My sarcastic reply withered, and Xavier’s smile dissolved into grim understanding. He turned to the easel and ripped his near-complete sketch off the canvas. It soon joined the rest of the drawings on the floor.

Acid ate at my stomach. We’d been getting somewhere, and now…

“Xavier. Sloane.” Eduardo’s voice was heavy. “It’s time.”

We didn’t need elaboration, and neither of us spoke as we followed him into the hall. I could practically hear the camera flashes outside; the vultures were circling, and it was only a matter of time before they landed.

We made it halfway before a light touch on my shoulder forced me to halt.

“Before we go in there…” Xavier swallowed, his eyes clouded with turmoil. “Thank you for checking on me.”

The words landed like arrows, each in its vulnerable target.

It hadn’t occurred to me before, but in a house filled with his family, I was the first person to check and see if he was okay.

“You’re welcome,” I said quietly.

There was nothing else I could say in that moment.

The only thing I could do was step aside, let him say his goodbyes, and prepare him for the storm to come.

CHAPTER 15

Xavier

It should come as no surprise that a man who’d barely been there for me in life was equally absent in death.

Alberto Castillo, Colombia’s richest man, former CEO of the Castillo Group, and father of one, died at home at five minutes past three on Saturday afternoon.

I made it to his room just in time to witness his last heartbeat.

He never woke from his coma before he passed, and we never exchanged a proper goodbye.

If this were a movie, we’d have some dramatic heart-to-heart or big confrontation before he died. I would unload my grievances on him; he would confess his regrets to me. We would have a cathartic fight or make up. Either way, we’d have closure.

But this wasn’t a movie. It was real life, and sometimes, that meant loose ends didn’t get tied up.

In the wake of his death, I felt a strange mix of nothing and everything all at once. I was relieved that we no longer hung on tenterhooks, waiting for a final health verdict, but I couldn’t fully process that he was gone and never coming back. I despised the last-minute manipulation he’d pulled with my mother’s letter, but the overwhelming closeness I’d felt to her when I read her words was worth it.

Yet constraining that sea of complicated emotions was a layer of numbness I couldn’t shake no matter how hard I tried.

Top drawer of my desk.

Those were the last words my father had uttered to me, and I supposed it was fitting that our chapter ended with ties to my mother. Dead or alive, she was the bedrock of our relationship.

The pocket watch I found in his desk drawer burned a hole against my thigh.

“Do you think I’m a monster for not crying?” I stared at the scotch in my hand. It was midnight and I was in the kitchen, drinking my worries away, because what else would one do the night after their father died?

“No,” Sloane said simply. “People grieve in different ways.” She poured a glass of water and slid it toward me.

She’d stayed with me through the immediate aftermath of my father’s death, forcing me to eat and turning away my family members when they tried to accost me with questions about my inheritance.

Thankfully, she didn’t smother me with pity. I could always count on Sloane to be Sloane. Whenever I was drowning, she was my anchor in the storm.

Part of me was embarrassed to show her this side of me—raw and exposed, tangled in the pieces of the mask I usually wore for the world. It was easy being Xavier Castillo, the billionaire heir and party boy; it was torturous being Xavier Castillo, the man and disappointment. The one with a fucked-up past and uncertain future, who had plenty of friends yet no one to lean on.

Sloane was the closest thing I had to a support system, and she didn’t even like me. But she was here, I wanted her here, and that was more than I could say for anyone else in my life.

She examined me, her face softer than usual. “But I might be the wrong person to ask about grief. I can’t…” A beat of hesitation. “I can’t cry.”

That surprised me enough to shake off some of my self-loathing. “Figuratively?”

“Literally.” She rubbed her thumb across the beads of her friendship bracelet as if debating whether to elaborate.

“I can cry if I’m in pain,” she finally said. “But I’ve never cried out of sadness. I’ve been that way since I was young. I didn’t cry when our family cat died or when my favorite grandmother passed. I didn’t shed a single tear when my fiancé—” She stopped abruptly, her face darkening for a split second before her composure slid back into place with a near-audible clank. “Anyway, you’re not the only one who’s felt like a monster for not crying when you should.”

She grabbed the bottle of scotch from the counter and poured some into a crystal tumbler. It was her third of the evening.

Fiancé. There were rumors she’d been engaged years ago, but no one could confirm it—until now. Sloane was notoriously private about her personal life, and it helped that she’d been living in London at the time, away from the vicious Manhattan gossip machine.

I watched in silence as she sipped her drink.

Perfect hair. Perfect clothes. Perfect skin. She was the picture of flawlessness, but I was starting to see the cracks beneath her polished façade.

Instead of detracting from her beauty, they added to it.

They made her more real, like she wasn’t an elusive dream that would slip through my fingers if I tried to touch her.

“We seem to have more and more in common,” I drawled. Shitty fathers. Commitment issues. Major need of therapy.

Who said adults couldn’t bond over trauma?

Sloane must’ve expected me to pry about her fiancé because her shoulders visibly relaxed when I lifted my glass instead.

“To monsters.”

A soft gleam brightened her eyes, and she raised her glass in turn. “To monsters.”

We drank in silence. The house was dark, the clock ticked toward one, and an army of reporters gathered outside the gates, waiting to turn my father’s death into a media circus.

But that was a problem for the morning. For now, I basked in the warmth of my drink and Sloane’s presence.

She wasn’t a friend or family, and on a bad day, she made the Titanic iceberg look like a tropical paradise. And yet, despite all that, there was no one else I would rather spend tonight with.