There’s nothing left to see.
He betrayed me.
All that time—he and Lucia pretending to care, asking their gentle, stupid questions, pretending to worry about me. It was all a test. A way to study the cracks in me.
They never cared. And I wouldn’t have cared about that if they’d just stayed the fuck out of my business.
“You’re fucking done, man,” Jason says, disappointment dripping from his words like acid. “You were obsessed with her from the beginning.”
“I was intrigued by her,” I bite out.
“You were—and youare—fuckingobsessed.” He gestures to the papers, exasperation clawing across his face. “No point in bullshit now. Your cards are on the table.” Another shake of his head, like he’s watching a child ruin his life. “Christ, Dante. Tracking down a professor and killing him because he had a connection to her? What the fuck is wrong with you?”
The question echoes, ricocheting inside my skull, bouncing off the wounded, still-bleeding walls of my mind.
It’s not the first time I’ve heard it. It always sounds the same—drenched in disgust, disbelief twisting every syllable, their eyes gleaming with the exact same thing.
Fear.
And once, that fear made me shrink. Made me try to carve that part out of myself, to hide it, to pretend it didn’t exist.
But Estella saw and accepted it without hesitation.
So now? I fucking embrace it.
“You’re right, Jason,” I say, stepping toward him. The slightest ripple shivers through his frame as he retreats a pace, and the movement tugs a small, curling smirk from my lips. “Thereissomething wrong with me. See, you and Lucia live in this neat little world of black and white, and I get it.” I spread my arms, letting the gesture fill the space between us. “You’re good people. Hollow as an empty shell, sure—but good, at least in the eyes of everyone else.”
He edges back again, his mouth twitching like trapped words are clawing at his teeth, desperate to escape. He doesn’t want to lose control. He’s hanging on by the thinnest thread, and thefear in his eyes—fuck, the bright, intoxicating gleam of it—only swells. It feeds the storm in my chest.
“Do you even hear yourself?” he spits, a laugh shattering free from him, brittle and humorless. “What do you think you are? What do you think she is? The two of you, just a pair of psychopaths who were made for each other? You think after tonight you’re going to walk off hand in hand, ride off into the sunset, start over?” he snorts. “Maybe crank out a couple little psychopaths while you’re at it?”
A muscle beneath my eye jerks. My vision narrows to a tunnel, the rage slipping in through every crack, wrapping itself around me like a living thing. The more he talks about her, the more my bones itch to break something—to break him.
Estella has shown more humanity than the entire swarm of ‘normal’ people crowding my life. Even those I once called friends.
“You still don’t understand, Jason. You never will,” I say, every muscle straining as I fight to keep still. The emotion burns under my skin, pulsing, pushing, trying to tear out of me, and I bite down on it, hard. “I never wanted kids. I never thought I’d get some happily-ever-after. You really think I’m obsessed with her because she manipulated me into believing she understands me? That’s what you’re clinging to, isn’t it?”
“Dante, how the fuck could she understand you?” he fires back. “You grew up in a perfect, rich family—two loving parents who got killed by The Order. That’s why you started fighting. How could you forget that? How could you betray them? Dishonor them like this?”
Loving parents—a lie so fake it made me want to vomit. I wasn’t lying when I told it to Estella back in Mexico.
His words twist something deep in my gut, sharp enough to rip me open from the inside. A fresh blaze roars up my spine,and everything flashes red as the accusations echo—each one a strike meant to crack me the fuck apart.
“You don’t know what they did to me, Jason. Nobody does,” I say, my voice trembling, whether from rage or from the old wounds he’s ripping open again, I can’t tell. “Both of them. What they did behind closed doors?—”
“That’s not a fucking excuse to switch sides!”
Silence drops like a weight. Only my ragged breathing and the hammering of my heart disturb it.
There’s never been a point in explaining anything to him. He doesn’t understand; he doesn’t want to. His world is white or black, and because my parents were kind to him, they branded themselves into his memory as saints.
He never thinks to look behind the curtain.
So why should I waste another breath?
“What will you do now, Jason?” I ask, my eyelids lowering as I study him. “Now that you’re convinced I’m some unhinged monster, what exactly is your plan?”
He swallows, taking his time before he speaks. “While you were busy fucking her, Lucia and I kept moving with our plan. Why else do you think things suddenly stopped being stuck in that dead spot?”
