heath didn't flinch through a single word of it. just listened. lola, caravaggio, a deal, information, love, lies - all of it tangled in that desperate tone people use when they think truth might buy them grace. he didn't know what lev expected him to do with that. the story didn't change anything, didn't mean anything, not to him, anyway
'i didn't tell her a damn thing until we were really something'
there was something in the way lev mouthed these words that felt too disturbingly familiar for comfort. it's what men like them did, the venomous ones - perpetual performers, shapeshifters whose entire existence rested on weak foundations cemented with half-truths. excuses spun so carefully they could almost pass for compassion. after all, they're refined enough to make deceit felt like devotion "i know what it's like to blur the line between yearnin' and guilt" he licked his lips, staring at the floor
heath didn't give much away. his thoughts, his feelings, locked up tight, guarded like a weapon, and calling it survival. but in that moment with lev, he let a sliver slip. a few layers peeled back, just enough for the air to touch him, for someone else to see what he usually buried deep. maybe that conversation was the closest they ever came to being real with each other, stripped of pretense, raw and human for once
he couldn't understand why the brotherhood letting lev go hadn't been enough to set him free. when offered that kind of chance, you take it, you walk away, and don't look back. but the other clung to that guilty kind of need to make amends, as if redemption was something someone could carve out of old wounds. he'd buried things too, but he'd learned to live with the ghosts. lev kept trying to save his "mercy was the end of yer debt" heath admitted, words torn between anger and ache "ya walkin' away didn't just leave a space. it left noise. the kind that don't shut up, no matter how much work ya bury it under"
he looked at lev like he was trying to remember the man standing in front of him and the boy he once pulled out of his own ruin "ya was the one i saw a lil hope in. the one i poured my best into. and when ya left, it cut deeper than i thought it would. like i'd done ya wron' somehow. like i spent years tryin' to build ya up, just to watch ya walk out like everythin' we bled for never mattered" he took a slow sip, the burn sliding down his throat
"at first, i blamed myself. thought ya turned yer back cause ya couldn't stomach lookin' at what we'd become" he looked down at his hands - rough, scarred, tired "took me a lon' damn time to see it. all that visceral anger i felt was actually envy. ya got out. ya got to start over. i never got that choice. i'm still here, diggin' my own grave and callin' it loyalty" his mouth twitched, not quite a smile
