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Donte had been handcuffed to the wall, bruised and beaten and bloody. He was naked, with just boxers to cover him. He’d been completely violated and stripped of his dignity. He’d been tortured… And tears were streaming down his face.
Tears caused by me.
I bolted up to him, sobbing. Unable to hold back my emotions. Feeling completely and utterly broken.
As soon as he saw me, he looked like somebody had just walked over his grave. He looked so empty and hollow, that it was impossible to read him. He looked tired, exhausted, defeated.
He looked like a dead man walking.
“I’m so sorry…” I wept. “I’m so fucking sorry, Donte.”
“Why are you here?” he breathed. “Please don’t make this any harder than it already is. You played me.” He broke off his sentence, trembling. “You fucking played me.”
“I love you, baby,” I pleaded. “Everything we had was real. When I was sent on the mission, falling in love with you wasn’t part of the plan. That’s why I tried so hard to stay away from you. I kept cutting you off, to avoid you getting hurt. Because I knew that this would happen when the truth came out.”
Donte couldn’t speak. He looked so torn, it was like his soul had been ripped out of his body and battered to shreds.
“I saw you for who you really were, Donte,” I whispered. “I knew it wasn’t you behind the murders. I did all I could to prove your innocence, to gather evidence to find out the real culprit, but my boss stole it all from my room. He broke in, and he trashed my room.
“I love you with all my heart, baby… You’ve gotta believe me. I would die for you. If I didn’t love you, I wouldn’t be here fighting for you right now. Here to get you out of this place.”
“I don’t know what to believe anymore, Sapphire…” Donte murmured, his voice dropping to barely below a whisper. “I know your name is Maya, but you’ll always be Sapphire to me…”
I broke into fresh tears, my heart feeling like it was splitting apart. Like I was about to explode.
I couldn’t breathe.
Seeing him like this…
It was pushing me to fucking breaking point.
“I love you too, Sapphire,” he mourned. “I love you so fucking much. It feels like my heart has been ripped out of my chest. Like I’m in a nightmare and I can’t wake up. I don’t know if we can move past from this. I can’t live without you, either…
“But I can’t forget what you did. I can’t erase it from my memory.
“I gave you so many chances to come clean. I told you all about me, all about my involvement in the Mafia. Maybe if you’d told me earlier, we could have moved past this. But now, I’m not so sure.”
He trailed off his sentence, clutching his chest in agony. Looking completely empty and numb.
“Please, baby,” I pleaded. “I can’t live without you. I would rather die than live a life without you.”
“I would rather die than live a life without you, too…” Donte sighed, his heart hammering against his chest into a frenzy. “Despite everything, I still love you so fucking much. But the truth coming out just keeps playing itself over and over in my damn head. It’s torturing me. The signs were there from the beginning… Signs that you were hiding things from me. But I was just too blinded by love to take notice.”
“Everything I did…” I sobbed. “I did it for you, Donte. I hate the circumstances in which we met… But if I’d never came to Manhattan undercover, I never would have met you. And I can’t imagine a life without you in it.
“Everything else that I told you about myself is true. Fibonacci, and all that shit. I’m willing to tell you the truth about everything else.
“The only difference is that I studied Criminal Law at university, not Computer Science. And after I ran away from Fibonacci…
“I started fighting in underground fights. Illegally. Because of how much abuse I’d endured, it was like my outlet for my anger. And I met my boss there. He offered me a job in the Secret Service from then…
“I met Brett at the Service. It was a relationship of convenience… I didn’t love him. I broke up with him before moving to Manhattan for the mission. And that stuff about my mother being dead…
“My boss killed her.”