The Test
1151 Words
RAFAEL POV
It’s funny how quickly guilt stops feeling like guilt and starts tasting like gasoline.
The kind you pour in a circle around yourself. The kind you light a match to while staring someone you might love in the eye.
Because that’s what this is now.
I’ve stopped pretending it’s just the mission.
I’ve stopped pretending I can walk away clean.
The mission is dead. Burned alive the moment I let Cassian put his hands on me and moan my name like it meant something. And now I’m standing on the edge of a war, his empire or my badge. And I already know which one I’m going to burn.
---
The meet is in a rundown backroom of an old billiards bar in the Bronx. Cigarette smoke stains the air. Someone’s playing Latin jazz through a static-blown speaker in the wall, but it can’t drown out the tension in my spine.
Luca Torres walks in late. He’s older now. Scarred. Hair gray at the temples, neck still twitching from when Navarro’s men nearly choked him to death five years ago. He used to be one of our best informants. Until we left him behind.
"Didn't think you'd have the balls to show up, Moretti,” he says, tossing his coat on a cracked leather chair.
“I’m not here for pleasantries,” I say. “Give me something useful or I walk.”
He smiles. Thin. Too smooth. It puts me on edge.
“You’re in deeper than I thought,” he says, eyeing me. “DelaVega's got his hooks in you, doesn't he?”
“Shut up and talk.”
He leans back, fishing a flash drive from his coat pocket. “Navarro’s planning a full breach tonight. He's got a new shipment coming in through Jersey, but it's just a distraction. The real hit’s going to be on Cassian's stash house in Red Hook.”
I freeze.
That’s not a secondary location. That’s one of Cassian’s critical ops sites, where he keeps most of the imported arms for his inner-circle enforcers. Hit that, and it’s like cutting off the head of a hydra.
“How sure are you?”
“Sure enough I’m risking my neck telling you.”
I eye the flash drive. “What do you want in return?”
He smiles. “Proof you’re not Cassian’s little bitch.”
He tosses a slip of paper onto the table. A location. One of Cassian’s other sites.
“Give Navarro this,” he says. “Let him bomb something that matters.”
My fingers tighten around the flash drive. I could walk away. I could lie. I could…
But I don’t.
I take the paper.
---
Back at the mansion, I can barely look Cassian in the eye.
He’s sprawled on the couch in nothing but black silk pants and a glass of whiskey. The fireplace casts flickering shadows across his torso, making the ink on his chest look like it’s alive. Serpents. Daggers. Names written in blood.
"Where’ve you been?" he asks, not looking up.
“Clearing a loose end.”
He smirks. “Did the loose end talk?”
I nod. “Navarro’s planning a hit on a stash house. Red Hook.”
That makes him sit up. Fast.
I toss the flash drive on the coffee table. "Proof."
He studies it like it might explode. “Why help me now?”
“Because if Navarro takes you out, my cover's blown either way. You’re the lesser evil.”
That’s a lie. But it’s the only one he’ll let me get away with.
He nods slowly. “I’m mobilizing my crew. You’re riding with me.”
“Thought I was on punishment.”
He grins like a wolf. “You still are.”
---
We get to Red Hook thirty minutes before the hit.
Cassian's crew fans out like shadows, all dressed in black, wired up, weapons ready. I move like one of them now. Like a soldier in a war I swore I’d never fight.
Cassian doesn’t even ask how I got the intel. He trusts me.
That’s the part that breaks me the most.
Because thirty minutes after we secure the perimeter…
**The other location blows.**
The one I gave them.
The sky lights up orange in the distance. A ball of fire, followed by the thunder of metal shrieking and bodies breaking.
Cassian’s head snaps toward the noise. Then toward me.
And I know.
He knows.
His voice is quiet. Too quiet.
“Where did you say you got that intel?”
I swallow. “A contact.”
“Name.”
“I didn’t get one.”
“Bullshit.”
Then the call comes in. One of his lieutenants.
Cassian listens. Says nothing. Then hangs up.
Three of his men are dead. So are two civilians.
His eyes burn through me.
“You gave them the wrong location.”
“I didn’t… ”
“You fed them my coordinates.”
“No,” I choke. “I was trying to help you…”
His gun’s already out.
And pointed at my chest.
---
He doesn't say another word on the ride back.
No threats. No swearing. Just silence.
The kind of silence that builds coffins in the mind
We get back to the mansion. I expect fury. A gun to my head. Maybe worse.
But instead, he smiles.
Dead cold.
"Strip."
“What?”
“You heard me.”
I hesitate for one second too long.
His hand snaps out. Fist in my collar. I’m thrown against the wall.
“You betrayed me. Again. And you still think you get to speak?”
His mouth crashes onto mine before I can answer
Fury. Hunger. Madness.
His hands tear at my clothes, shirt, belt, pants, all discarded like I’m nothing but a body to him now. And maybe that’s all I am. A body. A lesson. A punishment wrapped in skin.
He shoves me onto the couch, crawling over me like he owns every inch.
"You want me to believe you're mine?" he growls. “Then prove it.”
And I do.
Over and over.
Until my voice is gone and my body’s bruised and there’s nothing left but sweat and the taste of copper in my mouth.
---
Later, I lie on the floor. Naked. Shaking.
He stands over me, sipping whiskey like nothing happened.
“You’ve got 24 hours,” he says flatly.
“To what?”
“To prove you’re not feeding Navarro intel. Or I’ll cut out your tongue and send it to your old Bureau friends in a gift box.”
Then he tosses me a towel and walks away.
Like I never mattered.
Like none of this did.
---
But that’s the worst part.
It does matter.
It matters more than anything I’ve ever known.
And I think that’s why it’s going to destroy us both.
- Writer
