Barry’s POV

The message sat on my screen, stark and heavy.

This has to stop.

Four words. Cold. Final. A door slammed in my face.

I stared at them longer than I should have, my thumb hovering over the glass. My chest tightened with something that felt like anger and something that felt like… panic. Because Alina didn’t send words like that lightly.

She was tired. I’d seen it in her eyes last night, in the way her hands shook even as she tried to hold herself together across that café table. Tired of me, tired of Dante, tired of being the rope in a game of tug-of-war none of...