I stare at him, and my chest hurts so badly it feels structural, like something inside me is actually giving way.
“You look at me,” I say, and my voice has gone so quiet it scares me more than shouting would, “and tell me why you still came back to my house.”
I watch the memory move through his face, and I hate myself for asking because I already know it’s going to hurt, but I ask anyway. Of course I do. I’ve always gone for the wound when I know exactly where it is.
His voice breaks on the reply. “I needed one last night where I wasn’t losing you already. One last night to remember you still loved me.”
That lands clean and fatal. It means everything I fear. The grief in him that night was real, and the softness wasn’t performance. It means he loved me enough to drown in me one last time before he put the knife in.
That’s worse than if he’d never loved me at all.
“You should’ve let me hate you cleanly. You should’ve let me walk away from this with something simple. But you didn’t.Why?” My voice cracks, and I hate that he hears it. “Why make this harder than it already is, Salvatore? Why make me love a ghost of you at the exact same time I’m supposed to bury the man?!”
His face crumples enough to let me see the boy under the heir, the son under the Vieri, the wreckage under the posture. The human thing he’s spent his whole life being punished for every time it dares to show.
“Because I loved you,” he says.
Past tense.
That hurts in an entirely new place.
I nod because I can’t trust myself with anything larger than that. If I move too much, I’m going to fucking fold. “And now?”
“Now I don’t know what to call what’s left.”
I do.
Poison.
Inheritance.
“You picked them,” I say quietly. “You picked your bloodline after I told you I would kill my father for you.”
His eyes close like I’ve struck him. “I know.”
That’s it. That’s the whole sickness of us. Love and betrayal braided so tightly that there’s no way to separate them without tearing flesh off with the rope.
I reach up before I can stop myself and touch the bandage over my eye.
His mark.
His sentence.
Our ending written right into my face.
He watches my hand and looks like he might stop breathing altogether. There’s horror in him. Horror and grief and that useless love still burning under all of it, and I hate him for making me see it.
“You should’ve killed me,” I say. “Instead, you leave me alive with your father’s politics carved into my skin and your love still sitting inside my chest like a fucking splinter. And that’s the cruelest thing, isn’t it? We don’t even get to die for this. We just get to live long enough to watch what it turns into.”
I think of sons not born yet. Of boys with our faces and our fathers’ tempers. Of future heirs raised under the same poisoned stars, carrying this war in their blood before they can ever choose anything for themselves.
Then I lower my hand from the bandage and look at him properly one last time.
“I’ll never forgive you,” I say.
The words ring between us, and for a second, I think that’s enough, that maybe that can be the clean edge, the border, the thing that lets me walk away with something intact.
Then the truth comes anyway, because love’s always been the ugliest part of me where he’s concerned, and I’m too ruined now to dress it up as anything else.
