If she is going to be safe, if they are going to be safe, then I become exactly what my family always knew I could be and exactly what I spent years refusing to become.
Bellandi. Head of Houston. Enforcer when it needs enforcing. Executioner when it needs ending.
Whatever name they put to it later means nothing to me.
What matters is that nothing like this ever happens to her again.
I move at last, crossing the room slowly until I stand at the edge of the bed, close enough now that I can see the tracks of tears dried at her temple from earlier, close enough to smell her shampoo under the antiseptic and warmth of sleep.
I don’t touch her.
I want to.
God, I want to.
But wanting and allowing are not the same thing anymore.
So I stand there instead, looking down at my wife, at the child she is carrying, at the life that almost slipped through my hands, and I make the promise without speaking it aloud.
Everything that can reach for her will burn.
Everything.
No hesitation. No restraint. No second chances.
Jackson glances up at me eventually, reading something in my face that I don’t bother trying to hide.
“What are you thinking?”
I keep my eyes on her.
“That this ends.”
He goes still.
Zach does too.
Neither of them asks what I mean.
They already know.
And the worst part is, so do I.
thirty-eight
Liana
The days blur together in a way that doesn’t feel like healing.
They feel contained.
Measured out in soft, careful increments where everything is watched, adjusted, softened before it can become anything else, and I know why, I understand it in a way that sits deep in my chest because I know what they saw, I know what they carried me out of, I know how close I came to not being here at all, but understanding it doesn’t make it easier to live inside.
The apartment is warm, familiar, filled with everything that used to make it feel like mine, and yet there’s something different in it now, something tighter, something that presses in at the edges of every moment and doesn’t quite let me settle into it the way I want to.
Zach tracks everything I eat.
Jackson tracks everything I feel.
