I'm the one who felt it all. Every insult. Every dismissal. Every time he looked at me and saw nothing worth keeping. I felt all of it, and instead of building walls or finding exits or applying logic, I burned. Just burned and burned until there was nothing left but ash and the desperate need to not feel anything at all.
That's what the drugs are. Not escape. Survival. The only way I know to keep existing inside a body that feels too much in a family that feels too little.
I close the journal.
Set it down on the bed beside the others with careful hands, as though it might break.
My chest aches with something I can't name.
The man who wrote these words is not the man I've been dealing with. Or maybe he is, and the version I've been dealing with is the act. I don't know. I've known him for days, not years.
But I know what I've read. And the person on these pages is not falling apart. He's holding on with everything he has, and no one around him seems to notice.
I gather the journals carefully. Stack them in order: black, brown, navy, the way I found them. I carry them back to the dresser, place them in the third drawer beneath the blanket. Slide the drawer closed.
I stand there with my hand on the wood, breathing slowly.
Everything has shifted.
Not the situation. The situation is the same disaster it was an hour ago. Russians plotting our destruction. A mole feeding them intelligence. My father fighting for his life. The families scattered across safe houses while Viktor Tarasov thinks he's won.
But the man at the center of it all, the man sleeping on a couch fifteen feet from me, the man who saved my life and brokemy heart and kissed me like I was the last good thing in his world.
That man is different now. In my mind, at least. Rewritten by his own words in his own handwriting.
William Murphy is not the disaster everyone sees.
He's the most self-aware person in this entire war. And he's been fighting it alone, inside journals no one reads, in a safe house no one knows about, carrying the weight of a dead father and a fractured family and an intelligence he has to dull with chemicals just to survive.
I won't tell him I read them. Won't let him know what I've seen. That knowledge is mine now, and I'll hold it close. Not as a weapon. Not as leverage.
As understanding.
Understanding that changes the way you see someone. The way you stand beside them. The way you fight.
I return to the bed. Pull the covers up.
But sleep still doesn't come. Not because of the explosions this time. Not because of Reilan or Father or the fear that's been my constant companion since that bullet shattered the drawing room window.
It doesn't come because I'm thinking about my mother.
She died when I was fifteen. Cancer, the doctors said. And that was true, technically. The disease was real. The tumors were real. The slow wasting that stole her from us over six months was brutally, medically real.
But I remember her funeral. Standing in black beside Reilan, watching mourners file past, accepting condolences from people who barely knew her. Father stood at the front, composed and controlled, shaking hands, accepting sympathies with the practiced grace of a man who understood that even grief was a performance in our world.
And then I heard it.
Father's uncle, Declan. Old and weathered, with a face like cracked leather and a voice that carried further than he realized. Standing near the back of the church, speaking to another man whose name I never learned.
"Stress causes cancer," Declan said. "Sure, the doctors won't tell you that. But everyone knows it. And no wonder the woman was black inside, with how much of a handful that one was." He'd nodded toward my father. "She married the Mafia, and it ate her alive. Same as it does to all of them."
I was fifteen. Standing ten feet away in a dress that was too big because I'd lost weight from not eating. I heard every word.
And I never forgot.
Black inside. That's what he said. Like the stress of loving my father, of living this life, of carrying the fear and the violence and the constant threat of loss, had turned her organs to coal. Had poisoned her from the inside out.
I'd pushed the memory away for years. Told myself it was a cruel old man's ignorant opinion. That cancer doesn't work that way. That my mother died of biology, not heartbreak.
