Chapter 5
My mouth still tastes like him, metal and heat and the stupid, sweet tang of something I never knew could be more than a wish.
My body is humming from the kiss, like someone struck a tuning fork inside my ribs and left it ringing.
Everything I ever let myself imagine—every secret, ridiculous, forbidden thing—is there in that bruise of a kiss, and it’s so much more.
I want more. I want to climb inside that single steady certainty I felt when his hand closed over mine.
I open my mouth to tell him exactly that, to tell him off for apologizing, to tell him he has no right to be sorry for saving us, when—
The SUV’s brakes whine, and the world shifts. The door slams. Angelo’s voice erupts, all heat and fists of words. He yanks me out by the elbow, cursing like a man who’s already decided what I owe him. Raffael gets out behind me, all coiled anger, ready to answer.
Angelo looks him over like he’s an insect under a thumb. “You’ve done your job,” he says, cold as a slab. “You’ll have our gratitude. This is between me and my sister. Get out of here.”
Raffael takes a step forward. His hand lifts, as if to argue, to put a hand on Angelo’s shoulder. He looks ready to trade the lot of them a single death if Angelo even thinks about touching me.
I see him about to make a mistake, a brave, stupid mistake that would get him broken because that’s how our world works. My body is still on fire from the kiss, and my lungs are full of air I don’t trust. I latch on to the only weapon I have that might keep him alive: my face.
I turn to him slowly, my expression hard, and make my voice a shard. “Go,” I say. “Now.”
It sounds small, but there’s an edge to it that surprises both of us.
He blinks. Hurt and confusion, and something like pleading, flicker across his face.
I want to tell him it’s not for him to take, that I’ll explain, that he can stay if he wants, but staying would get him killed. I force the rest down like a weight.
“I’m sorry. I was stupid. I made a mistake, but I’m with Angelo now. He’s my family. You’re not. Walk away before you make this yours.”
He stares for a beat that stretches like wire.
Angelo’s hand is a fist waiting to strike; the other men are watching.
Raffael’s chest rises and falls. I can see the calculation, the thing he’s weighing: his code against my command.
My command. I swallow the tiny, traitorous ache that wants to beg him to disobey, and I make myself look like I mean something again.
“Save your apologies,” I add. “You'll get your reward for saving me.”
It’s cruel. It’s a lie. It should feel like betrayal to send him away, but the truth is louder than any of that: if he stays, they’ll take him the way men take anything in our world—fast, only to kill him slow, and public.
I’d rather he live with the memory of my coldness than be remembered in the ledger of their brutality.
Raffael’s jaw works. For a second, his eyes find mine, and there is a storm there — hurt, something that looks dangerously like not listening to me.
He swallows. He gives me one last look, half question, half plea, then steps back.
Without another word, he turns, the movement practiced and efficient, and walks down the path that leads to the parking lot for the employees.
"I don't like the way he looked at you." Angelo snarls, staring after Raffael, and a new worry gnaws at my stomach. Without another word, he grabs me by the arm to haul me toward the house like I’m a thing to be returned to inventory.
He spatters apologies and curses into his phone, presumably talking to our father, before I can get out a word.
I let him, my jaw is tight, and my hands are shaking from the storm churning inside me.
A mistake. He called our kiss a mistake.
I should be petrified of what Daddy Dearest and Angelo will do to me; instead, all I can think about is the kiss.
A man doesn't kiss a mistake like that, does he?
I don't have any experience. None. I've never been kissed before, but deep down, I know nobody kisses someone like that if they don't have feelings. I might be na?ve to think so. But there it is.
"Are you even fucking listening to me?" Angelo fumes, and I notice we're in our father's study. Thank God he's gone for the weekend. Dealing with Angelo will be hard enough, but both of them?
“I’m sorry, Angelo. I won’t do anything like this ever again,” I say, and I mean it so hard my chest hurts.
He laughs, a wet, contemptuous sound that makes my skin crawl.
“Sorry?” he spits. “You think sorry fixes anything? You think a sorry puts the family back together? You’re a child who wanted to play at being dangerous and nearly got herself sold into the gutter.
Do you have any idea how stupid you look? How embarrassing?”
He steps closer until the scent of him—expensive cologne and old smoke—fills my nose. His hand flicks through my hair like I’m a stray; the motion is casual and full of the way he’s learned to handle things he owns.
“You’re nothing but a liability,” he says.
“A pretty liability, but a liability. You’ll be lucky if we don’t make an example of you.
” The words land like a promise. “We could send you somewhere you’d learn obedience.
Or we could marry you off so fast your head would spin, and your pride would be ground into dust. Maybe I’ll let someone break you, so you never forget who you belong to. ”
He’s smiling now, that slow, cruel smile that plays at his mouth when he thinks he’s clever.
He waves his hand like I’m a stain on his sleeve.
“Father will decide what to do with you, but this stupidity of yours will be punished. I never thought you were that smart to begin with, but this? This is the dumbest, most reckless thing you could have done.”
His insults are a machine: repetitive and grinding.
They thud against the inside of me the way they always do—practiced and familiar—because this is the language I grew up with.
I’ve heard the sneer, the dismissal, the way my mistakes are cataloged and stored like receipts.
I’ve learned how to flatten myself and let it pass.
It doesn’t stop them from hurting, but it teaches survival.
Under the anger and the shame, there’s a shard of something else: a hot, private ache that surprises me.
And yet—beneath the sting of Angelo’s words—I’m still humming with the memory of Raffael’s mouth on mine: urgent and terrible and so unbelievably real.
The way he pressed into me, the way his hands steadied and claimed without show or boast…
it felt like safety and danger at once. It felt like something I’d been starved of and didn’t know how to name.
Angelo paces and keeps talking, every syllable meant to shrink me.
I stand through it all and let the words land, because I learned long ago that arguing with a man like him only makes the punishment sharper.
But inside my head, the kiss replays, and with each loop, it grows less like a mistake and more like a wound and a want tangled together.
When I'm finally sent to my room, I still can't help but think about the kiss. He kissed me. I want to call Izzy and tell her all about it, but Angelo took my phone, telling me to kiss it goodbye for the foreseeable future. So I have no one to share this with.
Under the hot water, the sound of the shots comes back like they're lodged in my brain, loud pops that will loop forever. I close my eyes, and they’re not mine anymore; they belong to the night.
I see the white van, the way the man’s head snapped, the way Raffael moved like an animal, all of it in too-bright, too-fast flashes. My skin prickles.
I scrub at the bruise along my arm where his hand was, where a dark, angry welt is blooming, and the soap foams into my fingers.
When I shift my arm, the skin hurts, a dull, steady ache, proof that I was touched.
Proof that I was almost taken. My stomach twists, and a small, ugly pride rises up within it: he deserved it.
That man deserved to die. The blood goes down the drain, and a ridiculous, cold smile tugs at my mouth because I don’t have the faintest sympathy for a man like that.
The city will keep breathing without him. So will I.
Then the cold hits. Not from the water, no, this is a sliding, animal chill that curls under my ribs and makes my knees give out.
I sink to the tile and curl in, the shower turning the world into a small, wet cave where the noise of adults and anger and plans can’t get in.
Reality arrives in waves: Angelo’s hands on my sleeve, the disgust in his mouth, the way he talked about fixing me; the van; the smell of gunpowder and blood; the man’s hand on me; Raffael’s mouth on mine.
Each image is a stone thrown into my chest, and I drown in the splash.
My breath comes too fast. I taste copper and shampoo and the faint, obscene sweetness of adrenaline still in my throat.
My hands are trembling so hard I can barely scoop water to my face.
For the first time since the alley, the real tears come, hot and useless, and they don’t stop at the lashes.
They fall, and I let them. Let them be the thing that proves I’m still human and not the polished girl everyone expects me to be.
Some part of me is terrified of what those tears mean—weakness, softness, a crack Angelo will use—and another part is relieved because the knot in my chest needs to unwind somehow.
I press my palms to my temples and try to breathe like they taught us in school: in for four, hold for four, out for six.
It’s ridiculous. The rhythm stumbles; I can’t catch it.