Tate's POV
Morning light in the Valdez apartment doesn't behave like the morning light in my house.
Carmen stands at the stove in her bathrobe, and when she sees me emerge from the hallway, rumpled, disoriented, my neck stiff from a couch that was two feet too short for my body, she beams like I'm a Christmas morning she wasn't expecting.
"Mijo! Sit, sit. I'm making churros. And there's coffee, very strong coffee."
She presses a mug into my hands before I can form a complete sentence, then cups my face and studies me with maternal intensity.
"Did you sleep okay? That couch is terrible—I've been telling Mateo to replace it for two years now. You're too tall for it. Next time we'll figure out something better."
Next time. Like my presence here is assumed. Like I belong in this kitchen with its chipped mugs and its mismatched chairs and its warmth that costs nothing and means everything.
"I slept fine, Carmen. The couch was great."
"Liar. But a polite liar, which is the best kind." She pats my cheek and returns to the stove, and the casual affection of it makes my chest ache.
Carmen fussing, four brothers bickering, Harley emerging from the hallway with sleep-creased cheeks and yesterday's clothes, rolling her eyes at something Aro says, stealing a churro off the plate before Carmen can arrange them properly.
Harley and I leave together after breakfast with no plan or destination. The morning air is cool against my face, and the neighborhood looks different in daylight—less threatening and more tired.
"Your mother tried to give me leftovers," I say. "Four containers. I told her I couldn't carry them all, and she looked at me like I'd personally insulted her ancestors."
"You should've taken them. Refusing Carmen Valdez's food is a declaration of war."
I glance sideways at her—black silky hair loose around her shoulders, the gold chain catching the light, that almost-smile she wears when she's pretending not to be happy. "Your family is... something else."
"Something else good or something else terrifying?"
"Both. Simultaneously. It's disorienting."
She laughs with the one that changes her whole face, and I'm cataloging the sound like evidence I'll need later when my phone rings.
The number is Ezra's, and I answer on reflex, already smiling from whatever Harley was about to say, and the sound that comes through the speaker empties my lungs.
Crying. Not the quiet, controlled kind Ezra usually manages—this is shattered, gasping. The sound of someone trying to form words through sobs that keep breaking them apart. "Tate, I need… He's gone, Tate, he just—"
My body goes rigid. Every muscle locks into place, the morning dissolving around me like paint in water. "Ez, Slow down. Where are you?"
"I'm at home. Please, I need you to—"
"I'm coming. I'm coming right now." I hang up and my feet are already moving, direction reversed, pace doubling.
Harley matches my stride without missing a beat, her expression shifting from relaxed to alert in the time it takes her to read my face. "What happened? Is it Ezra?"
"He's at the house. I need to go now." I'm calculating distance, route, how fast I can get to my car. "You don't have to come. Actually, you shouldn't come. My parents might be there, and after what happened with my father, I don't want you anywhere near…"
"Is Ezra okay?"
The directness of the question stops my spiraling. "I don't know. He was crying in a way he never does."
"Then I'm coming." Not a question, not an offer—a fact, delivered with the same stubbornness that made her laugh in my face when I tried to buy her silence with ten thousand dollars. "Call your brother back and ask if your parents are home."
So I do. Ezra confirms between fractured breaths that our parents are at a luncheon in the city—some donor event that'll keep them occupied until evening.
I let Harley come. Not because I've stopped wanting to protect her from my family's rot, but because arguing with Harley Valdez when she's made a decision is like arguing with the weather.
The Mercer house rises ahead of us like a monument to everything I'm trying to escape. Ezra is in the living room, and the sight of him cracks something in my chest.
He's on the floor, his back against the couch with his knees drawn to his chest and his face buried in his arms. He looks younger than seventeen, smaller. Hollowed out in a way that makes the massive room around him feel like it's swallowing him whole.
"Ez." I'm on the floor beside him in seconds, my hand on his shoulder. "I'm here. Tell me what happened."
The story spills out in fragments, each piece torn from him between sobs that shake his entire body.
Monsieur Laurent received an offer, a prestigious position at a university in Lyon—tenure track, significant salary, the kind of career opportunity that doesn't come twice. He accepted immediately without hesitation or discussion.
Without so much as a text message to the seventeen-year-old boy who'd spent months believing every whispered promise, every stolen moment, every ‘I love you’ murmured in French in an empty classroom after hours.
"He's just leaving, Tate… Like I was nothing, like everything we had was nothing."
Ezra's voice cracks on every other word, raw and young and devastated.
"I found out from another student, not even from him. Someone mentioned it in passing, and I had to stand there and pretend I didn't feel my chest cave in. He didn't even say goodbye…"
His voice breaks completely, and the sound that follows is so small, so wounded, that I have to close my eyes against the fury rising in my throat.
Laurent.
The man who groomed my brother, who exploited his loneliness and vulnerability and called it love. Who whispered promises in a language Ezra learned specifically to understand him—chose a career upgrade without a backward glance.
I pull Ezra against my chest, holding him the way I used to when we were kids and thunderstorms made him cry. But I don't have words.
My rage is so total it's consumed every syllable I might offer, leaving nothing but the impulse to find Julian Laurent and make him understand what it feels like to be destroyed by someone you trusted.
Then Harley sits down.
Not across from Ezra, not at a careful distance. She lowers herself onto the floor beside him, close enough that her shoulder nearly touches his, and she doesn't say anything right away.
"He told me I was special." Ezra's voice is muffled against my chest. "He said I was the only person who really understood him. That when I graduated, we'd be together—openly, somewhere nobody knew us."
"I believe you," Harley says quietly. "I believe that's exactly what he said. And I believe it felt real, because he wanted you to believe it."
Ezra lifts his head, his eyes swollen and searching. "You think he was lying the whole time?"
"I think adults who love teenagers don't put them in situations where they have to hide."
Her voice is steady, gentle in a way that has nothing to do with obligation and everything to do with who she is.
"The pain you're feeling right now? It's real, It's valid, but it's not proof that what he gave you was love. It's proof that you have a bigger heart than anyone in your life has deserved."
I watch from beside them, my arms still around Ezra, and something shifts inside me. Not a crack—those have been forming for weeks. Something deeper, something permanent.
This girl owes my brother nothing. Less than nothing—Ezra's family has given her every reason to walk away, to let the Mercers drown in their own dysfunction.
My father dismissed her, I tormented her. And here she is, sitting on a cold marble floor, treating my little brother like he matters, listening without judgment, speaking with an honesty that's somehow both unflinching and kind.
Because Harley doesn't know how to be anything other than exactly what someone needs, even when that someone hasn't earned it.
Ezra's sobs slow as Harley's hand rests on his arm. I hold my brother and watch the girl who changed everything, and the feeling settles into my bones like something that's always been there, waiting to be recognized.
Then the front door opens—the sound cuts through the living room like a gunshot.
My mother's heels on marble, sharp and rhythmic. My father's commanding tone, mid-conversation. And other voices—male, professional, the clipped cadence of men discussing policy and polling numbers.
My blood goes cold.
They weren't supposed to be home. The luncheon was supposed to last until evening.
Footsteps growing louder, voices growing clearer. Ezra's head snaps up, tear-streaked and terrified. Harley's hand tightens on his arm. I rise to my feet as the living room doorway fills.
My father’s first, composed and commanding, followed by my mother with her practiced smile, followed by two men in expensive suits.
Governor Mercer's gaze sweeps the room and lands on the scene with surgical precision: his younger son, red-eyed and shattered on the floor. His older son, standing rigid with guilt and fury written across his face.
And between them, sitting on his imported marble with her secondhand clothes and her Southside posture, the girl he told me to discard.