I closed my eyes. “It was nothing.”
“Was it?”
He leaned forward again. “I’ve got your back.”
“You don’t like him.”
“No,” he admitted. “It’s not that I don’t like him. He makes me… uneasy.”
He rubbed a hand over his jaw, finally dropping into the chair beside the bed. “I’ve been the one keeping an eye on you. Since the beginning. When things went to shit, it was me making sure you got outin one piece. And now there’s him. It feels weird. Like I’m supposed to just… hand it over.”
I turned my head, eyes narrowed. “I’m not a thing to be handed over.”
Rio huffed a breath, sat forward, elbows on his knees. “No, you’re someone who needs stability. An anchor. And maybe Killian is that.” He looked away, his voice quieter. “Not some beaten-up enforcer like me who only knows how to make people bleed.”
I smirked, despite myself. “I love that beaten-up asshole.”
Rio snorted, shaking his head with a crooked grin. “Love you, too.”
“I dunno how, but Killian makes me feel…” The words caught, tight in my throat. There was so much emotion in me—rage, need, shame, fear—and I needed to vocalize it, but how? I didn’t have the language for softness. I wasn’t built for it. I only knew how to throw fire at what I didn’t understand and hope it didn’t burn me back.
“Yeah,” Rio said. “Can he stop you burning?”
“I don’t know.” That’s the part that scares me, too. Because wanting something real meant confronting all the reasons I’d lit matches in the first place.
I knew what the textbooks said about people likeme. Pyromania, arson—whatever the actual reason was why I burned—wasn’t about destruction, not really. It was about control. Release. A compulsion building pressure in your chest until fire was the only thing that made it stop. The act itself wasn’t about rage—it was ritual. The anticipation, the ignition, the glow. The aftermath. It gave structure to the chaos inside.
Most people thought it was about hurting others. It wasn’t. It was about the ache that wouldn’t let go, the one I tried to silence with flames. A temporary high, a flicker of control in a world that never gave me any.
But Killian—he short-circuited all of that. He looked at me like I didn’t need to burn to matter. And that terrified me more than anything I’d ever set alight.
I lay there, silent. “I don’t know how to want something without ruining it,” I whispered. “I want him, but not just sex. I want him to see me—reallysee me—and still choose to stay, and that single thought terrifies me more than anything. I let him in, and now I don’t know how to close the door. Fuck. What if I need him more than he needs me?”
Rio’s eyes widened, and he sighed. “Fuck Jamie. It’s okay to fall in love with someone.”
“I’m not in love,” I blurted. “I don’t know how to be in love.”
“Same,” Rio said on a sigh, then he moved to the window. “I look at Enzo and Robbie, and they just…”
“Belong together.”
“Yeah. And maybe we’re allowed to want good things, Jamie. Even if they don’t come packaged the way we thought they would.”
I stared at the ceiling, eyes burning. “Do we deserve them?” The words tasted like ash. Why had every good thing I’d ever touched always ended the same way—ruined, scorched, broken in my hands? I’d learned to survive the aftermath, but I’d never once been taught to believe in something better. Not for me.
He looked at me, steady and unflinching. “Yes. But we’re gonna have to fight like hell to believe it.”
We took our coffees to the sofas, and sat quietly for the longest time, me lost in thought, and Rio clearly having something to say and not knowing where to start.
“We should talk about Stockton,” he murmured. “Before you… y’know, with Killian.”
Stockton. An old motel. Empty. Abandoned. Boarded up. Rio and I had been out there picking up a 1969 Dodge Charger R/T—cherry red, with a 440Magnum engine and rear quarter panels that looked like they’d seen one too many winters—and we’d slept overnight in Rio’s truck because the owners wanted one more night to consider the sale. I remember being hot, irritable, keyed up with nowhere to put it—the pressure building under my skin until it felt like fire was the only answer.
I didn’t observe. Didn’t look for patterns of habitation aside from the obvious, didn’t think of the people in there who’d want to stay hidden from ICE. Didn’t have any reason to burn the place other than my selfishness. I didn’t see any signs that anyone was living there. I needed to burn, and that desperate want overrode everything else. I lit the fire as if it were a ritual, something sacred, but I didn’t know anyone was inside until I heard the screaming.
Two families. Undocumented and scared. A toddler. Three other kids. Parents trying to survive on the margins. My fire took every possession from them and nearly took their lives.
I got them out. Every single one. They were so fucking grateful—thanking me with tearful eyes and shaking hands while smoke still clung to their clothes. And I stood there, ash-streaked and hollow, trying to reconcile the truth—I’d almost killed innocents.
