I turn to face him, this tall, broad, tattooed Irishman who kidnapped me to save me, who lectures about Sartre and plays sea shanties, who has a whole library of poetry and drives a car from the 1980s like he's cosplaying a romantic hero.
"Why?" I ask.
"Why what?"
"Why do you care? You don't know me. You don't owe me anything. You could've just… reported what you found to whoever hired you. The LaRiccia family. Let them handle it. Instead you—" I gesture helplessly at the space between us. "This. All of this. Why?"
His jaw tightens. For a long moment, he doesn't answer. But he's not quiet—not inside, at least. His mind is going a million miles an hour, churning through whatever internal monologue he's having with himself.
I can practically feel the spiral happening, the way thoughts are looping, and connecting, and branching off into tangents he can't quite shut down.
I recognize it because I do the same thing.
The realization hits me with unexpected clarity. He is…familiar.
Not his face, though I suppose there's something almost classical about his features. Not anything physical. But hismind—the way it works, the way it won't let him rest, the way he processes everything through layers of meaning and connection.
A kindred spirit, maybe.
I'm not entirely sure what that means, if anything. Could just be pattern-seeking on my part, my brain trying to find safe harbor in the middle of this surreal nightmare by latching onto someone who seems just as trapped in his own head as I am in mine.
Or, more likely, it's something ripe for extensive psychoanalysis I'll never be able to afford.
Finally, Lorcan speaks.
"Giovanni got the Gothic revival mansion." His voice is rough, almost reluctant. "The dark wood. The ancestral weight. The brooding lord of the manor aesthetic." He gestures vaguely at the industrial elegance surrounding us. "I got… this."
"And this is…?"
"The opposite." A bitter half-smile. "Or it was supposed to be. Steel and glass. Clean lines. No history embedded in the walls. No ghosts in the foundations."
I wait, sensing there's more.
"See, here's the irony." He runs a hand through his hair, that spiral energy building again. "Giovanni's the practical one. Cold. Calculating. Views everything as transaction and leverage. And he ends up in a house that looks like it should belong to a Brontë hero—all that Gothic romance he'd never admit to wantin'. Meanwhile, I'm the one who reads poetry and believes in… fuck, I don't know. Meaning. Connection. The possibility that people aren't just chess pieces."
His laugh is hollow.
"And I built myself a fortress. Concrete and cameras. Security protocols. The most unromantic space imaginable."
He stares out the window at the harbor lights.
"If my teenage self could see this place, he'd know exactly what I was doin'. Runnin' from everythingSt. Augustine’s Military Academytried to make me. From frozen ground, and pickaxes, and… consequences that don't ever thaw."
Something snaps in my brain as I try to make the connections… "What? Frozen ground and…?"
"Nothin'," he sighs. "Definitely not a story for tonight. Or…you, for that matter."
"A story?" And for some reason, just as these words leave my mouth, the connection hits. It doesn't make much sense, but it's there. In my head, nonetheless.
A winter night.
Lie, Lie, Truth.
The dog story.
Jino and Enzo.
I killed someone when I was eight.
