Page 135 of The Ache That Stayed

Enough to be understood. Enough to be questioned. Enough to settle in Marcello’s mind and refuse to leave. Because breaking a man was never about what you showed him. It was about what you made him imagine.

My thumb brushed across the edge of the screen once more, as though committing the image to memory all over again.

“My pumpkin,” I whispered.

Not affection. Never that—history. An old claim left unfinished.

Some things imprint too deeply to fade. Roxanne had always been one of them. She’d hated the name by thirteen, but I kept using it anyway. Children rarely understood what was good for them. She believed she had grown. Believed she had escaped. But I knew better. Fear lived in her bones, the way it silenced her.

“It’ll be fun,” I added after a moment, my voice low, almost thoughtful. “To see how long she holds together.”

Because that was what interested me. Not the superficial illusion she had built so carefully around herself. But the moment where control slipped, where the structure failed, where everything she believed she had left behind came rushing back in.

She had spent years convincing herself I was gone. People mistook absence for mercy. They were rarely the same thing. And breaking her would only be the beginning, and watching the real game unfold of what the men around her did when she fell apart.

Tomorrow, at three, she would walk in. Not because I was forcing her. Because she had been taught to.

Conditioning had always been more reliable than chains. She would try to gain the false control I would let her have only to watch her crumble as I took it back from her.

She would come the same way she always had—resisting, perhaps, trembling, maybe. Because children trusted the adults who hurt them long before they learned to fear them.

Tomorrow, I reclaim what should never have been taken from me. What was wrongly given to her.

And I would be waiting, patient, certain. Because the forbidden fruit ripens eventually, and when it does, it falls into the hand that never stopped reaching.

CHAPTER 36

Roxanne

The hot water poured over my shoulders, down my spine, pooling at my feet, relentless and steady—like it could wash away the feeling crawling beneath my skin if I stood under it long enough. It wasn’t working.

Nothing was.

My eyes stayed shut, my palms flat against the tile, breathing uneven, thoughts slipping in and out of reach. I let the heat sink into my skin, trying to quiet everything clawing at me from the inside out. What I’d done, what I was becoming.

I had to think about tomorrow. I had to walk in—and walk out—with everything still intact.

I had to—

The sound of a soft click cut clean through the noise of the water. For a second, I told myself I imagined it. And then—

Strong arms sliding down mine, pulling me back against him, heat meeting heat, skin against skin like there had never been distance to begin with. My shoulders tensed instinctively. The water kept falling like nothing had changed.

“You left.” His voice was warm against my neck.

“I wasn’t feeling well.” I said, forcing steadiness into my tone.

Partly, it was true. Just not in the way he thought. He gently kissed my neck and I felt him shift behind me, felt the way his body reacted— unrestrained. He turned me, fast, like he’d run out of patience somewhere along the day, his mouth on mine before I could think, before I could stop him.

The water turned into a storm around us, steam rising, blurring edges, swallowing logic whole. But the second his body pressed into mine, the noise inside me quieted. Whatever I had been trying to hold together slipped. Everything blurred.

The water. The room. The noise in my head.

Gone.

All that remained was him.

My back hit the tile as he closed the distance between us, his body surrounding mine until there was nothing left but heat and the steady strength of him. My hands found him instinctively, gripping his shoulders, sliding into his hair, holding on.