Page 15 of Beautiful Obsessions
And Tone—Tone looked straight ahead, unblinking.Locking her emotions down.But I’d seen enough to know better.
The silence stretched.Pain sitting thick between them.Shared.Unspoken.Unforgettable.
I leaned back slightly, watching it all unfold, piecing it together.
The cousins.Their bonds.And the fractures.
Who belonged to who.Who carried what.Who broke, and who refused to.
It wasn’t just family.It was something tighter.Something welded together by an enormous loss.
And as I watched Tone, I understood something I hadn’t before.It wasn’t just anger or defiance.It was pressure.Coiled tight beneath her skin.Held there by sheer force of will.
Her need to leave—France, anywhere—wasn’t about distance.It wasn’t about sun or escape or freedom.It was about survival.About putting space between herself and something she hadn’t been able to face.Something she hadn’t let herself feel.
Alessio.
He’d been shot, killed, gone in a way that didn’t leave room for denial, but somehow—she’d found a way to deny it anyway.Not by pretending it hadn’t happened.But by refusing to let it break her.
She hadn’t cried.Gianni had said it like an accusation, but it wasn’t just that.It was confusion.Hurt.Maybe even resentment.Because everyone else had.Everyone else had felt it.Except her.She was still holding onto her grief, a silent, terrifying thing she couldn’t let go of.
Or at least—that’s what it looked like.But I knew better.People like her didn’t not feel.They just buried things better.Locked it down so tight it couldn’t breathe.And then they kept moving.Working.Fixing.Holding everyone else together so they didn’t have to look at the pieces of themselves that were missing.
She’d thrown herself into her role.Into being the one they relied on.The one who stayed steady while the rest of them fractured.And when that stopped being enough—she ran.
She was trying to outrun something that kept catching up to her.
Another country.Another life.Another version of herself that didn’t have to carry the weight of that moment.Of losing him.
My jaw tightened slightly.
And then there was the other part.The part she wouldn’t say out loud.
Alessio had been killed by Russians.Not my people, but that didn’t matter.To her, the distinction would blur.Because grief didn’t care about accuracy.It didn’t care about lines or allegiances or truth.It needed something to attach to.Something to blame.And I—I was standing right in front of her, carrying the face of it.The accent.The history.The enemy she’d been taught to mistrust long before any of this happened.
So of course she hated me.Or thought she did.It was easier that way.Easier than admitting that the anger wasn’t really about me at all.It was abouthim.About everything she hadn’t let herself feel when he died.
And suddenly—her sharp looks, her cutting words, the way she bristled every time I stepped too close—it made more sense.Not enough to excuse it, but enough to understand it.
Enough to know that this wasn’t going to be a fight I could win by pushing back.Because I wasn’t just dealing with Tone.I was dealing with everything she hadn’t faced yet.
And that?That was an eruption waiting to happen.
5
Tone
Grief was never loud the way people thought it was.
It didn’t always come in screams or shattered glass or bodies collapsing under the weight of it.
Sometimes it was quiet.Sometimes silent.Breathless.
A slow, relentless thing that hollowed you out from the inside until there was nothing left but echoes.
It crept in when the world stilled.When the noise faded.When there was no one left to perform for.
That was when it struck hardest.
