I can't respond. Can't move. I'm carved from stone, a statue of a girl kneeling beside death. Silent. Completely silent, like my voice died with the woman on the couch.
He crosses to me in three strides, drops to his knees, frames my face with his hands.
"This was staged,” he says. “This is a trap."
The words don't make sense. Nothing makes sense. But his hands are warm and solid and real, his heartbeat steady when he pulls me against his chest.
He doesn't ask questions. Doesn't wait for answers I can't give. He just acts, decisive, certain. His arms slide under me and suddenly I'm weightless, carried like something precious rather than broken. The last man who carried me from horror was Gabriel, fleeing his own crime. But Nico carries me toward something: safety, vengeance, himself. I'm dead weight in his arms, silent as the woman on the couch.
Out of the room, past Logan, down the stairs. He carries me through the golden light and music that keeps playing because the world doesn't know yet that something died upstairs. My face pressed against his chest, I stay silent, not even crying, just empty.
He's on his phone, voice arctic cold. "Lock down the building. No one in or out. Get me everything from security, every angle,every timestamp." A pause. "It was staged. Someone put that body there for her to find."
The words wash over me without landing. Body. Staged. Trap. They're just sounds.
Miami heat slams into us as we exit the club. Real. Physical. But I'm still in that room, still kneeling, still eighteen and frozen.
He puts me in the car, never letting go completely, like he knows if he releases me I might float away. Pulls me against him. I'm shaking now, and his hand grips the back of my neck, not gentle but grounding, like he's physically holding me in the present, refusing to let the past take me.
The drive passes in fragments. City lights bleeding past windows. His solid warmth beside me. The silence that doesn't demand anything from my silent lips.
At the penthouse, he guides me to the couch, wraps a blanket around my shoulders even though Miami never gets cold. Makes me drink water that I swallow mechanically.
Then he sits beside me. Waiting. Not pushing. Just there.
The silence stretches until I can't stand it anymore.
"It looked the same."
The words come out as a whisper, the first I've managed since the room. Since everything shattered.
Nico doesn't ask what I mean. He waits.
"Eight years ago. The woman in that room…" I stare at nothing, seeing blue wallpaper behind my eyelids. "Same position. Same stillness. Like she was just sleeping. Like if you shook her hard enough, she'd wake up and laugh about the weird dream she had."
My voice cracks, but the words keep coming, pulled from some deep place that's been locked as tight as that room.
"Someone knew exactly how to position her. Someone who knows about the worst night of my life."
The realization arrives through the shock like ice water in my veins. I look at Nico, really look at him for the first time since he found me.
"Cesar sent the fixer eight years ago. He's the only one besides me and Gabriel who knows what that room looked like. What she looked like."
Nico's jaw locks, his eyes turning to murder.
"He watched me help Gabriel that night. Through cameras, through the fixer's report, somehow. He saw an eighteen-year-old girl destroy herself to protect her brother, and he filed it away for eight years, waiting for the perfect moment to use it."
I feel something shift inside me, not quite healing but hardening into something sharp and dangerous.
"He thinks he's won," I whisper against Nico's chest, the words tasting like iron and promise. "He thinks I'll crumble like I did at eighteen. Thinks I'll stay silent and complicit while he destroys me."
"You won't." Nico's certainty is absolute, his arms tightening around me like he can hold me together through sheer will.
"No," I agree, and for the first time since I saw that body, I feel something other than empty horror. It's rage, crystallizing beneath the fear like ice forming on water. "Because this time, I'm not eighteen and alone. This time, I have you."
I pull back to look at him, and his eyes are black with fury, with promise, with something possessive that makes my pulse quicken despite everything.
"I'm going to help you destroy him," I say, and the words don't shake. They burn. "Cesar thinks he knows me: the party girl, the disaster, the weakness in my father's empire. But he doesn't know what I've become."
