My muscles hurt when I rise to my feet. I leave the coffee untouched and walk heavily toward the door. I move slowly in the hope she tries to stop me, but she doesn’t.
At the threshold, I glance back once. She’s standing in the kitchen beneath harsh fluorescent lights, her arms wrapped around herself like she’s trying not to fall apart.
And I realize, as every vital organacheswith regret, that no amount of love will erase what I turned ours into.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Fiero
It’stwo a.m. when I return to the club but I don’t go into the lounge, or the basement, or the VIP suite. Instead, I walk straight through to the back and take the elevator to the twentieth floor. I can’t bring myself to have another human interaction tonight but I’m too destroyed to sleep.
I pour myself a thick whisky and sink onto the sofa looking out over Manhattan. When the sky is clear I can see Liberty. But not tonight—there’s nothing clear about tonight except for the realization I might just have ruined my life.
In being so fatally selfish, I’ve destroyed the one thing I’ve wanted since I was a kid, and I’ve removed precious hours from Pfeiffer and her father.
My role in the revenge is undeniable and I take full responsibility for it, but my despair knows no bounds and it’s directing itself at the one person who drove me on to the very end.
The longer I sit here with alcohol swirling in my blood, theangrier I feel until the next thing I know, it’s four a.m. and I’m pounding on Remo’s door.
I don’t know how his drawl slides around the bullet proof door but it does. “Come in.”
I enter his apartment and find him on the balcony, a glass in one hand, his other in his pocket, staring out over the city like he owns every inch of it. Because, in his own way, he does.
The breeze lifts his shirt slightly, exposing the edge of ink at his waist. He doesn’t turn when I step out beside him.
We both stand in silence—shoulder to shoulder, two brothers who saw too much at too young an age. As bitter as I feel toward him in this moment, he’s still my brother.
I withheld words from him for a decade. I owe it to him now to be honest.
“I went to see her.”
His jaw tightens but he doesn’t respond.
I lean against the railing, curling my fingers around the edge. “I went to apologize. I wanted her to give me another chance.”
He takes a long pull of amber.
“And?”
I lift a shoulder. “It’s too late. I broke her?—”
I can’t get any more words out because I feel suddenly choked.
“That was the point,” he says, but there’s less bite in his tone now.
“No,” I say. “That was your point.”
“Don’t put this on me,” he says slowly. “You wanted to break her as much as I did.”
I breathe deeply. “Yes, I did. But not anymore.”
“And that has nothing to do with me.” His reply feels bitter.
I turn to face him. “If I can let it go, why can’t you?”
I need him to. Pfeiffer doesn’t deserve his hatred. We broke her. It’s done. And he needs to drop it—for all our sakes.
Remo’s gaze drops to the ground for a second before he laughs under his breath.
