POV Bella
*ONE MONTH LATER*
The cemetery sprawls before me like a city of the dead, air cool enough to justify wearing Ajax's leather jacket without raising questions.
The leather still carries his scent—motorcycle exhaust and expensive cologne mixed with something uniquely him that no amount of time seems able to erase.
I've clutched this jacket through every day of recovery, the only piece of him I have left.
Finding his grave feels surreal, like discovering evidence of my own nightmare made manifest.
The headstone rises from perfectly manicured grass, black granite carved with words that make him forever twenty-two: AJAX SPENCER. BELOVED SON. The dates underneath span barely two decades.
Ajax would hate this. He’d snort at the polished stone, toe the edge of the lawn, and mutter that they forgot the rest of him—menace, mistake, yours.
He’d glance at the clipped hedges and say it’s too quiet for a boy made of engine noise.
And then, hands in his pockets, chin tipped the way he did when he was trying not to smile, he’d tell me: Don’t build a shrine over a rock. Take the heart and redline it. Dance, drive, laugh. If you want to talk to me, do it under floodlights with something loud in your chest.
My knees hit the ground hard enough to bruise, and the words tear from my throat between desperate sobs.
"You promised always," I gasp against the cold stone. "You promised to come back to me. I was getting a new heart to love you better and you—"
My fists pound the earth beside his grave, dirt embedding under my nails. "I should have died, not you! You had so much life left, so much to prove to your father, so much—"
"He did prove it."
The voice stops my breakdown cold. I look up to find Vincent Spencer standing behind me, looking decades older than when I last saw him. Grief has carved deep lines into his patrician face, transforming the powerful businessman into something fragile and hollow.
"I come every Saturday," he says quietly, settling onto the grass beside me without regard for his expensive suit. "To talk to him. To apologize for all the conversations we never had."
"We lost so much time too," I admit, wiping tears with Ajax's jacket sleeve. "A lot of years wasted because of a stupid misunderstanding at a gala."
"He told me about that." Vincent's voice cracks. "The night before—he called to confirm you were coming to dinner. He sounded happier than I'd heard him in years. Said you understood him in ways we never tried to."
The revelation hits like a physical blow. Ajax had been planning our future while racing toward his death.
"He painted," I say suddenly, needing Vincent to know. "Beautiful landscapes, portraits that captured people's souls. He had dreams of designing motorcycles, combining art with engineering. He was brilliant, not just reckless."
Vincent's composure shatters completely. Tears stream down his face as he absorbs these glimpses of the son he'd never bothered to know.
"He wanted to prove himself to you," I continue, the words pouring out like confession. "Every dangerous thing he did—it wasn't rebellion. It was begging for your attention, for you to see him as more than a disappointment."
"I failed him." Vincent's voice breaks on each word. "Every day, every conversation. I turned my son into a stranger because I was too proud to admit I was wrong."
We sit in silence, two people destroyed by the same loss, united in grief for someone who died believing himself unloved by the people who mattered most.
"That day he told us about you," Vincent says finally, "he glowed. Literally glowed with happiness. My wife—Lucia—she said she'd never seen him look at anything the way he looked when he said your name."
Fresh tears blur my vision. "He made me feel alive when I was dying. He gave me reasons to fight for every extra day."
"And now you have a lifetime of days he'll never see." Vincent reaches into his jacket, withdrawing a single key. "We haven't touched his apartment. Can't bring ourselves to. But you should go. Take whatever you want. He'd want you to have—anything. Everything."
He presses the key into my palm, the metal warm from his body heat.
"I can't go with you," he admits, his voice barely above a whisper. "Not yet. But you belong there more than anyone. You were the future he was building toward."
Vincent rises slowly, his grief making him move like an old man despite his relative youth. "He loved you completely. The way I should have loved him but never learned how."
I watch him walk away, shoulders bowed under the weight of regret, and realize Ajax's death has destroyed far more than just my world. The Spencer family dynasty lost its rebel prince, but more importantly, a father lost his son just as they were learning to understand each other.
The key burns in my palm like a brand, solid evidence of trust I don't deserve but can't refuse. Ajax's apartment waits—the last place we were together, where we fought and reconciled and made love like the world might end.
Which, for him, it did.
I press my palm against his headstone one final time. "I'll go to your place," I whisper against the cold granite. "I'll see what you were building toward. And I'll try to live the life you died believing I deserved."
The autumn wind carries my words away, but I imagine they reach him somehow, wherever the dead go when they leave behind the people who love them.
I clutch the key tighter, knowing I need to see his space again, to say goodbye properly in the place where we discovered that love could be both salvation and destruction, often in the same breath.