When His Apology Comes Five Years Late

Nia POV

The only sound in the penthouse was the low, electric hum of the climate control system, a noise like a wire being drawn tighter and tighter around the silence.

Leo stared down at Serena, his chest rising and falling with slow, deliberate breaths.

"You are right," he finally said, his voice cleaving the tension.

He reached up, his large hands engulfing hers.

"She is just hiding in the shadows, playing games."

He disentangled himself from her grasp and crossed the vast expanse of marble to a mahogany liquor cabinet.

He poured two fingers of amber liquid into a crystal glass, the sound of the bottle neck clinking against the rim unnaturally sharp.

"I will tear this city apart to find her," Leo declared, his voice ringing with the cold iron of command.

He swallowed the liquor in one smooth motion.

"And I will make sure you are cleared of all syndicate charges."

Serena smiled, her eyes welling with artfully summoned tears.

"Thank you, Leo. I knew you wouldn't let them take me."

Leo set the empty glass down on the counter.

The sharp clink echoed in the large room.

"This is the last time I protect you, Serena."

Serena froze.

The moisture in her eyes seemed to evaporate as the words left his lips.

Leo kept his back to her, the line of his shoulders a rigid wall.

"Once Nia takes the fall and is released from federal custody, we are done."

Drifting in the shadows of the foyer, a place I had followed him to as if chained by a memory, I felt a jolt of something that was not quite surprise, but a profound dislocation. I tried to reach out, to feel the air he displaced, but my fingers met only a cold, dead static.

The Don of the Falcone Family had never severed ties with his obsession.

I remembered the violent arguments, the bitter accusations that had left hairline fractures in the plaster of our old home, each one ending with his choice of her over me.

He had sacrificed my freedom and my life just to keep her standing, yet here he was, walking away.

"I need to return to my true Family," Leo said quietly.

He turned around to face her, his face a blank canvas.

"I need to return to my wife."

Serena stood rigid, her knuckles turning white as she gripped the silk of her dress.

"A sickening dread has settled in my chest since I left her apartment," Leo confessed, the raw, unvarnished tone of his voice a thing I had not heard in years.

He looked down at his own hands, as if expecting to see them stained.

"I forced her into a cage for you five years ago. Today, I used her sister's life as a bargaining chip. I look at these hands, and though they are clean, I can smell the rot."

"You are abandoning me?" Serena asked, her voice trembling with disbelief.

Leo avoided her gaze. The muscle in his jaw knotted, a violent, twitching pulse beneath the skin.

"I don't know what is happening in my head right now."

He walked past her, heading toward the front door without a glance in her direction.

"I will fix your mess one last time. Then I am going to track Nia down."

He grabbed his keys from the console table, his shoulders set with a grim resolve.

He walked out of the penthouse, the heavy door clicking shut behind him with the clean finality of a guillotine.

I stayed for a moment, watching Serena.

The instant he was gone, the carefully constructed mask of her face dissolved. The elegant lines of her mouth twisted, her jaw working silently. The muscles around her eyes twitched, revealing a scaffolding of pure venom beneath the beautiful facade.

Her breathing turned ragged.

"Nia," she hissed to the empty room.

The name, spoken with such concentrated hatred, seemed to lower the temperature of the air.

"You had everything," she spat, her voice a guttural whisper aimed at no one and everyone. "The name. The ring. His devotion before I took it. I grew up in a rat-infested tenement while you were raised in a brownstone with a garden. And still—still—he could not stop saying your name in his sleep." She snatched Leo's empty crystal glass from the counter and hurled it against the wall, where it exploded into a thousand glittering shards. "You should have stayed dead the first time I tried to bury you." *

*The glass fragments skittered across the marble. And I understood, with a cold clarity that settled over me like a second shroud, that Serena had not merely taken advantage of my absence. She had orchestrated it. She had been trying to erase me long before that alley, long before those thirteen stab wounds. The only question was how deep her betrayal truly went—and whether Leo would ever be brave enough to see it. *