Chapter 9
Elowen
Bruno tugs at the leash, and I know who’s here.
I let go of both Rosie’s and Bruno’s leashes, and they sprint to the same place they went yesterday.
I follow them. Just like yesterday, he’s standing against the wall, patting Bruno and Rosie the same way Salvario used to, maybe that's why they like him.
Because to them as well, he looks like Salvario with a new face.
He isn’t Salvario. I tell myself again, and again when he looks up as I reach him.
“I want to ask you something,” I say, dragging my focus from his eyes, from the way he’s looking at me.
He nods.
“Were you following me that day?” The question has been nagging at me. “I spotted you at every location I visited. It can’t be a coincidence.”
“I thought you were someone else,” he intones.
Before he opened his mouth, it was just his build, his hair, his eyes making me uneasy.
Now his voice has made it ten times worse.
He doesn’t have the faint Italian accent Salvario had, but everything else is the same, the exact same baritone, the way he forms words, the way he pauses, the speed of his speech. Every single thing.
“Just as I thought,” I murmur, more to myself.
He nods slightly.
After this morning, I can tell it’s not something he wants to discuss.
Anything that touches on Salvario makes him stiff—yes, I observed him, despite having no business doing so.
I can’t shake the similarities between them.
The first day I met him, I was devastated.
Seeing him dragged me down into the black swamp of believing Salvario was dead.
It took Amber six sessions straight to pull me out of it, out of the suicidal thoughts, too.
Then yesterday, he said he could find Salvario in exchange for the city. All my dead hopes came back to life. For the first time in months, I fell asleep with the wish of waking up the next day.
Then this morning he showed up, and he sat, talked, moved, stared—just like him.
At first I was surprised by the similarities, minor and major, and then the more I observed him, the more I saw my Salvario in him.
Which is absurd, any person in her right mind would call this my biggest delusion yet, but I’m not normal anymore.
The day he vanished from my sight after crushing my heart, I stopped being normal.
And after eighteen months of waiting and dying little by little, nothing close to normal is left in me.
“Who did you think I was?” I ask, dragging myself out of my head.
“Someone I was looking for.”
He clearly doesn’t want to tell me. But I want to know. So I keep going.
“Your girlfriend?”
He shakes his head.
“Then your crush?”
He nods slowly.
“And did you find her?”
He nods again.
“Who is she?”
“Doesn’t matter. She loves someone else.”
I bite the inside of my lower lip, unsettled by his constant low-blink stare and the opaque answers he’s giving me.
I look away from him, down to Bruno and Rosie, who are sitting between us. I gather their leashes. They both look up at me, then back at Hunter.
“They would love it if you joined us for a walk,” I falter, unsure—not of his answer, but of my own request. I shouldn’t indulge myself with him.
He nods.
We start walking down the empty alley in silence. The sound of our footsteps and the dogs’ paws on the pavement is too loud in the quiet evening. In the distance, I can hear the footsteps of my bodyguards.
“Where are you from?” I venture.
“Toronto.”
“Were you born there?”
“Yes.”
He sounds native.
“Do you know my father or brother?” He looks at me. I turn my head toward him. “You didn’t ask about my family this morning.”
“I know them. Your brother is an investor in our startup.”
“Do you know their connection with the underworld?”
“Our startup only has use in the underworld.”
I look ahead. “So you’re from their world. That means you could be an enemy,” I toss out, light, almost joking.
“Not yours,” he murmurs, the words almost lost. But the silence carries them to me.
“My family?”
“I have no loyalty to your family.”
“My brother is your investor,” I point out.
“That means business, not loyalty.”
I glance at his face. “Who are you loyal to?”
His gaze locks onto mine. “To people I would willingly die for.”
“Do you have someone like that? A boss, a don, whatever you people call it?”
He doesn’t answer. I think I’m poking my nose too deep into his business.
But I have to be sure he won’t harm my family.
The thought sounds like a stupid joke, my family doesn’t need me worrying about them; they’re more than capable of protecting themselves.
As long as I keep myself out of harm’s way, that’s more than enough help to them.
And from what I can see, the Blackwood brothers aren’t a problem for me.
I’m doing business with them, and that’s it, minus him being a copy of Salvario with a different face.
We walk out of the alley onto a livelier roadside that curves around a cluster of houses and leads us toward the side of our homes.
I don’t ask him anything else, so we keep walking in silence.
He doesn’t speak, but every now and then I feel his eyes on me.
And the crazy part of my mind—the part illogically convinced he’s Salvario, even knowing he’s from an entirely different country—takes it as if Salvario is watching me.
The effect on my body is like being set near a furnace after being buried in ice.
It’s so warm, so comforting, I want to curl beside that furnace and forget the ice I was freezing in.
Hunter’s house comes first, and Bruno tenses. I kneel down and hug his neck. He lets out a whimper, looking at Hunter.
I kiss his face. “You can meet him again tomorrow.”
He gives me his sad puppy face. Hunter bends down and pats his head. Rosie leans in too, asking for the same. I rub both their backs.
I look up at him. “You can go in. I’ll settle them.”
He nods, slowly straightening up, and after staring at me for a whole minute as though he wants to memorize me, he slides open his gate and disappears inside, leaving the impact of that unwavering gray gaze etched into my pounding heart.
He isn’t Salvario. I repeat the mantra in my head, but it’s useless.
No one has ever watched me the way Salvario did, like I’m the only thing worth seeing, and looking away costs too much.
How do I make myself believe that the only other man who looks at me the exact same way—with the same body, the same eyes, the same voice—isn’t Salvario?
What if he changed his face and is lying to me for God knows what reason?
If he had behaved like this after meeting me a few times, I could have accepted it, but from the very first moment, he’s been this way.
Bruno nudges his nose against my chin, pulling me out of the storm in my head. I kiss his head, then Rosie’s, and rise to my feet.
Hunter
“Chris was asking for you,” Logan says from the living room as soon as I enter the house. “I told him you’d gone out for a walk.”
I settle onto the couch across from him. “Why did he call?”
“To check on the work. I told him we’ve gotten close to Alessio’s daughter by promising to find her missing boyfriend. He was pleased. I didn’t mention the deal you made with her.”
I nod.
“By the way, how was the walk?”
“Good.”
“Did you talk with her?”
I shrug. “I answered her questions.”
He groans. “That’s not how you get the girl. You have to put in effort. You have to open your mouth, say things that replay in her head when she goes to sleep. You have to do things that make her feel like you care. Just existing doesn’t work, especially when you already have a rival.”
“I don’t know how to do any of that,” I state.
“Don’t worry, your brother’s still here,” he announces, patting his chest. “First step: start a conversation. You must have questions, like her favorite food, favorite vacation spot, favorite band.”
I shake my head. “Her favorite food is sushi. Her favorite vacation spot is Norway. And her favorite band is Hamster and Plot.”
He runs a hand through his hair. “How the hell do you know that?”
“I hacked her Instagram using the phone number she gave me this morning.”
She has a private profile under the handle flyingpickle.
She hasn’t posted anything in the past year and a half, but she used to post often before that.
She has only a handful of followers, all family and friends.
Her family likely keeps her information as private as possible, there’s nothing about her in the media. To the world, she doesn’t exist.
From that profile, I learned that she used to perform at major concert halls and is a renowned pianist under the stage name Ella, whose music I’ve been listening to obsessively for the past six months. The more I learn about her, the more I realize she is the core of all my obsessions.
He snorts. “But you can’t tell her that. So ask her anyway. Girls love talking about the things they’re into.”
“I can’t fake conversation.”
He purses his lips. “You think you know everything now. I bet once you ask her and she answers, you’ll realize you know very little.”
That makes sense.