Jino's voice cuts across the space, sharp with confusion.
I don't answer. Can't answer. My brain is a goddamn catastrophe—a writhing mass of imagery I can't shut off.
Octopi squeezing through impossible cracks, three hearts beating in impossible rhythms.
Emmaleen's grin from between my thighs.
Lorcan's crimson robe like some fucked-up Catholic fever dream.
Her voice reciting prayers toSaint Lorcanwith the same reverence she used when she called me King.
Her throat beneath Lorcan's hand, her eyes rolled back in ecstasy I've never once given her.
The sound she made when she came—guttural, broken,free.
And underneath it all, the sick realization that I trained her for him. Made her perfect for someone else.
I shove through the door and hit the driveway.
Everything's slipping. Every carefully maintained element of control I built over years—the routines, the discipline, the absolute certainty that I could shape outcomes through sheer force of will—all of it disintegrating.
I can't even jerk off anymore. Can't summon basic fucking arousal unless I'm watching footage ofhimwithher.
The Aventador's door opens, and I slide behind the wheel.
The engine roars to life and take off down the driveway, punching the gate remote and accelerating before it's fully opened, scraping through with inches to spare.
No destination in the GPS.
No music.
Just me and the road and this relentless spiral of thoughts I can't escape.
Emmaleen can't come back. That's the fundamental truth everything else crashes against. Luca LaRiccia is prowling around the edges of our world, sniffing for blood, looking for any excuse to justify what his instincts are already telling him—that I killed his son.
And if he finds her, if he discovers she witnessed it, he'll make her death last fordays.
I accelerate. The countryside blurs past.
I could call my father. Ask Salvatore to intervene, to use his influence to smooth things over with Luca, to create some kind of protection for Emmaleen that would let her come home.
Except I won't.
Because Salvatore wouldn't help me anyway. He'd laugh—that cold, dismissive sound he makes when I've disappointed him.
Why would he protect what I love when he's spent my entire life teaching me that love is weakness?
I matter to no one in this world.
Marco and Angelo have wives and kids. They'reestablished—legitimate branches of the Bavga tree with roots sunk deep.
I'm the rotten fruit Salvatore pruned off and shipped to Riverview.
The miles eat away beneath my tires.
My thoughts loop and loop and loop?—
Emmaleen's face. Lorcan's hands. The collar I put on her throat that someone else gets to hold. Rico's ghost laughing from his unmarked grave. Salvatore's indifference.
