Page 89 of The Beautiful Dead

Just silence.

And the burn of his name on my lips as I let go.

CHAPTER 18

DOMINO

Control had never been an issue for me. Not once. Not ever. I had learned early—compartmentalization was survival. Feelings were a liability. Doubt was a death sentence. A weak mind bled before the body ever did.

And I had never bled.

Until now.

Now, the carefully constructed world I had locked myself inside was crumbling. The walls were splitting at the seams, cracks widening, the flood of questions and doubts seeping through like rot. It started after that confrontation with my father. That was when the first fracture formed.

The Gallos were crawling through Marlow Heights like a plague, leeching into every corner of our business, fucking up deals, fucking up my focus.

But none of that mattered. None of it compared to what truly fucked me up. Remi left. It was inconceivable. Unthinkable.

He was mine. I never wanted him out of my sight. I had thought—no, I had known—that what we had was singular. Something irrevocable. A bond so deep it blurred the lines of self, tangled and fused, one entity instead of two.

I didn’t claim to understand people or emotions. They were background noise. I understood the dichotomy of life and death. I understood power.

The insufferable need to amass it, hoard it, wield it. The way it could be used to collar and control small-minded idiots, the ones who wouldn’t know which way was up without someone like me to dictate it to them.

But Remi threw everything out of sync.

Because he didn’t just leave. He told me he loved me. And he did it right after shattering my fucking world.

Right after ripping the ground out from under me.

Right before his breath stuttered into nothing.

Right before he went limp in my arms.

And in that moment—as the last breath left his lips, as his body sagged against me, as the color drained from his face—I realized love was an illusion.

What I felt for him was something far more powerful. Far greater. It was primal. It was deadly. It was not love.

It wasobsession.

When his pulse gave one last, weak flicker before fading into silence—the world fucking shattered. It was like the last star had been plucked from the sky. The final light was snuffed out. I had never felt darker, colder.

A scream tore from my throat. Raw. Splintered. The sound felt like it had been ripped from the center of my goddamn soul.

The world had changed at a molecular level. But at the same time, nothing had changed at all.

I moved through the streets, through my apartment, through my father’s compound with a single thought gnawing its way through my skull: Who the fuck could I trust?

I watched my men—the soldiers, the runners, the dealers in their dens. I watched their eyes, their hands, their movements.And for the first time, I saw the masks I’d been too blind to notice.

Nothing was real.

Nothing was solid.

The world as I knew it was gone.

Once I’d told Remi that I didn’t trust anyone. But maybe that had been a lie. Maybe—before he broke the one thing I thought was unbreakable—Maybe I had trusted him.

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