Page 133 of The Ache That Stayed

Not again.

CHAPTER 35

Darius

The silence that followed the call settled into the room like a reward. Not empty nor peaceful. Satisfied. It had weight to it—anticipation, certainty, the quiet satisfaction of knowing exactly how an event would unfold long before they did. I remained seated, the phone resting loosely against my palm, my gaze fixed somewhere beyond the glass as the city stretched endlessly below. She would come. There had never been a version of this where she didn’t.

A slow smile curved at the edge of my mouth.

“My pumpkin.”

The name lingered in the air, not softened by time, not diluted into something harmless. If anything, the years had sharpened it, stripped it down to what it had always been—possession disguised as familiarity, history that refused to stay buried.

Denial had a way of doing that. Of preserving things exactly as they were, untouched, waiting. Denial had only fuelled the hunger—the memory of small whimpers, wide, petrified eyes. More enduring than prayer.

My mind always circled back to her. The first always leaves a mark. Not because they matter more, but because they teach you where people fracture.

I set the phone aside and reached for the iPad resting on the desk. The screen lit instantly, her image already waiting for me. Roxanne stared back from it—caught mid-step, wind lifting strands of her hair, her face turned just enough to avoid the camera, unaware of the eyes that had followed her long enough to capture this moment.

Time had refined her, smoothed the edges, given her the illusion of control. But the readiness to flinch was still there. The same tension threaded through her posture. The same awareness she tried so carefully to mask. She had learned how to carry herself better, how to exist in spaces without shrinking—but she hadn’t unlearned what lived underneath.

My thumb dragged slowly across the glass, not quite touching her image, but tracing it anyway, as if confirming that what I was seeing was real, that the years between then and now hadn’t rewritten her into someone unrecognisable.

“You learned to stand with confidence,” I murmured, more to myself than anyone else. “But not well enough.”

The memory of the gallery returned with ease, not as a distant blur, but a sequence I had been replaying long before this moment. I hadn’t gone there for her. Not initially.

Ireland had been a necessity, not a choice—a consequence of business gone sideways. Millions lost because men with delusions of morality had interfered where they didn’t belong.

Marcello Vitale.

The Rossi dog.

And that Chinese fool who thought loyalty made him family.

Together they interfered where they shouldn’t, dismantling arrangements that had taken years to cultivate. And that had cost me more than I tolerated.

Marcello’s reach had extended further than it should have.

Sentiment. Always sentiment. Men destroyed empires for women and children every day.

Idiots.

But then I learned about his weakness—my darling niece, Roxanne. A poetic symmetry. Marcello’s empire had cost me blood and money, and now his own blood would pay me back.

My plan was simple: deal with Marcello, cut out the rot. Clean. Efficient. Necessary.

Until I saw her.

She had walked into that gallery like she belonged to a different world—light spilling over polished floors, conversations murmured in controlled tones, everything curated, structured, contained. Exactly the kind of environment she had always gravitated towards. As if order could erase what came before it.

I had watched her longer than I should have.

The way her gaze moved through the room. How she mapped it, instinctively. Entrances. Exits. Distances. People.

She carried awareness like a second skin, even now.

And then, without turning, without looking—she felt me.