Morning comes without mercy. I don't remember falling asleep. One moment I'm staring at the ceiling, the next the light is wrong, too pale, too honest.
Vegas looks best at night. Daylight shows you what survives when the glitter shuts off.
I sit up, my jaw already clenched, my body already tight with a fury that never really leaves anymore. My phone has fallen off my chest onto the sheet, dark and silent. It never rang.
It never rang ten years ago either.
That's where my mind goes. Not to how we met. Not to her laugh, or the way she used to tuck her hair behind her ear when she was nervous. My memory doesn't give me those things anymore.
It gives me the asphalt. Headlights. Impact. The sound of my body breaking.
Then the engine again.
Twice.
Gabriel found me in the street, more dead than alive. Broken, twisted, unrecognizable. He told me later that I didn't look human anymore. That he thought I was already gone until he heard something, a breath, a moan, or maybe stubbornness.
I don't remember any of it.
I remember waking up weeks later, drifting in and out of darkness, pain so complete it erased everything else. A room that wasn't a hospital. Shadows instead of nurses. The smell of blood and antiseptic mixed with desperation.
Gabe couldn't take me to a hospital. My uncle would have finished what his sons started. Bello figured it out first. Confirmed it. The hit had been ordered from inside the family. High up. Clean. Efficient. Designed to look like an accident.
My father and my uncle built this empire together. When my father died, my uncle held the throne in trust. Long enough for me to grow into it. But regents don't always enjoy stepping aside.
He had sons of his own. Three of them. Two who enjoyed the crown's shadow. One who studied how to claim it.
"Don't move him," Bello had advised. "If he goes to a hospital, he dies."
So they found someone else. A butcher with a medical license. A man who asked no questions and made no promises. He kept me alive. Barely. Put me back together wrong, because wrong was better than dead.
When I woke, my body was a ruin. And still, it wasn't over. Years later, they had to break me again. Break bones that had healed crooked. Re-set joints that never aligned. Pain layered on pain so I could walk like a man instead of a reminder. It was worth it. Every fracture. Every scream. Every dark night I thought I wouldn't survive.
All of it was survivable.
All, except her.
What she and I had was a secret. Not an affair. A decision.
She didn't want anyone to know she was with me so soon after Carter. Not after the accident. Not while the world still treated him like a saint in a wheelchair. And I didn't want my uncle anywhere near her. Didn't want her touched, threatened,or leveraged. So we agreed. No names spoken out loud. No public traces. No claiming each other until it was safe.
I honored that promise, even when I was broken. Even when I was unconscious.
The moment I was somewhat coherent, I sent Bello to find her, to tell her to wait for me, then I waited until I was healed enough to go find her myself. I didn't have to look very hard. She was everywhere. The newspapers had her face on the front page. Glossy. Perfect. Smiling beside a man in a wheelchair.
HIM!
Carter Whitford.
In a wheelchair.
The man I'd failed to kill.
Her hand rested on his shoulder like devotion had always been her natural state.
GOVERNOR'S DAUGHTER MARRIES LOCAL HERO
TRAGEDY, RESILIENCE, AND LOVE TRIUMPH IN LAS VEGAS CEREMONY
