It should’ve felt crowded. It didn’t. Instead, it was a blessing. A gift. One I didn’t know how to name.
My eyelids grew heavy as I let myself sink into the safety of it. Their breaths surrounded me—three different rhythms, all syncing into something soothing. I drifted, dreaming of the yellow pools of Parisian streetlamps and smoky jazz clubs and the heat of hands gripping my waist as music pulsed through the floor.
But a noise cut through everything.
A sharp vibration. A ring.
My eyes snapped open.
Jonathan muttered something under his breath and shifted away from me. The bed dipped then rose as he stood. I blinked into the dark, disoriented. The red glow of the hotel clock read 3:47 a.m.
My stomach clenched.
Jonathan crossed the room, answering the call in a low voice. But even from the bed, I could hear the silence—the kind that meant he was listening. Really listening.
I pushed upright, heart hammering. Alex did the same. Devin rubbed his face, instantly alert.
Then Jonathan turned toward us.
And his expression… God. I’d never seen it so stark.
“That was one of my guys,” he said, voice hoarse. “My dad—Anthony—he had a heart attack. They’re putting him into a medically induced coma.”
My breath caught.
Alex cursed under his breath. Devin sat forward like the air had been knocked out of him.
Jonathan swallowed hard. “He might not make it.”
The room dissolved into motion. Clothes pulled on, bags grabbed from the floor, the bright snap of panic sharpening everything. We needed to leave. We needed to get back to the States now.
But under all the scrambling, dread twisted in my gut. We’d come to Paris to get away from danger, not walk back into it. Whoever was threatening me and my mother…none of that had been resolved.
As Jonathan zipped his suitcase shut with shaking hands, I couldn’t shake the feeling that going home meant stepping directly back into the storm we’d barely escaped.
24
JONATHAN
I should’ve gone straight to the hospital the second the jet touched down on the tarmac. That was what everyone expected of me—the dutiful eldest son, the heir, the one who’d been groomed for this life since the moment I was old enough to understand why there were always so many men with guns in our house.
But instead, I sat in my father’s home office at the Butera mansion, my childhood home, surrounded by the heavy scent of leather and cigars, the quiet hum of the past pressing in on me. Suffocating me.
The room hadn’t changed since I was a kid. The same mahogany desk, the same crystal decanter half-filled with some expensive whiskey my father only drank when he wanted to “teach me something.” The same thick curtains that blocked out the sun, the rest of the world.
His papers were spread in front of me now—ledgers, contacts, notes written in his harsh, angular handwriting. I’d always thought of them as “his.” But someday soon, they’d be mine.
The idea made my stomach twist.
I sifted through the documents, pretending I was looking for something specific, but really I was avoiding the moment when I’d have to see him hooked up to machines, unmoving.
The thought of Anthony Butera—my father, the immovable object, the man whose shadow was bigger than most people’s entire lives—lying helpless in a hospital bed made my hands shake.
He’d never been gentle. Hell, he’d never even been warm. But he’d been there. Solid. Present. A force of nature I thought would go on forever.
I found an old photo as I flipped through a stack of files—me, maybe ten years old, sitting stiffly beside him at his desk as he taught me how to read coded messages. My sisters were outside in the yard that day. I remembered watching them from the window, wishing I could be out there too.
Wishing for freedom I’d never have.
