Chapter 14: The Decision
He gave himself one night to decide, sitting on
the rocks above the water long after Isabella
had cried herself into a restless, exhausted
sleep inside, the folder still burning a hole in
his jacket pocket like it had weight beyond
paper.
Seven-year-old Romeo had made himself a
promise, standing in a stranger's borrowed
coat and watching his childhood home
smolder down to its foundations, that
someday the person responsible would answer
for it. That promise had become the
architecture of the man he grew into — every
hour of training he'd endured, every job he'd
taken that others turned down, every wall he'd
carefully built around a heart he'd decided long
ago wasn't safe to use. Revenge wasn't a whim
he could talk himself out of. It was the load-
bearing wall holding the rest of him upright. But he thought, too, of Isabella's hand finding
his on the rocky path without either of them
discussing it first. Of too much salt in a ragù
and the sound of her laughing on a kitchen
floor. Of a kiss that had tasted like gunpowder
and relief in the middle of the worst night of
the last month, the two of them alive and
clinging to that fact together.
He made his decision before the sun came up,
and it cost him something he suspected would
take years to grow back, if it ever did.
He would go through with it. Not out of hatred
for Isabella — that hadn't changed, would never
change, he understood that now with a
certainty that frightened him. But he could not
become a man who buried his parents twice:
once in an actual fire, and once more in his
own convenient, comfortable silence, chosen
because the truth was inconvenient for a love
he'd never expected to find.
"I have to go back," he told her in the gray light
of morning, finding her awake and waiting on
the porch steps like she'd known he'd come to her the moment the sun rose. "I have to face
him."
"Then I'm coming with you." Her eyes were red-
rimmed but her voice was steady, steadier than
his. "Not to stop you, Romeo. Not yet, anyway.
But I will not let you walk into that house alone.
Whatever you decide when you get there — I
want to be standing beside you when you
decide it. That's not negotiable."