All Chapters of LORENZO, MY FATHER'S BEST FRIEND : Chapter 181 - Chapter 190

LEXIThree days.That's how long I managed to pretend the name meant nothing.Three days of classes and training and eating meals and laughing at Maya's jokes and lying next to Damon in the dark telling myself Cole had just been stirring trouble on his way out. That it was nothing. Old history, like Damon said. Not relevant to anything.I was a terrible liar. Even to myself.The worst part was watching him and not being able to stop. We'd be in the middle of a training session — him correcting my grip on a hold, fingers pressing into my wrist to adjust the angle — and I'd catch myself studying his face instead of focusing on the move. Looking for something I couldn't name. Some crack in the surface that would tell me what lived underneath.He'd catch me sometimes. Raise an eyebrow."You're not paying attention.""I am.""Your elbow says otherwise."And I'd refocus. Correct the elbow. Run the drill again.But the splinter was still there. Working its way deeper every day.I went to the

DAMONThe weight had a texture.That was the thing nobody told you about guilt. People talked about it like it was abstract — a feeling, an emotion, something that lived in your head and could be reasoned with. But real guilt had mass. Had density. It sat in the center of your chest like a stone that had been there so long your body had grown around it, incorporated it, made it structural.Remove it now and you might not hold together.Seven years.Seven years of waking up and feeling it before I was fully conscious. Before the room came into focus or my name came back to me. Just that — the weight. Present and accounted for, same as always.I'd learned to function around it. That was all you could do.But lately something had shifted. Lately I'd lie there in the gray pre-dawn with Lexi's warmth against my back and feel the weight differently — not just as something to carry but as something that was starting to cost me. Charging interest. Demanding payment in a currency I was running

I heard her before I saw her.The soft sound of the bedroom door, bare feet on the floor. Then she appeared in the kitchen doorway in my hoodie and yesterday's socks, hair loose and sleep-tangled, taking in the scene — me at the table, cold coffee, whatever was on my face.She crossed the kitchen quietly. Put her hand on my shoulder."Hey."I looked up at her.In the gray morning light she looked very young and very old at the same time, which was something she did sometimes that still caught me off guard. Lorenzo's daughter, all the way down. Bone-deep."Sit down," I said. "I need to tell you something."---She sat across from me and folded her hands on the table and waited.I started talking.I told her about Gabriel first — who he was, not just what happened to him. The barracks. The argument that became a friendship. Four years of service that had been the realest thing in my life up to that point. I wanted her to know him before I told her how he died. It felt important. Like th

LEXII woke up with my phone already in my hand.Not unusual lately. I'd been sleeping the way you sleep when something is unresolved — one layer too shallow, body not fully committing to unconsciousness, some part of my brain keeping watch.The text was still there when I unlocked the screen. I'd read it so many times the words had started to lose their shape.Your father knows you're with Cross. He's been informed. You have 48 hours before he comes for you both.I put the phone face down on the nightstand and stared at the ceiling.Damon was still asleep beside me, one arm across my waist, breathing slow and even. Yesterday had cracked something open in him and he'd slept deeper than I'd seen in weeks — the particular heaviness of someone who'd finally put something down.I didn't want to touch that. Didn't want to bring this into the space yesterday had made.So I got up carefully, found my clothes, and left him sleeping.---Olandria answered on the third ring, which meant she was

LEXIThe trees changed first.That was always how I knew we were getting close to home — not a sign, not a landmark, just the quality of the forest shifting. The trees got older, taller, closer together. The light came through differently, broken into longer pieces, the kind of afternoon gold that only happened when the canopy was thick enough to earn it.I watched it happen through the passenger window and felt my stomach tighten with every mile.Damon drove with one hand on the wheel, relaxed in the way he was relaxed about most things — not careless, just economical. Like he'd made peace with the destination and saw no point in spending the journey in knots about it. His other hand was on the seat between us, fingers loosely threaded through mine.He hadn't reached for my hand. It had just happened somewhere around the first hour, the way things happened between us now — without announcement, without making it a thing.I was thinking about my father's face.Specifically the express