Page 10 of His to Destroy

Chapter 3 – Almeria

The weight of the past feels heavier when it arrives wearing a tailored suit and memories I never asked to relive.

Gaspare’s reappearance has cracked something in me I thought had long been buried. For eight years, I’ve kept myself together with the delicate precision of a pressed flower. Neatly folded, carefully hidden, beautiful only from a distance. But now… I’m starting to feel the edges fray.

He found us. Somehow, through all my efforts to remain invisible, he cut through the layers I built around my life.

And now, he’s everywhere.

In the spaces between my breaths. In the tension I carry through my shoulders. In the flickers of memory that resurface when I least expect them.

I don’t want to acknowledge the effect he still has on me.

But I feel it. Every time our eyes meet. Every time his voice brushes against my ears like a sound I used to know. The pull of him is wrong. Dangerous. A tether to a life I clawed myself free from.

I should hate him.

I want to hate him.

But when he showed me the photograph—a surveillance shot of Luca and me, grainy but unmistakable—and told me we were being watched… something inside me cracked.

It wasn’t his words. It wasn’t even the fear. It was the look in his eyes.

It was the concern.

Real. Raw. Not the performance of a mob boss trying to intimidate or assert power. It was personal.

And that was what scared me most of all.

I sit by the dining room window that evening, tea gone cold in my hands, while Luca finishes his dinner at the table. He’s talking and chattering about his day as he always does, legs swinging, one hand squeezing a napkin over and over again, the other holding the fork he’s using to play with the food in his plate.

I don’t realize he’s noticed my lack of attention until he calls me loudly, causing me to jerk in fear.

“Baby,” I scold gently, seeing he’s not in any harm.

"Mama, are you sad?"

I blink, my displeasure at him fading. “No, sweetheart. Just tired.”

He looks at me like he doesn’t believe it. Then he smiles and goes on talking about some girl who let him put flowers in her hair at school.

I stare out the window into the darkening street.

There’s no one out there.

But I can still feel him.

Gaspare.

His presence is like smoke. You don’t see it at first. But you smell it. Taste it. And when it wraps around you, you can’t breathe.

After Luca is asleep, I sit on the edge of my bed and let the silence press in around me.

I haven’t thought about that night in a long time.

Not because I forgot. Because I chose not to remember.

But now, the memory surfaces whether I want it to or not.

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