My fingers hovered over the screen. I wanted to scream. I wanted to throw the phone through the window. I typed back, my composure stretched painfully thin.
Me:You can blame the world all you want, but eventually you’ll learn to blame yourself.
I didn't wait. I sent the second one immediately.
Me:If you think you scared me, you didn’t. And if this is supposed to be a warning, don’t bother. I’m done playing your games.
I didn't wait for a reply. I didn't want one. I set the phone facedown on the nightstand, the glass clattering against the wood like a final gavel strike.
He’d done exactly what he wanted. He’d dismantled my father’s life with the clinical precision of someone who’d never known the weight of a consequence. He was a Valerio; he didn'tbuild things, he just decided who was allowed to exist in his world.
I crawled beneath the covers, pulling the duvet up until it felt like a shroud, and waited for exhaustion to kill the noise in my head. For a few hours, I clung to the lie that I could shut him out. That if I just closed my eyes, I could pretend he didn’t exist.
But my dreams never seemed to get the memo.
As I drifted off, the anger didn't fade—it just pooled into something unwelcome. The edges of the gala floor blurred back into the suffocating dark of that upstairs hallway. I could still feel the imprint of the way he’d looked at me, heavy and electric, pinning me back against the room. In the dark, my mind didn't replay the sabotage or the shattered glass. It replayed the way his breath had hitched. It replayed the raw, unpolished hunger in his eyes.
I woke up in the middle of the night, my skin damp and my heart hammering a rhythm that felt like treason.
I stared at the ceiling, my throat tight with a sudden, hot flash of shame. It was one thing for Dominic to humiliate my father in public; it was another for him to occupy my head like this. It was a secondary violation, a sick joke played by my own nervous system.
He had turned my life into a wreckage, and here I was, still reacting to the way he looked while he did it.
I rolled onto my side, clutching the pillow until my knuckles ached. I didn't want to surrender. I wanted to burn his world down. But as I lay there in the dark, I realized the hardest part of this war wasn't going to be the sabotage or the racing. It was going to be killing the part of me that had actually liked the way he looked at me—in that moment, right before he came.
I wasn't terrified of him. I was terrified of myself.
Chapter eight
Carter
SHIFT smelled like salt, old grease, and too many summers stacked on top of each other. The neon sign out front flickered half a beat behind the morning sun—a sputtering survivor that looked as tired as I felt. I pushed inside, the air hitting me like a warm, oily blanket.
It was the first thing in days that wasn't currently vibrating with the threat of a collapse. No heavy silences, no Valerio-sized pressure hanging over the room. Just the low hum of the refrigerator units and the rhythmicthwackof a spatula hitting the grill.
I needed the noise. I needed my brain occupied by something other than the sensation that had haunted me since I woke up. I’d spent the morning trying to scrub the lingering static of sleep off my skin, but some things didn’t wash off with soap. Mysubconscious was a traitor, plain and simple. It didn't care about the ruin he’d brought to my front door; it only cared about the way he’d looked in the dark.
I shoved the memory back into the corner where I kept my most dangerous thoughts, the mental effort leaving a tired ache behind my eyes.
Today, I didn't need a career. I just needed to be somewhere where the air didn't feel like it was holding its breath.
The pool house had become too small. My father wasn't angry—not this time. Anger would have been easier to fight. This was a quiet, vibrating embarrassment, a repeat of the way he’d carried himself after his career went up in flames and Mom followed the smoke out the door. Seeing him shrink into his chair this morning, looking at his coffee like it held the secrets to his failures, was like watching a slow-motion car crash I was supposed to have learned to avoid by now.
I couldn't fix him, and I couldn't stand the way my own chest ached when I tried to.
I’d only been to SHIFT once before, but as I’d walked out the door, I’d remembered the neon-greenHelp Wantedsign taped crookedly to the glass.
When I woke up this morning to the sound of Dad’s heavy, rhythmic pacing that sign was the first thing that flashed in my mind.
The woman behind the counter had a bun pulled so tight it looked structural and eyes that had seen every version of a bad customer. Her nametag read Margaret. She looked to be somewhere in her late forties, but she carried herself with a sharp, iron-backed kind of grace. Even under the harsh lights, she was pretty—the kind of woman who had earned every fine line around her eyes and didn't seem to mind them one bit. She didn't ask if I was a Hayes. She didn't ask anything at all until I laid the crumpled application on the counter.
She looked at the paper, then up at me, cataloging my face like she was checking for a shelf life.
“You’re the one who came in the other day with the Valerio kid, right? The nice one?”
“Luka,” I said, a small, tired smile tugging at my mouth. “And yeah. That was me.”
“He tips like a prince but eats like he’s never seen bread before,” she grunted. “Not like the older one. He comes in here and drops a fifty just so I’ll leave him alone in the corner booth.”
