That word still feels dangerous.
Uninvited, another memory surfaces.
Jenna—years ago—washing blood off her hands.
"Will this come back to me?" She isn't crying. She isn't shaking. Her voice is steady in the way people get when they've already accepted that fear won't save them.
I kneel beside Coach's body, awkward, young, furious at the world but not yet powerful enough to bend it. "Not if we do this right."
"Tell me what to do." She looks at me. It's not trust in her eyes. It's not desperation, but that's there too. She looks like she's ready to negotiate with me.
She always had guts. I saw it then. I just didn't understand its value yet. Back then, I was a twenty-year-old idiot with a beautiful girl in my arms, trying to impress her with control I didn't yet have.
Now?
Now I'm a man who understands exactly what kind of strength it takes to endure and adapt. I don't feel rage when I think of her anymore. I feel something far more dangerous. Respect.
And now, curiosity.
The couch dipsbeneath me as I shift, half-awake, half-lost. Sleep won't take me fully. It circles. Teases. Drops me back into myself over and over again. I stare at the ceiling, Massimo's ceiling, and let the truth settle where denial used to live. This is the second time I've killed someone.
The first time, I didn't have a choice. Survival stripped it down to instinct and aftermath and shaking hands. This time… this time I chose. I looked a man in the face and nodded, knowing exactly what would happen when I did. I watched him die. The thing that gets me is that I don't regret it.
That's what scares me. There is no line left. Not really. No moral edge I won't step over if it means Amauri comes home safe. If it means he sleeps without flinching. If it means he never learns what the Oven smells like. The thought settles, cold and absolute. With it comes something else. Something I haven't let myself touch in ten years.
Massimo.
Not the man he is now. Not the monster Vegas whispers about. Not the fury and the violence and the way he looks at me like I am a liability and a weakness all at once.
The boy. The man who found me when I was shaking apart. It comes back in pieces at first. Not scenes. Sensations. The smell of citrus, bleach, and men's sweat. And yes, death. I scrubbed my hands raw, convinced I could still feel him on my skin. The wayMassimo didn't touch me until I asked. Didn't crowd me. Didn't ask questions I couldn't answer.
Just sat there. Present. Solid.
I remember how grateful I was. God, I was grateful. For his silence. For the way he looked at me like I wasn't broken, or dirty, or something to be pitied. Like I was still… me.
One night turned into another day. Then another day. Grief doesn't respect schedules; it leaks. It followed me. So did Coach's face, which was suddenly everywhere. Missing posters taped to lampposts and grocery store windows. His name scrolled across the bottom of the news like a prayer that wouldn't be answered. Pillar of the community. Beloved mentor.
I saw his wife on TV. She clutched a microphone with shaking hands. I watched his children, too young to understand what missing really meant, only knowing that their father hadn't come home. I remember thinking he was a monster. I remember thinking he deserved everything he got.
And then—God help me—I saw their tears. The waiting. The terrible, human not-knowing. It tore me open deep inside. I would lie awake at night, staring at the ceiling, guilt pressing so hard on my chest I thought it might crack my ribs. Some nights I couldn't breathe. Others, I couldn't stop shaking.
Massimo was there for all of it.
Not fixing. Not judging. Not giving absolution that he couldn't give. He was there when the posters multiplied. When the story shifted from missing to presumed dead. When the world moved on, and I couldn't. He held me when the guilt wrecked me so completely that I forgot how to exist as anything but a wound.
We stopped talking about what happened because we didn't need to. Words would have cheapened it. He didn't treat me like glass. Didn't look at me like something fragile or ruined. He treated me like a woman who had survived something ugly andwas still allowed to want things. Allowed to laugh. Allowed to touch. Allowed to feel good without earning it through pain.
At some point between the days and nights he stayed and the mornings he didn't rush away, between the weight of guilt and the quiet relief of being seen, I fell in love with him. I remember laughing with him, real laughter, the kind that sneaks up on you and leaves your ribs sore. Walking through gardens at night, neon bleeding into green, pretending the world wasn't sharp. Him stealing food off my plate and smirking when I pretended to be offended.
I remember the first time he kissed me. Not hungry. Not careless. Reverent.
I had never been kissed like that before. Like he was memorizing me. Like this wasn't just a moment, but a decision. I fell in love slowly. Terrifyingly. The kind of love that doesn't crash so much as settles—quiet and deep and impossible to shake. I let myself believe that maybe I was allowed that. That maybe the worst thing that had ever happened to me wouldn't define the rest of my life. Somewhere along the periphery, I remember breaking up with Carter. Not the next day, I was too shaken, but soon after. Then he had the accident. People looked at me like I should care. I didn't. There was only Massimo.
And then one day…
He was gone.
No warning. No explanation. Just absence where certainty had been. I had folded that memory so tightly, wrapped it in anger and pride and survival, that I almost forgot how much it hurt to lose him. Not just him, but the version of myself I was with him. The girl who still believed someone could choose her and stay.
