Page 162 of The Ache That Stayed

It came down to one thing. That I would never be enough.

His thumb kept wiping away my tears as they kept falling.

I trembled because I’d finally been seen, and I no longer knew how to hold it together.

“That’s not your decision to make,” he said firmly.

I felt myself give way. Enough that I felt it in the way my body leaned into his hand, like I had been holding myself together for too long and didn’t have the strength to keep doing it anymore.

“You don’t have to carry this alone,” he said.

I shook my head, my breath unsteady, my chest tightening painfully like I couldn’t hold it in anymore.

“Come home, amore,” he murmured, his lips brushing my forehead—gentle, grounding, devastating in its tenderness.

“Come back to me.”

And that broke me in a way no amount of pain or guilt could.

Not even the truth of what I had done.

It was him. The way he stood in front of me when everything inside me had fractured beyond recognition.

I didn’t think—I just moved. My hands fisted in his shirt as I stepped into him, pressing my face against his chest like I needed to disappear somewhere safe. The sob came without warning, tearing through me—raw, uncontained, unstoppable.

Everything I had held back spilled out at once.

The warehouse.

The blood.

The man I had killed.

The one I might have lost.

The truth I had buried.

All of it. And he didn’t stop me, didn’t silence me, didn’t pull away. He just held me without trying to fix me. Without asking me to be less. Without asking me to become someone easier to love.

My hands pulled him closer to me, till I could only smell him, feel his heartbeat, grounding me in a way that all of this still felt real.

I didn’t feel like I was standing alone in the ruins of what I had become. I felt held. Loved. Understood.

And for the first time in my life—I didn’t feel like I had to earn being loved.

CHAPTER 44

Marcello

The cabin of the jet was quiet, filled only with the low, steady hum of the engines cutting through the night. It was the kind of silence that should have felt controlled, contained—but instead it pressed in, heavy with everything that sat between us.

Roxanne lay curled into herself on the bed across from me, her body finally giving in to exhaustion. It wasn’t restful sleep. There was no peace in it. Just stillness—the kind that came when the body shut down because it could no longer carry what the mind refused to release. She looked smaller like this.

I sat opposite her, a glass of whiskey loose in my hand, watching the slow rise and fall of her chest as though it were the only thing anchoring her to the present. The leather beneath me creaked when I shifted, the sound oddly loud in the cabin. The burn slid down my throat, sharp and deliberate, and I let it linger, welcomed it even. Because it was clean. Predictable. Unlike everything else that transpired.

I had told her I would never hate her. And I wouldn’t. That part had been easy. But the truth beneath it was not. I was hurt. Not in a way that would fade or dull with time, but in a way that settled deeper, and stayed. Worse, I still loved her. Completely. Deeply. Infuriatingly madly. In a way that made walking away feel less like survival and more like a slow, deliberate death.

I used to think people exaggerated when they said things like: I don’t know how I lived without you.