Chapter 18 #2
My eyes burn. I bite the inside of my cheek hard enough to taste salt and copper, because if I start crying now, I won't get a single word out, and I have to talk to her. I have to hear her voice.
"Okay," I manage.
He pulls his phone from his pocket, unlocks it, and holds it out to me across the little kitchen, screen up, like an offering.
I take it. The phone is warm from his pocket, in a black case scuffed at every corner. I wrap both hands around it the way I wrapped them around the water glass.
"Thank you," I say, and my voice comes out small, frayed, and not at all like me.
I walk out of the yellow light and down the short hall, finding his contacts as I move so I won't have to do it once I'm sitting still.
His contact list is short. First names only, half of them probably fake.
I scroll past Bruno and Luca and Dante and a Mamma that makes me stop for half a second, because of course this terrifying man has his mother saved as Mamma, of course he does, and I do not have the bandwidth to unpack what that does to me right now.
And there she is.
Vittoria.
My thumb hovers over her name.
Down the hall, a cupboard door bangs. Water runs. The ordinary, domestic sounds of a man who kills people deciding whether I can stomach pasta.
I press call and put the phone to my ear.
It rings once. Half a ring.
"Amanda?"
Her voice. Just my name, already breaking, and I hear her suck in a breath like she's been holding it for hours.
"Vee," I say, and it comes out wet and ruined.
I can't say anything else. I just hold the phone and shake.
"Okay," Vittoria says, and I can hear her pulling herself together. She blows out a breath. "Okay. I'm here. I'm not going anywhere. Talk to me."
"I don't know what to say."
"How are you?"
A laugh slips out of me, small and broken. "That's a big question, Vee."
"I've got all night."
"I keep tasting metal," I say before I can stop myself. "In my mouth. It won't go away. I drank a whole glass of water, and it's still there."
She's quiet for a second. I hear her swallow.
"That's the drug," she says. "It should go away soon." A shaky breath leaves her. "I'm so sorry."
"You don't owe me an apology."
"I sent you a bodyguard, and I should have sent you home. I should have called and told you to get on a plane the second Bruno mentioned Milan. I knew. I had a feeling—"
"You had a bad feeling. That's not the same thing as knowing. If you'd known, you would've shown up yourself and dragged me to the airport by my hair."
A sound catches in her throat. Not quite a laugh. Not quite a sob.
"Probably."
"Definitely."
"You're impossible."
"You're dramatic."
"You're my person," she says, and her voice finally cracks straight through.
"You've been my person my entire life. There is a very short list of people I would burn the world down for, and you're at the top.
Somebody put their hands on you while you were on the other side of an ocean, and I couldn't—I wasn't—"
She breaks off, and the silence fills with the sound of her crying.
I've never heard Vittoria cry like this. She cried at Riccardo's funeral, but that was different. That was grief with somewhere to go.
"Okay," I say softly. "If you keep crying, I'm going to start again."
A wet laugh punches out of her.
"Sorry."
"I missed you," I say.
For a minute neither of us says anything. We just breathe, an ocean and a phone line between us.
Down the hall, something sizzles in the dented pan.
"He's making me pasta," I say.
"Who is?"
"Valentino."
The silence stretches.
Usually Vittoria has something to say within half a second.
"Valentino is cooking for you."
It's not a question.
"He asked if I could eat." I pick at a thread on the hem of the borrowed shirt. "It's weird, Vee. He sat on the floor outside my door all night. He didn't come in. He just sat there. And when I woke up scared, he didn't grab me. He just kept saying his name until I knew who he was."
"Amanda," she says carefully.
"I know. I hear it too."
"Hear what?"
"That I'm building a whole defense case out of the bare minimum."
She doesn't answer right away.
"He helped," I say, because I can't stop coming back to that. "I don't know what that means. I don't know if it means anything. But he helped."
Vittoria exhales, long and slow. "How do you feel about him right now?"
I open my mouth, then close it again. The answer is there, but it's tangled up with too many other things to pull free.
"Safe," I say finally.
The word comes out cracked.
"Which is insane. He killed a man for me, and I keep looking at his hands thinking they're the reason I'm still here. I don't know what that says about me."
"It says somebody protected you when you needed protecting."
I press my lips together.
"That's not the weird part and you know it."
"No." Her voice softens. "The weird part is that you're trying to make sense of any of this twenty-four hours later."
I drag a hand across my face.
"Vee—"
"Amanda, you were drugged, kidnapped, and almost assaulted. If your feelings were neat and logical right now, I'd be concerned."
Despite everything, a laugh escapes me.
"So your benchmark for mental stability is complete emotional chaos?"
"It's the one we're using."
I close my eyes.
"You have me," Vittoria says. "You know that, right?"
The lump in my throat gets bigger.
"Yeah."
"Good. Because you're stuck with me.”