Dragging my exhausted body back through the safehouse door, I stood in the dim entryway and let myself look—really look—at the place where I had lived for the past seven years.
The overhead light buzzed faintly, casting everything in a pale, clinical glow that made the apartment feel like a crime scene already processed and abandoned. Every corner held memories of Damien and me. The narrow kitchen counter where he'd poured bourbon at two in the morning while I sketched designs at the table. The hallway where his coat always hung beside mine, the weight of his shoulder holster leaving a permanent dent in the fabric of the hook. Once so beautiful, now stabbing into my heart like a thousand sharp blades.
I found a large cardboard box in the hall closet and, unable to sleep, spent the night erasing those remnants of happiness. I moved through each room with the slow, numb precision of someone dismantling an explosive—careful hands, dead eyes.
There were the matching slippers with our "cat and dog" love-diary design, the couple mugs that interlocked at the handles when placed side by side. The pair of keychains that sensed each other within ten meters and lit up, a foolish romantic gadget he'd let me buy without complaint one winter. And there was a whole box of photos and portraits—him unsmiling but close, me leaning into his shoulder as if proximity were the same thing as being claimed. These were once the only proof of our relationship, especially in those times when I felt insecure. No public dinners, no family introductions, no seat beside him at any sit-down or feast. Just these small, private things I clutched like evidence that I mattered.
Now, there was no need for any of it.
I placed the box by the door, sealed with packing tape, ready for the trash chute in the morning. My thumb rubbed once over the inside of my wrist before I straightened and reached for the next shelf.
Damien didn't come back to the safehouse for half a month. Not a single night. I imagined him at the Valenti compound, or at Alessia's side at some restaurant where everyone could see them, occupying the visible world I had never been permitted to enter. In that time, apart from finishing my design drafts for the front-business interiors the Family contracted out, I nearly cleared out the entire apartment. I even disposed of the furniture I'd chosen myself—the reading chair, the low table where I'd stacked fabric swatches, the small bookcase I'd filled to make the place feel like something other than a holding cell. I left the space as it was when I first moved in: black and white, so minimalist that you could see the entire room in a single glance. Bare walls. No warmth. No trace of the woman who had waited here, invisible and faithful, for seven years.
It looked the way Damien had always wanted me to exist—present only when convenient, and otherwise vanished.
