France was no longer a vacation; it was a cold education in the reality of the Tenorio reach. After the incident with the manifests, the veil had been lifted, and Matt stopped pretending. The burner phones sat openly on the nightstand of their Parisian suite. He took calls at 3:00 AM, speaking in clipped, lethal codes about "unloading hardware" in Marseilles and "moving obstacles" in the Mediterranean.
One night, the door to the suite swung open, and the smell hit Cheska before she saw him: ozone, metallic blood, and the sharp scent of gunpowder. Matt stumbled in, his tailored shirt torn, a jagged cut blooming across his cheekbone, and his knuckles raw and purple.
"Don't," he rasped as Cheska immediately stood up, grabbing the medical kit Joie had taught her to use for "emergencies."
"I'm not Alliana, Matt. I don't need the fairy tale, and I'm tired of you pretending I'm too fragile for the truth," she snapped. She shoved him into a velvet armchair, her hands steady despite the roar of her heart. As she dabbed antiseptic on the cut, she looked at the man who had just come from a world of violence she couldn't even imagine. "Is this the cycle? You go out and handle the mess, you come home smelling like death, and I just... make you dinner and pretend your hands aren't stained?"
Matt gripped her wrist, his eyes dark and hollow. "You can leave, Cheska. I told you that the night you opened the briefcase. There is a jet on standby at Le Bourget. You can go back to Manila, back to the mall, back to a life where you don't have to know what a 9mm does to a human shoulder."
Cheska looked at him—the man who protected his siblings with a ruthlessness that terrified her, yet held her with a gentleness that broke her heart. She realized then that she was already too deep. She didn't want the jet. She wanted the man. She leaned down, her lips ghosting over the bruise on his cheek before she kissed him, a silent, tragic promise to stay in the dark with him.