“I said don’t.” He snaps his head toward me for a split second, and the void is back. It’s deeper than before. The man who let me touch his bare skin this morning is dead. This is the thing that lives in the cellar. “You’re a doctor, right? Then diagnose the silence. It means the conversation is over. I don’t want to fuckingtalk.”
“We were having a normal day, Valerio. You were here.With me. Don’t let her pull you back into the dark.”
He lets out a harsh, barking laugh with no humor in it. “A normal day? I’m a Morelli. There is no normal. There is only the rot. I am a monster, little prey. She’s right… you should run while you still can.”
He doesn’t take the turn for his penthouse. He swings the car onto my street, braking so hard in front of my building that my seatbelt locks against my chest.
“Get out,” he orders.
“Valerio—”
“Out, Charlotte. Our sessions are over. The ‘normal day’ was a lie. Go back to your life and pray I don’t decide to come back into it.”
My heart breaks in a way I didn’t think it could. The progress, the touch, the way he looked at me in the sunlight—it’s all gone. He’s built the wall back up, brick by bloody brick.
I open the door, my legs feeling like lead. I want to say something, to reach across the console and rip the gloves off his hands, but I know it’s useless.Shehas won.
As soon as my feet hit the sidewalk, he floors it. The matte black car disappears around the corner.
We were doing so fucking good. I understand that his mother is a traumatized woman, but that huge diamond on her finger made it clear she has moved on.
Why can’t she let her sons move on too? They didn’t choose to be his sons, just like she didn’t choose to be his wife. She keeps placing them in the box of “monsters,” but isn’t that what she conditioned them to be? She won’t let them fucking breathe.
Valerio deserves to live without being punished for his father’s mistakes. He deserves to be happy… to be seen.
And I’m going to do my best to make it happen.
Chapter Thirteen
Charlotte
The coffee is bitter and cold. I’m staring at the tablet on my desk, the blue light stinging my eyes.
Blackwood Penitentiary: 40 Dead in Overnight Bloodbath.
No security footage or weapons recovered. Just forty bodies in a high-security prison wing. The news anchors are talking about gang wars and internal collapses.
They’re wrong.
It was a tantrum. A forty-body-count tantrum because a woman with his eyes told him he was a monster. Valerio went to a place where he could kill without consequence to remind himself of who he is.
My phone vibrates against the mahogany. The screen reads:L. MORELLI.
I grip my hair, pulling until it hurts. I want to let it ring. I want to throw the phone into the Hudson. But Lucian Morelli isn’t a man you ignore. He’s the one who signs the checks and keeps the police away from my door.
I slide to answer.
“What the fuck, Charlotte?”
The hair on my arms stands up. “Things were going so well,” I mutter. “Therapy isn’t linear, Mr. Morelli. You know that. It’s two steps forward, one bloodbath back.”
“Enough with the bullshit. Something triggered this. Valerio was stable. Now he’s painting walls with inmates.” There’s a pause where I can hear his teeth grinding. “Do you know what happened?”
My hands start to sweat, the phone becoming slick in my grip.
“Tell me,” Lucian growls.
“It’s your mother.”
