7. Serena
SERENA
Matteo sleeps in front of Lucia’s door with a gun under his coat and one of her pink sofa cushions beneath his head.
It has a llama on it. The llama is wearing sunglasses.
This would be funnier if the man hadn’t just torched a nine-year career—and every safe house, contact, and paycheck that came with it—to keep my husband from locking me in a luxury flat.
I stand in the dark hallway and look down at him.
His eyes open. Immediately.
He doesn’t move, but his right hand slides toward the coat.
“It’s me,” I whisper.
His hand stops.
“Are you all right?”
“I needed the bathroom.”
He looks at the bathroom door three feet away.
“Right.”
Lucia’s sofa is approximately the size of a large suitcase. It folds out into the bed where I’m supposed to be sleeping.
“There’s a chair in the kitchen,” I say.
“It doesn’t face the door.”
“You no longer work for Rocco.”
“Danger didn’t resign with me.”
There’s no drama in the way he says it. I lean against the wall.
“Are you going to tell me why you quit?”
“You know why.”
“I know you disobeyed an order. That’s not the same thing.”
He sits up. The llama cushion falls into his lap. For the first time since I met him, Matteo looks embarrassed.
“He told me to bring you back by force if necessary,” he says.
My bare toes curl against the cold floor.
“What does that mean?”
“It means I was meant to put you in the car whether you agreed or not.”
“Would you have hurt me?”
“No.”
Instant. Certain. The answer shouldn’t feel as good as it does.
“Would Rocco?” I ask.
Matteo looks away.
“He’d never mean to.”
That’s not an answer. It’s worse.
The baby’s quiet. Knowing that is normal doesn’t help.
“Go to bed,” Matteo says.
“Bossy for an unemployed man.”
His mouth moves. Almost.
“Try to sleep, Serena.”
I do.
I lie on Lucia’s narrow sofa bed and listen to Matteo breathing on the other side of the wall.
I miss Rocco.
I miss his heavy arm across my waist. I miss the way he steals the blanket and denies it with legal-level confidence. I miss his hand finding my stomach even when he’s asleep.
My body misses him too. Traitor that it is.
I can still feel him against my back at the front door. His mouth on my neck. The way he said my name like it cost him something.
Then he put me on a plane.
He wanted my body Monday night and doubted my word Tuesday morning. Both are true.
I press my palm to the cold sheet where his weight should be and hate myself for wanting it back.
I cry into Lucia’s pillow so quietly neither of them hears.
Three days later, the sofa bed has developed a personal hatred for my spine.
Lucia says it’s vintage.
I say so is lead paint.
She throws a cushion at me. Not the llama. Matteo has claimed that one.
Life in my sister’s flat isn’t glamorous.
The kitchen window sticks open half an inch and lets in enough cold air to refrigerate the bread. One of the upstairs neighbors owns a small dog with the feet of a horse.
I love all of it.
Nobody blocks the door. Nobody takes my passport. Nobody tells me my sister hasn’t been cleared.
The first morning, Matteo retrieves my luggage from the protected flat. He comes back with only one suitcase.
“Where’s the other one?” I ask.
“Harris wouldn’t release it.”
“On whose authority?”
Matteo gives me a look. Right. My husband’s.
“What did he give you?” Lucia asks.
I open the suitcase.
Two dresses. Three sweaters. Underwear. Toiletries. Prenatal vitamins. One pair of shoes.
My passport isn’t in there. Neither is my jewelry. The green dress is gone too, and that one I don’t miss.
I’d rather walk naked through Edinburgh than wear that dress again.
Probably.
“Enough for a week,” Matteo says.
“How helpful of them,” Lucia says.
She opens her own wardrobe. My sister is five inches shorter and enjoys clothes that fit like a legal threat.
At four months pregnant, I do not.
She finds a pair of black leggings, an oversized red jumper, and a maternity dress she bought by mistake online because she never reads size charts.
“Why did you keep this?” I ask.
“Spite.”
“Toward whom?”
“The return process.”
I put it on. It’s blue with small white flowers and makes me look like a sofa in a cheerful doctor’s office.
Four days ago I had a closet arranged by color. Now I’m wearing my sister’s online mistake because my own clothes are hostage in a flat I’m not allowed to enter.
The joke is easier than the arithmetic of how far I’ve fallen.
I enter the kitchen. His eyes pause.
Not on my breasts. Not on my stomach. On the flowers.
“Do not,” I warn him.
“My face is professionally neutral.”
“You’re unemployed. Your face has lost its credentials.”
Lucia laughs so hard she snorts tea through her nose. For ten minutes, I forget my marriage is on fire.
Then my phone lights up on the table.
Rocco: Are you safe?
The laughter stops inside me.
He asks the same question every morning.
Are you safe?
Not Do you hate me? Not Do you still love me? Not Can I come get you?
Safe.
The word he uses when he wants control to sound like care.
I do not answer.
Matteo sees the name. He looks away.
He never asks what Rocco says. He never tells me to answer.
That matters too.
That night, Lucia comes home with three foil containers from the restaurant and enough anger to warm the whole flat.
“Sit,” she tells Matteo.
He’s standing beside the window.
“I’m fine.”
“That wasn’t a health question.”
She puts a container in front of him.
“Sit.”
Matteo looks at me.
“Do not involve me,” I say. “I’m frightened of her.”
“Correct,” Lucia says.
He sits.
Dinner is fish stew, thick bread, and roasted potatoes covered in enough garlic to keep every vampire out of Edinburgh.
For five minutes, nobody mentions Rocco. It’s the longest five minutes of my week.
I tell her the upstairs dog has started running laps at two every morning. Matteo eats like a man who expects somebody to take the plate if he slows down.
“When did you last have a proper meal?” I ask.
He looks at the stew.
“This is proper.”
“Before this one.”
“On the plane.”
“You had coffee on the plane.”
“Coffee is a meal in several countries.”
Lucia points her spoon at him. “Not this one.”
His phone vibrates against the table. One letter appears on the screen.
R.
Matteo turns it facedown. The room changes anyway.
“You can answer,” I say.
“No.”
“He was your boss for nine years.”
“He fired me.”
“You quit.”
“He disagreed with my timing.”
The phone vibrates again. Then a third time.
“What if something happened?” I ask.
I hate how quickly the fear comes.
Rocco could be hurt. Rafe could’ve escaped. Vittorio could’ve decided my exile wasn’t enough.
Matteo reads my face. He answers.
“Yes.”
Not boss. Just yes.
Rocco speaks long enough that Matteo pushes his plate away.
“She’s safe.”
Another pause.
“That’s all I’ll tell you.”
My spoon stops halfway to my mouth.
Rocco says something sharp. Matteo’s face hardens.
“You no longer give me orders.”
He ends the call.
“What did he want?” I ask.
“Your address.”
“Did you tell him?”
“No.”
Relief comes first. Pain follows.
My husband doesn’t know where I am.
That’s what I wanted. It still hurts.
“What else?”
“He wants me to hand protection back to his team.”
“Are you going to?”
“Do you want me to?”
The question surprises me.
“No.”
“Then no.”
Simple again.
Lucia looks between us.
“What did quitting cost you?” she asks.
Matteo picks up his spoon.
“A job.”
“Do not be annoying in my kitchen.”
He sighs.
“The flat I lived in belongs to a Castellano company—Meridian, on paper. My car’s registered through the security office. My accounts are mine, but they’ll be watched. And most of my contacts won’t take my calls until they know whether Rocco’s going to have me killed for walking.”
My stomach drops.
“Does he?”
“I did not ask.”
“Matteo.”
“He doesn’t kill men in anger.”
“That’s not comforting.”
“It wasn’t meant to be.”
Guilt settles heavily in my stomach.
“You gave up your home.”
“It was furnished.”
“Your car.”
“It was ugly.”
“Your entire life.”
He sets down his spoon.
“No.”
The word is quiet.
“I gave up a job when the job required me to hurt someone I was meant to protect.”
I turn my face away before he sees too much of it.
Across an ocean, my husband is asking whether I’m safe.
At Lucia’s tiny table, the man he sent to control me has lost everything to let me choose.
I do not know what to do with that.
So I take another bite of stew. Lucia pushes the bread toward Matteo. Nobody speaks for a while.
It’s the safest silence I’ve felt in days.
Matteo builds a new protection plan around what I agree to. I hate that the phrase sounds radical.
He changes Lucia’s locks because the back one can be opened with “a firm opinion.” He walks the alley and the stairwell, clocking sightlines and exits the way a man does when he’s spent nine years expecting the worst one to be used.
He gives both of us an emergency number that goes to him, not the Castellanos.
He doesn’t put cameras inside. He asks before standing outside the bathroom window to check the fire escape.
“Where are you staying?” I ask that evening.
He’s at the kitchen table with a map, two phones, and the expression of a man who regrets every choice that led him to my sister’s floral tablecloth.
“Here.”
“You can’t keep sleeping on the floor.”
“I can.”
“Lucia has a spare room.”
“Lucia has a cupboard with a mattress in it.”
“That’s the spare room.”
“It has no view of the entrance.”
“You really know how to make a woman feel safe and guilty at the same time.”
“I’m working on the guilty part.”
I stop. That sounded almost like a joke.
Matteo sees my face.
“Do not make a thing of it.”
“Too late.”
He returns to the map. The corner of his mouth lifts.
I feel it anyway.
Not desire. Not yet.
Relief.
Somebody in this flat can make a mistake, admit it, and try again.
My standards are currently in the basement.
On the fourth morning, Lucia has to work.
She manages a restaurant two streets from Princes Street and has spent three days pretending it can run without her.
It cannot.
Apparently the fish supplier and the new sous-chef are in a blood feud over haddock.
I am jealous.
“You need food,” she says while putting on earrings.
“There’s food.”
She opens the refrigerator.
Half a carton of eggs. Mustard. A piece of cheese with an uncertain future. Three bottles of tonic water.
“We have ingredients,” I correct.
“Go shopping.”
I look at Matteo. He’s checking the street from the window.
“Am I allowed?” I ask.
His face tightens at the word. Good.
“Do you want to go?”
“Yes.”
“Then we go.”
Simple.
The baby moves low in my stomach. I smile before I can stop myself.
Lucia sees.
“Was that a kick?”
“Maybe.”
She drops her handbag and puts both hands on my stomach.
“I don’t control the baby.”
“You married a Castellano. Control is apparently a family hobby.”
I laugh. Lucia kisses my cheek and leaves for work.
The shop is six minutes away. Matteo turns it into twelve.
He checks two routes, changes direction once, and pauses outside a pharmacy window long enough to make sure nobody behind us pauses too.
He does it without grabbing my arm or ordering me into a car. He explains each change.
“Man in the gray coat,” he says quietly.
I look.
“Do not look.”
“You need to give instructions in the right order.”
“He’s passed twice. He’s lost.”
“How do you know?”
“He’s holding a paper map upside down.”
The man turns around again, sees a street sign, and swears loudly. Matteo relaxes by half an inch.
This is what protection looks like when it doesn’t feel like punishment.
Inside the shop, he takes a basket.
“I can carry that.”
“I know.”
He carries it anyway.
I buy bread, fruit, pasta, cereal, milk, chocolate, and enough vegetables to make Lucia suspicious.
Matteo adds ginger biscuits when he thinks I’m not looking. I let him.
At the register, I take out my usual card. The cashier taps it. The machine beeps.
DECLINED.
“Again, please,” I say.
She tries. Declined.
Heat climbs my neck.
The woman behind us sighs. Her toddler is trying to eat the corner of a magazine.
“There must be a mistake.”
I open the banking app. The account appears for one second. Then a red banner covers the screen.
ACCESS RESTRICTED. CONTACT PRIMARY ACCOUNT HOLDER.
Primary account holder. Rocco Castellano.
The money was never mine. His name at the top of it, always, and one call from a warehouse to shut the tap. My hand starts shaking.
Matteo puts his own card on the reader.
“No,” I say.
“People are waiting.”
The toddler has moved on to licking the shopping cart. He has a point.
Matteo pays.
I walk out of the shop without the groceries. Rain hits my face. I call the bank from the pavement.
The woman on the line asks for my security code, my address, and the last four digits of the card. Then she becomes very careful.
“Mrs. Castellano, the account was restricted by the primary holder four days ago.”
The day Rocco sent me away.
“Restricted how?”
“All cards and transfers are frozen.”
“Why?”
“The note says security concerns.”
Security.
Rocco didn’t only send me away.
He froze my money.