Page 58 of Jayson (Gatti Enforcers #3)

JAYSON

C hange isn’t a flick of a switch.

It’s slower. Sharper. Like erosion—silent until one day you look back and realize the landscape of who you were no longer exists.

I used to think change was weakness. That the only way to survive was to stay the same: hard, brutal, untouchable.

But love changes you. So does loss. And pain.

And redemption. It strips you bare, shows you every piece you broke off to make room for survival—and then asks if you want to build something better.

I used to kill to feel powerful. Now I build to stay human. And maybe that’s the biggest shift of all. Not that I changed—but that I let myself.

The biggest change for us isn't war. It's peace.

Not the blood-stained kind we used to claw through, but the quiet kind—the one that comes with decisions about paint colors and drainage systems and whether to keep the original balustrade on the second-floor landing.

We’re rebuilding the estate.

Not selling it. Not abandoning it. Reclaiming it.

Keira loves it there. I see it in the way her fingers trail along the banister, the way her voice softens when she walks past the study.

That house holds our history—both the kind that tried to ruin us and the kind we created ourselves.

But it’s time. Time to strip away the bones without burying the history.

We’re keeping the structure. The soul. But the guts? They're getting torn out.

New electrics. Updated plumbing. Every pipe, every wire—gutted and replaced. No more flickering lights or dodgy pressure in the guest showers. No more echoes of old sins humming through faulty copper.

The decor’s coming into the present, too. Keira worked with a designer to preserve the house’s original gothic character—arches, stained glass, intricate molding—but she’s adding warmth. Earth tones. Lighter wood. Something that says we survived instead of we’re still fighting.

She wants a real kitchen. A sunroom. A reading nook off the second landing.

She says it like it’s just about the layout.

But I know better. She’s planting roots in every corner of that house so the ghosts can’t grow back.

And me? I’d bulldoze the whole damn thing if she asked me to.

But she didn’t. She asked me to help her heal it. So we are.

The hardest goodbye in all this? Nina.

She’s been with us longer than most blood relatives ever bothered to stick around. Raised me like I mattered. For years, she kept the books, the secrets, the family from tearing itself apart at the seams. And now, above every protest I could come up with, she says she’s ready.

She’s retiring. To Italy, of all places.

A little vineyard near her cousin’s place in the hills outside Florence. She showed me pictures on her phone—stone cottages, olive groves, a view of the valley that looks like something out of a poem.

“It’s time, Jayson,” she said, pressing her palm to mine the way she used to when I was a kid with bloodied knuckles and no direction. “You don’t need me anymore.”

She’s wrong, of course. I’ll always need her.

But I didn’t stop her.

Because Nina—who sacrificed everything for a family that took too much—deserves a life now. A slow one. With wine and laughter and sun-warmed linens hanging on a line. She deserves peace that doesn’t demand she stand guard over broken men trying to find their way.

I made her promise she’d visit at least twice a year.

She made me promise not to cry when she left.

We both lied.

The day she packed her bags, Keira helped her fold every blouse, every scarf. They talked in hushed voices I couldn’t quite hear from the hall. When I finally stepped in, Nina hugged me without a word, just gripped my face in her hands and stared at me like she was memorizing it.

“You built something good,” she said, her voice thick. “Make sure it lasts.”

I will. For her. For Keira. For Lila. For every girl the system forgot, every name we couldn’t save, every scar that still aches when it rains.

The estate will be unlivable for six months. Maybe longer.

So we’re staying at the waterfront loft—open plan, exposed brick, the kind of place with too much light and not enough corners to hide in. It feels strange at first. Like we’re trespassing in someone else’s calm.

But Keira fills it quickly. Her books on every surface. Law school notes spread across the dining table. Fresh flowers in a cracked vase we found at a weekend market. Laughter where silence used to sit like smoke.

At night, she pulls me to the balcony, wraps herself around me like armor, and points out stars I never cared to learn before her.

“This one’s called Lyra,” she whispers against my throat. “It’s the harp.”

“Sounds fragile.”

“It’s not,” she says. “The strings are made of fire.”

I look around now—at this temporary peace, this pause between what was and what we’re building—and for the first time in my life, I don’t feel restless. I feel rooted. And the thing about roots? They grow deeper when the earth is scorched.

The library in our new house smells like possibility.

Ink. Aged oak. That faint trace of cedar that clings to me no matter how many suits I go through. Morning sunlight filters in through the arched windows, casting honey-gold stripes across the desk where Keira’s law school applications are stacked in near-perfect alignment. The name at the top?

Keira Victoria Northwood.

Keira Bishop no longer exists—not on record, not in the world that almost destroyed her. The new name is hers by choice. Northwood —woven from my mother’s maiden name and the future we fought for with blood and grit and bone.

She thinks I haven’t noticed how her shoulders square every time she signs it. But I do. I see the way she presses into each letter like she’s exorcising the past with a pen.

Watching her rebuild is addictive, and half the time I feel like a man eavesdropping on a sunrise.

Lucky and Kanyan want me as liaison—bridging our Enforcer network with the legal shipping empire my grandmother mothballed decades ago. Two rivers finally meeting: legitimate revenue by day, clandestine muscle by night .

And if I steer it right, we’ll fund shelters, scholarships, and survivor resources in the daylight—while kneecapping traffickers in the shadows.

It’s the first time I’ve ever looked at power and seen something good reflected back.

I tell Keira all of it when we crawl back into bed after lunch, tangled up in sunlight and linen. She’s still warm from the shower, her limbs wrapped around me like they’ve finally found somewhere to rest. She traces soft circles on my chest, listening with that quiet fire in her eyes.

“You could be the first benevolent crime lord since Robin Hood,” she teases.

“Robin Hood was an outlaw.”

“So are you.” She leans forward and presses a kiss to the scar above my eye. “Outlaws make the best reforms.”

“Think the board of directors will agree?”

“Let them disagree. Scar will glare. Saxon will grumble. Lucky will negotiate. And you’ll do what’s right anyway.”

Her faith in me burns hotter than any bullet ever fired at my chest.

I brush a lock of hair behind her ear. “You okay?”

She doesn’t lie. She never does.

“I will be,” she says.

And in that answer lives a whole cathedral of progress.

We make love with the curtains half-open, wrapped in golden light and soft sighs. No rush. No desperation. Just something sacred and slow. A conversation in the language we never needed words for.

Her nails rake across the scars life carved into me. My hands find new strength in the curve of her hips. And when she falls apart in my arms, she whispers my name like a secret that’s finally safe to say out loud.

Jayson. Not a weapon. Not a warning. Just… me .

After, we lie in the afterglow, the world hushed and breathing with us. She curls against me, her breath warm on my throat.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, I hear Lila’s laugh—light and bright and finally unburdened by grief.

You found the light, Jaybird.

Yeah, little sis, I did.

And this time? I’m keeping it.