Chapter 16
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Amanda
The chair scrapes the floor as Valentino drags it close to the bed. I pull the blanket higher, like a shield from the memories.
"I know you're not ready," he says. "But we don't have much time."
"That's reassuring." I try to joke but it comes out rough, raw, and shaky. "Nothing makes a girl feel safe like a deadline."
"Can you tell me what happened?"
His eyes show pity, already deciding I'm fragile, but he's too polite to say so. I am so tired of people deciding things about me.
"Why are we here, Valentino?" My voice comes out smaller than I want it to. "And don't say safe. You've used up your allotted safes for the week. Where is here? Whose house is this? Why does Elio keep looking at me like I'm a vase he dropped?"
He doesn't blink. "I need to know what happened first."
"That's not how conversations work. That's not even how negotiations work, and you people negotiate for a living."
"Amanda."
Just my name, but he says it softly enough that I stop.
Damn him.
Because I know what he’s asking for. Not the argument. Not the sharp little pieces I keep throwing at him so he has to deal with those instead.
The truth.
"Okay." I press my palms flat against the blanket. "Okay. Just give me a second. It's not in order.”
"It doesn't have to be in order."
I nod.
The words don't come all at once. I have to drag them out piece by piece.
"I went to the powder room." The marble gleamed under soft lighting. Gold taps caught the light. In the mirror, my reflection looked expensive and completely fine. "You gave me six minutes. I was being a brat about it." A laugh catches in my throat.
"And then Francesca. She said there was someone I needed to meet. Someone important."
"You went with her."
"I did." I force myself to hold his gaze. "I know. You told me to find you if anyone tried to lead me away. I know." I swallow. "But it didn't feel like that. It was work. Just another room. Another buyer."
I've done it a thousand times.
He nods once. He doesn't tell me I should have known.
He doesn't have to.
"She took me down a corridor. To a private room. There were people inside. A few." I force myself to keep going. "And there was a man. He stood when I came in. Took my hand."
My fingers curl into the blanket.
The memory doesn't come back all at once. It's in fragments that scrape against each other. Fluorescent light reflecting off a polished desk. The faint smell of wine. His hand closing around mine and not releasing when courtesy should have ended the gesture.
"Aldo," I say. "Aldo something. Obviously he had a last name, but I can't—it's gone."
The name feels detached from everything else about those horrible moments, floating loose while everything around it remains lodged beneath my skin.
"He was attractive. Effortlessly so. The kind of man who understood exactly how he appeared to other people."
I stare at a wrinkle in the blanket because looking anywhere else feels impossible.
"He talked about the campaign. Not in generalities. He knew details. Conversations I'd had. Problems we'd been dealing with. Things that made it seem like he'd been paying attention."
At the time, it felt flattering. Reassuring. Like meeting someone competent in a room full of strangers. Now every remembered smile feels contaminated by what came after.
"I trusted him almost immediately," I say quietly. "At least, that's what it felt like. Looking back, I don't think trust is the right word. Something in me responded to him almost right away. Before I'd consciously formed an opinion at all."
I swallow.
"I didn't trust him entirely. But I can't honestly say I didn't trust him either.”
Something in what I said makes his expression tighten.
His hand has settled on his thigh. The knuckles are split and swollen, the scabs still fresh.
I look at him, and a question forms that I'm not ready to ask.
"Keep going," he says, his voice steady.
"He talked. God, he talked. About not caring about fashion. About his mother. About money, investments..." I shake my head. "I stopped listening."
I pull at a loose thread on the blanket, understanding the feeling. I feel like I'm unraveling too.
"And then Francesca was gone. There were fewer people in the room." I swallow. "I remember thinking I should leave. That it was time to smile, make an excuse, and go."
The words hang between us. I wait for the memory to continue, for the next piece to fall into place. It doesn't.
Everything after that is blurred at the edges, disconnected fragments that refuse to become a whole.
"The room moved." I hate how even my voice sounds when I say it.
Too calm. Too clear. "Not me. The room. The floor went sideways and my legs went out from under me.
I sat down hard. Or fell. I don't know. Maybe he caught me, and I remember wrong.
" I pause, allowing more memories to build.
When the next one forms, I want to shove it back down.
"I can still feel his hand on my back." A violent shudder wracks my body, and nausea swims up my throat at the memory. The sensation. "‘You need air, bella.’ I tried to tell him no, but I couldn't get the word out. I couldn't get anything out."
I'm not crying. That feels wrong. Like I should be.
"After that, it's pieces." I press my hand over my eyes. "Lamps. Carpet. The floor against my cheek. Someone rolling me over. A phone flash."
My words die in my throat. I have to stop because if I keep talking for another second, I'm afraid I'll remember too much. The fragments I've been forcing out start colliding with each other, trying to become something whole, and I don't want them to. I don't want to see it clearly.
"A-a hand on my jaw when I tried to turn my face.
Someone spit on me." The violation burns, deep and humiliating.
My heart is pounding so hard it hurts, and suddenly I'm back there, trapped inside flashes of sensation instead of memories.
The smell of alcohol. The weight of hands.
The helpless certainty that something was wrong while my body refused to listen to me.
I drag in a shaky breath and stare at nothing, trying to get control before the panic swallows me whole. "Then h-he—put his mouth on me."
Valentino doesn't move. Doesn't speak. His silence is somehow worse than if he raged.
"I gagged." I admit quietly. "I wanted to throw up. I couldn't."
"Amanda." His voice is rough now. "You can stop."
"He said it was a reminder." The words keep coming now, one after another.
"For asking about the girls. The bruises.
For looking at things I shouldn't look at.
" My fingers twist in the blanket. "He stroked my hair.
I can't stop thinking about that part. How gentle he was.
Like he was trying to comfort me while he said it.
He told me loud girls need reminders they can feel in the morning. "
For a second, the only thing I hear is Valentino's watch. I shouldn't be able to hear it. Not from where he's sitting. Not over my own breathing. But I do. Each tick sounds louder than the last.
"And then I don't know." I lower my hand and look at him. "I don't know what happened after that. I don't know how much I remember and how much is missing. There's a point where everything just... stops. I don't know if it stops because they stopped, or because I stopped remembering."
I swallow, but it doesn't help.
"I don't know what happened to me after that. I don't know what they did to me."
Valentino doesn't answer. He leans forward, elbows on his knees, his battered hands hanging between them, and for the first time since I've known him, he looks like a man without a solution.
My gaze catches on those hands. On the raw skin across his knuckles. On the dark stains dried there.
I nod toward his knuckles. "Whose blood is that?" I whisper. "On your hands. Whose is it?"
Valentino
"Mine, mostly." That's true. My knuckles look like I went three rounds with a brick wall, because I did, except the wall had a face. "Some of it isn't."
I sit so I'm level with her instead of looming. Her one stupid shoe is still sitting on the chair across from me. I stare at it for a second. She watches me like it matters, and maybe it does.
She's wearing my shirt. I don't say anything about it. Thinking about it is already more than I should be doing.
Hours ago, I peeled her out of that pink dress because every time I looked at it, all I could think about was what he'd done to her, and I couldn't stand the idea of her waking up still wrapped in it.
I couldn't leave her in it. I found one of my own shirts in the closet here, left behind on some job months back, gray and worn soft, and dressed her in it without looking at anything I had no right to look at.
My eyes stayed on the ceiling. Every movement remained careful. Undressing unconscious women isn't new to me, but nothing had ever cost me what that did. No pride remains in admitting how hard the fight was against a thought that had no place in that room.
I kept my hands where they needed to be and nowhere else. That's all that matters.
"I need to tell you what happened," I say. "And after I do, there are going to be some things that change. You're probably not going to like them. But you deserve to know why."
"Then tell me.”
So I do.
I tell her how I came down the corridor and heard her screams. That there were three of them, and the door was locked. I tell her what I saw when I opened it.
The rest, I leave out.
I have killed men for the family, for orders, for money. I've done it often enough that I learned how to shut parts of myself off and just get through it.
That is not how I killed them.
"There were three?" she says.
"Aldo Basile. Two others."
"And they're—"
"Dead. All three."
She nods once. Then her hand comes off the blanket and reaches across the space between us, settling over my ruined knuckles like she's afraid of hurting me.
"Okay," she says.