None of it should have stayed with me.
All of it had.
I had threatened Olivero with a great deal of pain and the strategic loss of several body parts if he so much as hinted to my father what he witnessed in that library. Then, because I was apparently determined to abandon both pride and common sense in the same week, I considered going around him and asking one of my father’s men to find out who she was.
Which, of course, was a fantasy.
Nothing in my family ever stayed quiet for long. If a report existed, my father would see it at roughly the same time I did.
So I decided to go old school.
That decision had backfired spectacularly.
Instead of returning to Hawthorne and relying on luck, timing, and the embarrassing hope that Emily might be there again, I was sitting in the back of the family jet on the way home to pay my respects to one of my father’s oldest associates.
I sighed and tapped my fingers once against the armrest.
Across from me, Olivero looked up from his phone.
“You appear distressed,” he said blandly.
I gave him a long look. “Be careful.”
“What?” He slipped his phone into his pocket. “I know you’re not especially fond of public displays.”
Ah. That.
I cleared my throat and adjusted my cuffs. “I’ll survive. I have to stand beside my father, pay my respects, and look appropriately solemn. It comes with the territory.”
“Interesting,” Olivero said. “And here I was thinking your mood had more to do with the girl.”
There it was.
“What girl?”
He gave me a sideways smile I would have enjoyed removing from his face. “Of course. My mistake.”
I narrowed my eyes at him.
“Just so you know,” he said lightly, “I have a friend. Derek. IT genius. If you ever needed information on this imaginary girl, I’m sure he could help. But as you said, there is no girl, so naturally that would be unnecessary.”
I ground my teeth hard enough to feel it in my temples. For a brief and not entirely unappealing moment, I considered stabbing him.
Instead, I looked back down at the book open in my lap and pretended to read.
It was an old habit.
Reading had been more than a pastime when I was young. It was refuge. Escape. Whole lives hidden between covers while mine remained carefully contained on an island my father called safe. For years, I thought his distance meant shame. That I was something he had tucked away because a son with a disability did not fit the image of a future don.
I was wrong.
What I mistook for rejection was fear. Not fearofme, butforme. Fear that if I was visible, I could be used. Taken. Broken.
It had taken Lily to make me understand that.
She came into my life when I was ten and tore open the walls of that careful little prison with more warmth than force. She never treated me like glass. Never let me retreat into the version of myself built by other people’s limits. If my father taught me caution, my mother taught me possibility.
After that came years of pain, training, discipline. My uncle Hoka had no patience for self-pity and even less for excuses. With his help, and more stubbornness than was probably healthy, I built strength where I could, balance where I lacked it, and endurance where I needed it.
