Chapter 2 Elena
ELENA
Later that night, I don’t sleep at all.
I sit on the edge of my bed with the lights off, the rest of my bedroom wrapped in shadows.
The soft hiss of the TV fills the room as Luca is tucked under the covers and curled up against my side like he always is.
The noise from the late-night talk show is only broken up by his small, steady breaths, and it’s the only thing keeping me from pacing around the room like a wild, caged animal.
Every creak of the building makes my spine lock.
Pipes groan from down the hallway in the bathroom.
The radiator clicks loudly when it kicks on in the living room.
A door slams from the neighbor’s apartment next door, and I nearly come out of my skin from the stress before I finally settle back down to my usual state of on-edge.
All I can do is listen and hope that this feeling of fear eventually passes so I can claim some sleep before sunrise.
But no matter what I do, my mind won’t stop spiraling back through every lie I’ve ever told since stepping onto U.S. soil with a forged passport and a fake surname I answer to without hesitation now.
The documents that say I was born somewhere I’ve never been have all but become muscle memory at this point, lines recited with simple prompt and little flair.
My neighbors only know me as the quiet single mother from Florence here on a work visa soon-turned-citizenship.
They wave to me every morning when we leave for the bookstore, always commenting on how polite Luca is whenever he greets them back and wishes them a good day.
None of them know the truth.
They don’t know that Luca’s father is a man whose name still haunts me whenever I think about it.
A man I once loved when I never should have allowed myself to.
He is someone whose world destroys everything it touches because that’s all men like him have ever known.
I can’t even say it out loud without feeling like I’m summoning an ancient curse down on myself.
No one knows that my son carries the blood of the Cosenza empire in his veins.
That his gray-green eyes that dozens of strangers compliment him on come from a family built on power and violence and loyalty written with dead bodies in their wake.
That if the wrong person looks at him too closely, or recognizes his features in any way, he won’t be just the child of a broke single mother anymore.
He’ll be used as leverage against the very family I ran from four years ago.
I press my hand over his forehead, brushing his soft hair back, and whisper, “I won’t let them take you… I swear it.”
I don’t realize how long I sit there until the darkness in the room begins to brighten, gray light creeping in through the windows like an unwelcome guest.
Dawn arrives quietly, indifferent to the night I’ve spent unraveling and torturing myself.
Luca stirs, mumbling something unintelligible under his breath, one small hand brushing the mattress as he turns in his sleep.
It forces me to stand, the movement sending a wave of dizziness through me.
I pause, gripping the edge of the nightstand until the room steadies, then make myself walk into the kitchen.
Locking myself inside this apartment all day won’t pay rent.
It won’t keep food in the fridge or on the table, and it definitely won’t get Luca into a better school someday far from this block and this tiny apartment with too-thin walls.
If I ever want that kind of future for him, I need every shift I can get and every dollar I’m given under the table.
I let out a soft, tired sigh and pull a pan from the rack. The familiar weight of it in my hand steadies me somewhat. I set it on the stove, twist the burner on, and listen to the quiet click-click-click of the flame catching before turning the temperature back down again.
I crack a few eggs into the pan, the yolks blooming yellow against the dull metal.
The smell of it hits the air, the comforting smell completely at odds with the chaos still twisting in my chest.
My hands move on autopilot, muscle memory taking over while my mind lags behind as I put two slices of toast into the toaster on the counter next to me.
With less than two years until Luca starts school, I’m living on borrowed time.
Right now, his world is small and unassuming.
Daycare forms can be vague if I ever need to place him in one temporarily to get better hours in time to save up funds for a private education.
Birth records and citizenship aren’t scrutinized while I’m working down at the bookstore and he’s toddling between the aisles greeting our patrons.
My boss/landlord doesn’t question why I avoid pediatricians tied too closely to major hospital networks or refuse to go to the same GP as his granddaughters.
So far, I’ve been able to keep Luca close to me without anyone asking questions as to why.
But school is different.
School means paperwork that gets passed through offices and databases I can’t control.
It means enrollment forms, immunization records, emergency contacts and teachers asking questions when stories don’t add up.
Administrators always double-check the finer details and someone somewhere will notice the inconsistencies that I can’t explain away because they were all manufactured to begin with.
I won’t have answers that hold up under real scrutiny.
I’ve built our life out of careful omissions and just-good-enough lies that strangers would never care enough to question me on.
So far, that’s been enough, but time eventually erodes everything. Every year that passes narrows my margin for error by that much more.
Not to mention Luca himself is growing.
He already asks more questions about where we’re from and why we don’t visit family than he ever has.
It’s normal for him to wonder why everyone else has grandparents and he doesn’t.
I can only dodge them with smiles and half-truths because he’s young now, but one day, he’ll want real answers and I won’t be able to give them to him without completely compromising everything I’ve tried to bury in the past.
That’s the real truth that keeps me awake at night, the real reason I don’t let myself relax or let myself imagine staying in one place for too long.
I can’t.
But what do I do? What can I do?
The questions circle endlessly until they blur together into a dull ache behind my eyes.
I sigh and press the heel of my hand against my forehead, wincing as the pressure blooms into what I know will soon be a full-fledged migraine.
My pulse throbs there relentlessly, a warning I can’t ignore no matter how badly I want to.
Think, Elena. You’ve survived worse than this.
The eggs on the stove hiss and spit, the smell of them suddenly nauseating.
I drag in a breath and let it out slowly, trying to ground myself in the ordinary of breakfast and routine.
If I can just make it through the morning, maybe the panic will ease.
But right when I turn the burner down, that’s when I hear it—heavy footsteps coming up the stairwell.
The sound cuts through the apartment with brutal clarity, not muffled or distant like the ones I’ve trained myself to ignore from my neighbors coming and going next door.
These land with purpose, echoing up the stairwell like a countdown.
My breath catches in my throat as my body goes utterly still, every muscle locking as if I’ve suddenly been turned to stone.
I don’t move.
I can’t.
All that exists is the sound of those footsteps climbing closer and closer until they reach my floor, and then they stop right outside my door.
The silence that follows is worse.
It stretches, heavy and oppressive, filling every corner of the apartment until it feels like I’m breathing it in instead of air.
I stand there in the middle of my kitchen, fear coiled tight in my chest, knowing that whatever I’ve been running from has finally caught up, just as I feared.
I should’ve run last night. I should’ve packed up our things the second that SUV pulled away from the curb because my gut has never truly been wrong. I should’ve taken Luca and disappeared before dawn, before whoever that man was climbing out of that SUV decided I was worth coming back for.
A sound breaks the silence.
It’s the unmistakable twist of the lock at the front door.
The noise moves through the apartment, ricocheting off the walls like a gunshot going off inside my skull.
I hear the chain catch as the door begins to open slowly, pausing before it’s rattled to test the chain’s strength.
For half a second, my body betrays me. I’m frozen in place with my hands curled uselessly at my sides.
Every nerve in my body screams move, run, hide, while my muscles remain locked in place, unresponsive as if fear itself has turned me to stone.
Then the door explodes inward.
The chain snaps with a violent crack, the force of it rattling the walls.
The sound is deafening, chaos crashing into the apartment in a rush of motion and noise that I barely have time to register before masked men appear.
My fragile illusion of safety shatters in an instant.
I scream and lunge for the first thing within reach—the pan still hot from the stove—and swing with everything I have at the man who enters the kitchen first. It catches him square in the shoulder, the impact hard enough to jar my arm down to the bone.
He barely flinches.
Another man barrels into the kitchen from behind him and is on me instantly, fingers like steel bands around my arm as he wrenches me down and pries the pan out of my hand, tossing it away from me.
My knees slam into the floor, but I don’t give in. I fight anyway, kicking and clawing and twisting in his grip as pure instinct takes over.
“Let go!” I scream.
Luca’s cry rips through me, echoing from the bedroom. “Mama!”
Something feral breaks loose inside me.
I don’t think, I just move.
Tearing myself free with a scream, my skin burns as I wrench out of the grip trying to pin me to the floor.
I land a solid punch against his jaw and sprint for the bedroom.
A third man has Luca by the front of his shirt, holding him up like a bomb about to detonate.
Luca’s wails fill the room as tears streak down his flushed cheeks while he reaches for me.
“Mama!”
“He’s just a baby. Put him down. I’ll do whatever you want!” I sob.
An arm locks around my body from behind and I’m wrenched backward, my feet sliding out from under me as I’m thrown hard onto the floor.
The impact rattles my teeth while pain blooms sharp and hot along my spine, a choked noise leaving me.
I twist and claw, raking my nails down the exposed skin around the mask of the man pinning me to the floor, feeling skin split beneath my fingers.
He grunts, startled more than hurt, and I scream until my throat burns.
I kick blindly, every movement fueled by one thought alone. Luca. Luca. Luca.
Then a sharp blow slams into my face.
The pain is immediate and blinding.
My head snaps back violently and strikes the floor with a hollow thud.
The world explodes into white-hot stars, my vision fracturing and swimming as nausea rolls through me in waves.
For a moment, I’m not sure where I am or who I am.
When I finally blink through the haze, shapes begin to sharpen once again. The man pinning me moves, a gloved hand coming up to wipe at his face while another takes his place.
The man hovering over me moves unnervingly silently. His mask hides his face, but my eyes snag on his hand as it lowers to the weapons strapped at his hip.
A gold ring on his pinky… this up close, I spot the serpent coiled in on itself, twisted into a figure-8.
My breath stutters painfully as he lifts his other hand and reaches for his mask. When he pulls it off, there’s no mistaking him.
Leonardo Sarto.
One of his most trusted men. Loyal to the bone, a shadow at Don Dante Cosenza’s right hand for as long as I can remember.
I’ve seen him kill without blinking. I’ve even seen him smile while doing it.
His gaze settles on me, calm and assessing, like I’m nothing more than an inconvenience.
“You always cause such a ruckus,” he murmurs. His voice is almost amused sounding, as if this is a familiar irritation he’s long since given up on rectifying.
To him, maybe it is just that.
I try to move or scream, but darkness rushes in before I can do either.
It’s belated that I realize the toe of a boot is pressed to my windpipe, conveniently resting hard enough to cut off any incoming oxygen.
My hands come up to claw at it, but with no strength left in me, they flop uselessly to my sides.
And then there is nothing at all.