He looks wrecked. Good.
I should walk away. I should turn my back and protect the part of me he already broke once.
But he’s alive. And despite everything—despite the rage, the betrayal, the ache that still hasn’t settled—I feel that same dangerous hope curling in my chest again.
I believed him dead.
And now he’s standing in front of me, forcing me to grieve and hope and rage all over again, all at once.
Dom moves behind me and places a hand on my shoulder, reminding me he’s here, he has me.
I can’t pull my gaze away from Raymond.
“Ellie,” he says, his voice raspy. He looks like he’s aged a decade. “I… I’m sorry. I had to see you. I had to apologize. I used some old sources. Tracked you down. I needed to see for myself that you were okay.”
The words hang in the air. “You escaped?” I deduce, my mind reeling. “During the attack?”
He nods, his gaze dropping to the ground. “I got out. I’ve been in hiding ever since. It wasn’t safe. Aria had eyes everywhere. But now, with most of her high-profile members either dead or in prison, I thought it might be safe enough to come out.”
A thousand questions claw their way up my throat. “I have so many questions, and I don’t know where to start. What happened back at the mansion? How did you find the flash drive? Why did you allow me to believe you were dead?”
He shakily runs his fingers through his salt-and-pepper hair, his gaze flicking over my shoulder. I don’t need to look to know my other lovers have arrived.
“POP took me with your boys, but I managed to break free before they could lock me up. I stumbled upon Aria’s study. It took me over an hour to rip it apart, but I found the flash drive behind the painting. You know the one? Of her great-whatever-grandpa?” He doesn’t wait for me to respond, though I can picture the painting in my head. “I managed to give the flash drive to one of my contacts, and then I…left. I left and I hid, because I knew I would be in deep shit if anyone found me. I broke a lot of fucking laws, Ellie. The FBI may have forgiven you six, but me? They wouldn’t have been so generous.”
My knees tremble, my legs threatening to give out. “I want to know… I need to know…” This question has been nagging at me for a while now, but I thought I would never be able to ask it. Everyone who had the answer was either dead or imprisoned. But now… “Why didn’t my parents just fuckingleave? God, theyknew about POP and Aria? Why didn’t they take me and Fischer and run? Why?!”
We would’ve saved ourselves so much pain if they had. My parents… They would still be alive. My brother wouldn’t have had to join POP to protect me. And my guys… We would still be together in this fairy tale reality, of that I have no doubt. There’s no other alternative.
Raymond looks up, and the raw guilt in his eyes is staggering. “They didn’t know,” he says, his voice strained. “Not the whole truth. They knew Aria was…intense. That her ambitions were getting dark. But they never understood the depth of the depravity she had reached. They thought they could talk her down, that they could reason with her. They stayed because they were family, and they hoped, one day, they could reconcile with the woman she used to be.”
It’s a plausible, heartbreaking story, and my heart twists in my chest.
God, I have so many questions, and I feel as if they’re spilling out of me in rapid-fire succession with no rhyme or reason.
“And you? Why were you kept out of my life? Why didn’t I know you?”
A bitter, self-deprecating smile touches his lips. “Because I’m a fuckup, Ellie. I fell out with my family—my parents and your father—when I joined the FBI. They had wanted me to take over the family business, but I chose to forge my own path. But I couldn’t stand the Bureau’s rules, their expectations, so I left them too. Things were…tense. I only came back when I heard about your parents’ deaths. But by then, Fischer had already adopted you, and POP had their hooks in you deep. It was too late.”
My heart aches for the fractured family I never knew. But there’s something else, a darkness in his expression that tells me the worst is yet to come.
“There’s something else,” he says, confirming my fear. “Something I have to tell you. Aria didn’t kill your parents, Ellie.”
My blood runs cold. “What? That’s impossible. You said?—”
“I lied,” he cuts me off, his voice cracking. “I don’t want to tell you the truth, but we can’t move on unless I do. I’m… I’m drowning in this guilt. Fuck!” He rakes his fingers through his hair once more, his hand trembling, and then blurts out, “I killed them.”
The world stops. The sound of the birds, the distant hum of a lawnmower, Dom’s sharp intake of breath behind me—it all fades into a dull, roaring silence. I can only hear the frantic, panicked beating of my own heart.
“It was an accident,” he rushes on, his words tumbling over each other. “I swear to God. I was trying to killher. I got intel that she was going to be on the road that night. I got my information wrong. The car I hit with mine…it was theirs. Not hers.” He’s crying now, silent tears tracking down his weathered face. “I’ve been living with that guilt every single day since. It’s why I stayed away. It’s why I could never face you.”
I stare at him, at the man who just confessed to murdering my parents. The man who I’d mourned as another victim.
A white-hot, blinding rage surges through me, so potent it makes me dizzy. It’s tangled with a sick, gut-wrenching sorrow. He lied. He let me believe Aria was the sole monster of my origin story, all while hiding his own part.
“I want a relationship with you, Ellie,” he pleads, taking a step forward. “I want to be the family you lost.”
“No,” I say, my voice shaking with a fury that feels alien and powerful. “You don’t get to do that. You don’t get to drop this atomic bomb on my life and ask for forgiveness. You killed them. You lied to me. Leave.”
