CHAPTER 8

RENZO

Fuck me… Zaria!

The thought didn’t finish. No, it didn’t even land properly. It detonated somewhere behind my eyes… loud, furious, and confused, then slipped through my fingers like smoke because nothing responded the way it should have.

My body couldn't rise. My hand couldn't come up. My mouth couldn't shape her name the way it wanted to.

Instead, there was pressure at the back of my head that exploded into a ringing so violent it drowned everything else. For a fraction of a second, just a fraction, I tried to understand exactly what had happened.

All I could remember was… she had taken so long to prepare my tea…

It had been her.Zaria.My beautiful Zaria.

“Renzo?” She called softly, lifting my hands and letting them drop.

Then realization hit in the most humiliating manner, flooding my entire consciousness. It hurt somewhere deep. A place of trust that had never been trained to take such blows of betrayal.

And I trusted her so damned much!

“Arghhh!”

There was a scream. It sliced through the sudden heaviness spreading to my limbs. I didn’t know if it was real or imagined. I didn’t know if it belonged to Zaria or to Grace or to my own mind fracturing under what I was losing control of.

I tried to move again and again.

Nothing.

My vision collapsed inward as darkness swallowed the edges first, then the center, until even the memory of light felt distant. My thoughts slowed, stretched, smeared together like wet ink.

I thought of her face.

The way she looked when she was afraid but pretending she wasn’t. The way her lips pressed together when she was lying.

“I am fine, Renzo.” She always says.

“Nothing is wrong, Renzo.” Her perfect plump lips uttered.

The way her hands shook when she thought no one was watching. I should have seen it and known that Zaria was such a perfect liar.

I had built an empire on reading people, on sensing weakness and deceit, on hearing the lies beneath the words, because in my line of work, those things killed faster than the most deadly disease.

Yet I had let myself believe that she was different because what she looked at me with was real and the warmth she offered hadn’t been false.

The last coherent thought I managed before everything slipped away was ugly and aching and full of regret.

I had never meant for it to hurt her like this.

Then even that dissolved.

_____________

“…no response…”

“…pupils sluggish…”

“…overdose levels are…”

Who was that? The ringing continued even louder as I tried to filter the noise. I couldn’t tell where I was. Panic tried to surface, but even panic felt muted, dulled by whatever had been poured into my veins…

A hand touched me.

What the hell is happening to me?

I didn’t feel it the way I should have, but I sensed it.

“…the sedation is deep…”

“…we need to stabilize first…”

“Oh my God!”

I knew her voice before my mind could attach a name to it.

“No,” Elix snapped. “No, you said he would wake up. You said this wouldn’t happen.”

I wanted to laugh and rage.

Instead, I floated.

A male voice answered her. “He was given a massive amount of sedatives. Enough to shut down motor response completely. His body is reacting, but his brain…”

“You don’t understand,” Elix cut in, and now her voice was cracked and desperate in a way I had rarely heard. “You don’t understand who he is. You don’t understand what happens if he doesn’t wake up.”

Something heavy rustled near me… more presence.

“Are you telling me,” My father's slow voice echoed distantly. “that my son is lying there because some woman decided to poison him, and you’re standing here explaining timelines to me?”

The doctor swallowed audibly. I could hear it. Funny, the details that came through.

“We are doing everything we can,” he replied carefully. “But right now, he is in a coma. Drug-induced, yes, but a coma nonetheless.”

A pause.

“How long?” he demanded.

There it was. How long I was going to be bedridden was the question that mattered the most.

“Days. Weeks. Possibly a month. Give or take. It depends on how his brain responds once the sedatives wear off.”

A month.

The words strangely repeated in my head. What that meant was a month trapped in my own body, a month unable to move, to speak, to act, a month for Zaria to disappear,

Elix made a broken sound.

“No,” she said again, softer this time. “Renzo, please. You can’t leave me like this.”

I wanted to tell her I had never belonged to her the way she thought I did. When her hand wrapped around mine, I felt her possession over my soul.

“I love you,” she said loudly, as if volume might reach wherever I was. “You hear me? I love you. I did everything for you. Everything.”

A chair scraped.

“If he doesn’t wake up,” Richard growled, “I will shut this hospital down piece by piece until someone gives me answers.”

“Sir”

“I don’t threaten,” my father interrupted coldly. “I destroy.”

Through it all, my mind drifted back to Zaria. Back then, her hands were shaking around the tray… fuck!

There was no denying that Zaria had planned all this and executed it with a precision I had never taught her, which meant she had learned it somewhere else… or learned it because of me.

And yet the thought that hurt the most was not the loss of control. It was the fact that I still loved her in an aching and twisted way while imagining her rich cocoa-brown skin, her full lips, and thick neat brows that gave her a soft look. She didn’t smile often, and when she did, it was dazzling…

If I woke up…

No.

When I woke up… Zaria would run, but there would be nowhere left to hide.