After he read the report,
Xavier requested the leave the right way.
Formal report.
Clear justification.
No emotion.
He stood at attention while the officer scanned the document, eyes moving quickly, disinterested.
"Denied," the man said, handing it back. "Operational demands."
Xavier's jaw tightened. "Sir, it's personal—"
"Sergeant Hernandez," the officer cut in sharply, "everyone here has something personal. Return to duty."
Dismissed.
---
The denial wasn't an accident.
Otilla D'Este made sure of that.
She never touched Xavier directly anymore—that would be crude. Instead, she whispered into the systems that already obeyed her father's name. A recommendation here. A concern there. A quiet suggestion that Hernandez was too valuable to rest.
So the workload increased.
Gradually at first.
Then relentlessly.
---
Xavier was reassigned twice in one month.
Day patrols bled into night operations. Training drills stacked without recovery days. Missions grew longer, harsher, farther from anywhere familiar.
Sleep became a luxury.
Rest became a rumor.
Every time he thought of Isabella—her smile, her voice, the way she listened—fatigue swallowed the thought before it could settle.
Later, he told himself.
I'll think about this later.
Later never came.
---
Otilla watched the reports with satisfaction.
"He's breaking," she told her father calmly over breakfast.
General Alessandro D'Este barely looked up from his paper. "He's a soldier. That's what they're for."
"Yes," Otilla agreed softly. "But even soldiers forget things when they're tired enough."
---
Weeks turned into months.
Xavier stopped checking his phone.
At first because there was no signal.
Then because there was no time.
Then—eventually—because it hurt less not to look.
The Rossi name faded from daily thought to distant ache.
An unfinished sentence.
A face he couldn't fully picture anymore.
Sometimes, in the brief quiet before sleep, something stirred—a memory of warmth, of laughter in a small pastry shop, of a girl handing him a box with flour on her fingers.
But exhaustion smothered it.
He would wake before dawn, body sore, mind empty.
Report.
Train.
Deploy.
Repeat.
---
The day he forgot Isabella's birthday, something inside him went silent.
He didn't notice.
---
Otilla ensured there was always another task waiting.
Another mission.
Another emergency.
Another reason he couldn't pause long enough to remember.
She wasn't cruel about it.
She was precise.
"Time," she once said, "is the cleanest weapon."
---
One evening, Xavier sat alone in the barracks, staring at his hands.
They were rougher now. Scarred. Different.
He tried to remember why his chest felt heavy.
There had been someone.
A reason.
But it slipped away like smoke.
He shook his head and stood.
Duty called.
---
Far away, Isabella still kept the phone.
The number untouched.
She didn't know that every mile between them was being reinforced with silence, fatigue, and deliberate forgetting.
She believed he was busy.
Xavier believed he was empty.
And Otilla D'Este finally allowed herself a smile.
Not because she had killed love—
But because she had starved it.
Slowly.
Quietly.
Completely.