Chapter 39
Chapter thirty-nine
Carlo
The roundabout looks exactly like every other piece of London infrastructure.
Unremarkable, functional, a place thousands of cars pass through every day without a second thought.
But from our position in the stolen van parked behind a lorry delivering office supplies, it feels like the center of the universe.
Everything hinges on the next few minutes.
I check my watch for the fifth time in as many minutes.
The prison transport should be here any moment, following the same route they’ve used every Tuesday and Friday for the past eighteen months.
Dante’s intelligence has been flawless so far, but that doesn’t stop the cold sweat breaking out across my forehead.
“Relax,” Pietro says from the driver’s seat. He’s the best wheelman I know, completely unflappable even when the job involves intercepting government vehicles in broad daylight. “You’re making me nervous with all that fidgeting.”
“Sorry.” I force myself to stop checking the time, stop adjusting my position, stop running through everything that could go wrong.
But Cristo, there’s so much that could go wrong.
The transport could be late, or early, or take a different route entirely. The guards could be armed. There could be backup vehicles we don’t know about. The whole thing could be a trap designed to catch people exactly like us doing exactly this.
And even if everything goes according to plan, even if we manage to extract Ginni without anyone getting killed, there’s still the question of what state we’ll find him in.
The contact Dante finally managed to reach inside the prison had been frustratingly vague. Ginni had been in a fight in the lunch hall, multiple injuries, taken to solitary confinement afterward. But no details about how bad the injuries were, or what might have happened to him in the days since.
The not knowing is eating me alive.
I think about my beautiful menace, alone in solitary, probably convinced I’ve abandoned him. The thought of him scared and hurt and thinking I don’t care enough to come for him is eviscerating me.
I’ve tried telling myself Ginni is safer in solitary. But I don’t believe it. I know guards can be worse than inmates. And thinking about that makes me want to scream.
He should never have been in that place. Should never have felt desperate enough to stab a policeman just to get my attention. Should never have doubted, even for a moment, that he was precious and wanted and absolutely worth fighting for.
I remember the conversation we had in the basement, when he was spiraling about his worth, about whether anyone would ever really want him. I’d told him that someday, someone was going to look at him and think, “That one, that’s the one for me, he’s crazy but he’s mine.”
I just wish I’d realized sooner that someone was me.
Ginni, with his impossible beauty and his fierce intelligence and his capacity for joy that can transform even the most mundane moments into something magical.
The way he sang for me, putting his whole heart into every note.
The way he looks at the flowers and candles, as if he is seeing the divine made manifest. The way he touches everything with such reverence, like the world is made of spun glass.
He should have been cherished his whole life. Should have grown up surrounded by people who saw his sensitivity as a gift rather than a flaw, who nurtured his creativity instead of trying to crush it out of him. Ginni should never have had to resort to kidnapping someone just to feel loved.
But his family sees him as an embarrassment. A problem to be managed and hidden away. And I was too fucking blind to see what was right in front of me until it was almost too late.
“There,” Pietro says quietly, nodding toward the road ahead.
The prison van comes into view, exactly on schedule. White with reinforced windows and government plates, flanked by a single escort car just like Dante predicted. It looks so ordinary, so unremarkable, except for the fact that somewhere inside is the most important person in the world.
“Remember,” I say into the radio, speaking to the crew positioned at various points around the roundabout, “minimal violence. We want this to look like an accident, not an assassination attempt.”
A chorus of acknowledgments crackles back through the static.
The van approaches the roundabout at a steady pace, the driver following normal traffic patterns, completely unaware that he’s about to become part of someone else’s plan.
Pietro eases our van forward, timing our approach perfectly. As the prison transport reaches the roundabout, a lorry that’s entering on the far side suddenly lurches forward, its driver apparently having mechanical difficulties.
The resulting collision isn’t serious enough to hurt anyone, but it’s spectacular enough to block two of the four exits from the roundabout. The escort car immediately moves to investigate, leaving the prison van momentarily isolated.
That’s our cue.
Pietro guns the engine, bringing us alongside the prison transport just as its driver realizes something’s wrong. I’m already moving, jumping from our van before we’ve come to a complete stop.
The rear door of the prison van opens as a guard tries to assess the situation outside. He’s middle-aged, soft around the middle, clearly not expecting to deal with anything more dangerous than a routine traffic incident.
I barrel into him with enough force to send him sprawling back into the van’s interior. His head slams against the metal floor hard enough to knock him out.
His partner, a younger man with nervous eyes, reaches for his radio, but my attention is focused entirely on the figure slumped beside him.
Ginni.
My heart stops beating entirely.
He’s barely recognizable. His beautiful face is a map of bruises, one eye swollen nearly shut, his lip split and crusted with dried blood. The prison uniform hangs loose on his frame, making him look smaller and more fragile than I’ve ever seen him.
But it’s the expression in his visible eye that destroys me. Hollow. Defeated. Like someone who’s given up hope entirely.
The younger guard still has his hand on Ginni’s arm, holding him in place with casual indifference to his obvious injuries. The sight sends rage through me so pure and violent that for a moment I can’t see anything but red.
“Get your hands off my wife!” I snarl.
The guard looks up at me with confusion and dawning terror, but he doesn’t let go fast enough. I move without conscious thought, my fist connecting with his jaw hard enough to snap his head back. He crumples immediately, joining his partner in unconsciousness.
Ginni stares at me with an expression I can’t read. Shock, maybe. Or disbelief. Like he’s seeing a ghost instead of the man who’s spent every waking moment of the last four days planning this rescue.
“Come on, Menace,” I say gently, reaching for him. “Let’s get you out of here.”
He doesn’t resist as I help him to his feet, but he doesn’t seem entirely present either. Like part of him is still trapped somewhere else, somewhere darker than this van.
We jump down from the transport together, and Pietro already has our vehicle positioned perfectly. I bundle Ginni into the back seat and throw myself in beside him as Pietro pulls away from the scene with the kind of smooth precision that makes him worth every penny I pay him.
In the distance, I can hear sirens, but they’re still far enough away that we should be clear long before they arrive. The whole operation took less than three minutes from start to finish. Clean, professional, exactly what Dante promised.
But none of that matters now. All that matters is the broken boy sitting beside me, staring at nothing with those haunted eyes.
I turn my full attention to Ginni, my hands moving over him automatically, checking for injuries I might have missed.
The bruises on his face are the worst of it, but there are others.
Defensive wounds on his arms, scraped knuckles that suggest he gave as good as he got in whatever fight landed him in solitary.
“Are you okay, baby?” I ask softly.
He doesn’t answer. Doesn’t even seem to hear me.
“Ginni?”
The worry in my voice finally seems to penetrate whatever fog he’s lost in. He blinks slowly, like someone waking from a dream.
“I got into a fight,” he says quietly.
“I can see that, sweetheart.” I brush a gentle finger across an unbruised patch of his cheek. “What happened?”
“They put me in solitary.”
“I’m sorry.” The words feel completely inadequate. Sorry doesn’t begin to cover the guilt eating at my chest, the knowledge that he suffered alone while I was making plans and gathering resources.
Silence stretches between us, filled only with the sound of London traffic and Pietro’s careful, yet swift navigation through the city.
But there’s something in Ginni’s expression that’s setting off alarm bells in my head.
Something haunted and deeply sad that goes far beyond just physical injuries.
“Did anyone...” I start, then stop. The question is too terrible to voice, but I have to know. “Did they...”
Ginni shakes his head quickly. “No.”
Relief floods through me.
“Would you still love me if they had?”
The question hits like a sucker punch, knocking all the air out of my lungs. The fact that he even has to ask, that he could doubt for even a second how I feel about him, makes my chest tight with something that feels like grief.
I cup his face carefully in my hands, mindful of the bruises, trying to pour everything I feel into my voice.
“Of course I would,” I tell him fiercely. “Nothing could ever change how much I love you. Nothing.”
He blinks at me, and for a moment some of the hollowness leaves his eyes.
“I had to bite a guard who wanted to,” he says matter-of-factly. “I bit him hard. There was so much blood and his screams were so high-pitched.”
The casual way he delivers this information, like he’s discussing the weather, tells me everything I need to know about what he’s been through. My beautiful, artistic boy, forced to violence just to protect himself from predators who saw his vulnerability as an invitation.
I lean forward and press a soft kiss to his forehead, breathing in the familiar scent of him underneath the institutional soap and fear-sweat.
“That’s my little Menace,” I murmur against his skin.
Ginni goes very still. When I pull back to look at him, he’s staring at me with an expression I can’t identify. Something between wonder and disbelief and terrible fragility.
He reaches out slowly, hesitantly, and pokes me gently on the nose.
“You can’t be real,” he whispers. “You can’t really have come for me. You don’t love me. I abducted you. I did terrible things to you.”
The broken way he says it, like he’s confessing to the worst sin imaginable, makes my heart crack in half. This is what he’s been telling himself. This is the story he’s been living with. That he’s a monster who deserves to be abandoned and forgotten.
“I am real,” I tell him, catching his hand and pressing it flat against my chest so he can feel my heartbeat. “I did come for you. And I do love you. More than anything in this world.”
He stares at me for a long, long time, searching my face for signs of deception or pity or obligation. Finding only the truth I should have told him years ago.
“Have I gone crazy again?” he asks in a small voice.
Instead of answering with words, I lean forward and kiss him. Soft and careful, mindful of his split lip, but real and warm and absolutely present.
When I pull back, his visible eye is wide with something that might be hope.
“No, my love,” I whisper. “This is very real.”
The sob that escapes him is heartbreaking in its intensity. All the fear and pain and abandonment of not only the last few days but an entire lifetime, pouring out of him in a single broken sound.
He climbs onto my lap like a child seeking comfort, curling himself against my chest with desperate need. His whole body is trembling like a leaf in a storm, and the quiet sounds he’s making are tearing my heart into smaller and smaller pieces.
I wrap my arms around him and hold on tight, my own tears falling silently onto his dark hair.
Because this is my fault. All of it. His desperation, his imprisonment, his suffering.
If I’d been brave enough to admit my feelings sooner, if I’d said yes to that hot chocolate invitation all those years ago instead of running scared from what I was beginning to feel. ..
“I’m so sorry I was so stupid for so long,” I whisper against his ear. “I should have said yes to that hot chocolate that day you were back from uni. I should have said yes and I should have stopped anything bad from ever happening to you.”
Futile words. Useless ones. Sentences that don’t even make sense, not least because the moment I’ve picked for my fantasy is still too late.
That day with him smiling at me, sweater slipping off his shoulder, is not soon enough.
That day was years after Ginni had been sent to conversion therapy.
Bad things had already happened to him. Terrible things.
Awful things done to him because he told his big brother he loved me.
And he still smiled at me with all the sunshine in the world.
Ginni doesn’t respond with words, just cries harder, his tears soaking through my shirt to the skin beneath and his grip on me tightens, like he’s afraid I might disappear if he lets go.
I think about how happy he was in the basement.
So exuberant, so capable of finding joy in simple things like a perfectly prepared meal or dancing alone to music only he could hear.
The way his whole face would light up when I smiled at him, like my approval was the only thing in the world that mattered.
Beneath his intensity and fondness for knives and abduction plots, Ginni is someone bright and joyful and precious.
And I’m never going to let anyone hurt him again.
As Pietro navigates us through London towards home, I hold my broken wife and make silent promises. Ginni is never going to have to cry like this again. Never going to doubt that he’s loved and wanted and perfect just the way he is.
I’m going to spend the rest of my life making sure he knows exactly how much he means to me.
Starting right now.