I scroll, heart hammering against my ribs like it wants out.
More of the same. A profile calling her “one of America’s most quietly influential women.” A donation to a children’s hospital wing bearing her family’s name. One of the wealthiest families in the country, maybe even the world, their empire built on shadows and silk, blood money polished until it gleams.
I keep scrolling. Page four. Pagefive. The results thinning, getting smaller, less polished, the digital equivalent of whispers in dark rooms.
And then.
Valeria Capello’s Ties to Trafficking Allegations—No Evidence Found, Case Quietly Closed.
One article. An outlet I’ve never heard of. A byline that doesn’t appear anywhere else in any related search, like whoever wrote it stopped existing professionally the moment the piece went up, erased as cleanly as the lives she touches.
I click it.
The page loads slow, the layout a decade out of date, pixels flickering like they’re reluctant to reveal the truth. The article is short. Allegations without named sources. Whispers of parties where the powerful indulged in the forbidden while she watched with that serene, predatory grace. A line at the bottom noting the journalist could not be reached for comment on a follow-up that, as far as I can find, never got written.
No follow-up. No second piece. No further coverage anywhere. Just one article, buried five pages deep, that someone wrote once before the story disappeared the way everything around this woman seems to disappear—people, evidence, hope.
I sit there in the kitchen with flour still on my hands and I think about a boy in a room with a door that only opened from the outside, about the scar that twists across Reth’s face like a signature.
Something in my chest goes very cold and very still, a quiet fury blooming beneath the fear, roots sinking deep into the love I have for him.
She didn’t just own him. She tried to unmake him. Andnow, even from whatever gilded cage she’s retreated to, her shadow still reaches for the man I refuse to let her have back.
I close the browser, set the phone down exactly as I found it, and stare at the failed bread cooling on the rack. My hands are steady now, not from calm, but from resolve.
Seventy-two hours. And however many more it takes. I’ll be here—kneading dough that fails, holding space for the man who once gave me his broken pieces—until the only thing left of Valeria Capello in his mind is the echo of her name on lips that finally know how to sayminewithout shame.
Because he’s worth every ruined loaf, every sleepless night, every scar we’ll trace together until they feel like stories instead of chains.
And I’m not going anywhere.
18
RETH
I’m finally able to take a shower now that the shaking has mostly stopped.
What’s left when it surfaces is pieces. Not memory in any order I trust—just fragments, sharp at the edges and unanchored from each other, like photographs spilled out of a box with no chronology to put them back in. Blood-slick snapshots from a hell I didn’t think I’d survive.
The driveway. Ian’s shoulder under my arm, Andrei on the other side, their grips iron because they knew I’d bolt if the drugs let my legs work. Then her—arms around me, soft and desperate and real, and for one second something in my chest unclenched so completely I thought it might be the drugs lying to me again.
I don’t know if that’s real. I want it to be real so badly that wanting it makes me distrust it more. A man like me doesn’t get soft landings. He gets bullets and blades and the wet sound of throats opening under his karambit.
I get out of the shower, grab a towel, cold water stillrunning down my back. The mirror’s fogged. Good. I don’t need to see the face looking back.
My right hand finds my left arm without thinking. The bruises are ugly—deep purple, yellow at the edges, puncture sites still tender. Track marks.
I trace them slowly, thumb pressing into the worst one near the crook of my elbow until the dull ache sharpens. These are the places the needle went in when the craving won. When I was too weak to stop it. Assassin’s veins. Supposed to be clean. Supposed to be disciplined. Now they look like any other junkie’s.
I press harder. The pain is honest. I can work with pain. It’s the other shit—the soft shit—that fucks me.
It feels good to pull on a clean set of clothes, sweatpants and tee. I think it’s been a while since I last vomited.I think.Throwing up until there was nothing left was the worst. Stomach heaving so hard I tasted copper and bile and the ghost of every chemical that got pumped into me. Retching on my knees like a dog, sweat pouring off me in sheets, muscles seizing until I thought my spine would snap.
The craving, it’s still humming low at the base of my skull. Quieter now but not gone. Just waiting for a crack. Still crawling under my skin. Insects with too many legs moving in lines up my arms.
Difference is now I know they’re not really there, but I still look down at my own forearms to confirm it, fisting my hands, feeling my fingers. And now staring at the compass inked into my skin.
North.
