.”
“It’s my way of saying, ‘If I have to get on public transport after sitting in a church basement for two hours, I will relapse just to make a point.’”
“Where are you?”
“Lexington and 12th. If you could hurry, that’d be great. The guy across the street is either selling bootleg DVDs or planning a homicide, and I don’t want to stick around to find out.”
“Stay put. I’m ten minutes out.”
I ended the call and tossed my phone onto the passenger seat. Lexington and 12th. A church basement. She didn’t have to say it. I knew.
AA.
It wasn’t a surprise, but it still landed like one. I hadn’t realized she was still going, especially after Max had stopped making it a requirement. Valentina wasn’t exactly the poster child for self-help, more likely to mock therapy than benefit from it, but she’d stuck it out. Even without an audience.
That meant something, even if neither of us would admit it out loud.
She’d always been good at faking it. The slips she’d forged, the AA chips she hadn’t earned but carried around anyway. I knew how cynical she could be about the whole damn process—the way she mocked the self-righteous optimism of people trying to better themselves. But here she was, weeks after Max had stopped checking her slips, still attending meetings, voluntarily enduring what she’d once openly despised.
That bothered me. Not because of the lie. Not even because of the stubbornness. It bothered me because it showed there was something underneath all her destructive tendencies. Something genuine. Something she wanted badly enough to make her sit in that church basement and keep showing up even when no one was watching.
