Chapter 9-Benji
The room is decent.
That’s the best word for it.
Cheap roadside motel, two floors, shitty-looking neon sign outside with at least two letters that don’t work, and a parking lot that’s seen better decades—but inside?
It’s clean.
Thank fuck.
Fresh sheets.
No stains I can see.
Air smells like industrial cleaner instead of something worse.
A rattling AC unit hums in the corner, fighting the lingering summer heat.
It’ll do.
But as I stand there, watching Esme drop her bag on the chair by the door like she’s done this a hundred times before—I hate it.
Hate that this is where I took her.
Hate that this is what I can offer her right now—not because of money but because of time and where we are.
Because the thing is—she deserves more than this. More than me.
She always did.
Back then?
We didn’t have anything.
I was just a soldier.
Living on base. Counting every dollar. Scraping together a future one paycheck at a time and pretending that was enough.
But now?
Now I’ve got land.
Money.
A damn empire in the making.
And that house—Christ.
That house—the one we used to dream about.
And yeah, that’s why I built it.
Because maybe somewhere deep down, I always thought…
She’d come back.
Or I’d find her.
