Chapter 20
CHAPTER TWENTY
Valentino
Ipull back an inch, just enough to breathe air that isn't her.
That's when it hits me, and it's worse than the wanting.
If she changed her mind right now, I would let her.
Then I'd spend the rest of the night finding reasons she couldn't leave.
The Basiles. The phone. The roads. Enzo Basile looking for her. Every one of them real. Every one of them something I could hide behind.
I'd keep her where I could see her. Where I knew she was safe.
I'd keep her until the danger passed or until she hated me.
I've buried men for less than what I'm thinking right now.
I open my mouth, but my phone rings before I know what to say.
I have never been so grateful for Bruno's timing.
"Stay here," I tell her.
She raises one eyebrow, lips still flushed from my mouth. "I literally can't feel my legs from the kissing or the drugs. Take your pick. I'm not going anywhere."
I answer on the second buzz and step to the window. "Bruno."
"Four hours," he says. "You're moving to Rome. Fabio's already there with his team. The apartment in Trastevere is set."
I look through the gap in the curtain. Nothing moves on the road.
"Why Rome?"
"Because this safe house turns into a coffin the second someone makes the wrong call. Rome is neutral ground."
I glance back at Amanda. She's watching me from the bed.
"Enzo knows a woman was seen with Aldo that night," Bruno says. "He's looking for her. And he's looking for one other person."
"A name?"
"No name. Not yet. That's the part keeping me awake."
"If he knew it was a Sartori who put his son in the ground, we'd already know it."
"Exactly. Sicily would be moving. Instead he's quiet."
"Fishing."
"Yes."
I keep my eyes on the road. "What else?"
"She's been attached to Vittoria for ten years. Photos. Social media. Events. Her face is everywhere, Valentino. Enzo's people are good, so how come they don't have her name yet?"
I think of her phone. Her clutch on the floor near Aldo's hand.
"The wipe," I say.
"Dante got it before they cracked it. Cut it close." Bruno exhales. "But that's not luck I trust twice. Aria and Carmela flew to Chicago an hour ago. I'm not having our mothers on the same continent as that old man while we figure out what he knows."
I press my thumb against the cool glass and watch the smudge it leaves.
"Four hours," he says. "Luca drives the lead car. Elio takes the second with Amanda. You ride with her."
Bruno hesitates, and I already know what's coming. He is my Don. He is not stupid.
"Valentino. The fact that Enzo is looking and still doesn't know what he's found concerns me more than the vendetta. An angry man, I understand. A man who doesn't know how angry he should be yet? That's the dangerous one. He can still surprise you."
"I know."
"Get Amanda to Rome. Don't let her near a window with the light on."
The line goes dead, and I stand there a moment with the phone in my hand.
Behind me, the bed creaks.
"That was the bad-news call," she says.
I turn around.
She's sitting up against the headboard.
"We leave in four hours."
"Where?"
"Rome."
"And the bad part?" she asks. "The part that made you do the statue thing."
I cross the room and crouch beside the bed so we're level.
"You're going to be safe," I say. "I'll make sure of it."
It's the closest thing to a promise I've made in a decade.
And the worst part is, it isn't only a promise to protect her.
It's a warning that I won't let her go.
Elio is in the front room cleaning his gun. The pieces are laid out across a dish towel on the table like a surgeon's tray. He doesn't look up when I come in.
"We're moving in four hours."
His hands stop over the slide. "Where?"
"Rome. Bruno already has the apartment set." I lean against the doorframe and let him hear the part where he doesn't get a vote. "Luca drives lead. You take the second car with Amanda. I ride with her."
"Of course you do." He fits the slide back together without looking, the metal clicking into place.
"Go find Luca," I say. "Take his place on the perimeter. I need him inside."
His jaw works. For a second, I think he's going to swing. Part of me wants him to. A little because of him, but mostly because I've wanted to hit something since the palazzo and walls don't bleed.
He stands and slides the gun into the holster at his back. Then he goes, and the door clicks shut behind him.
Luca comes in three minutes later. His face gives away about as much as a locked safe. Fifteen years I've worked with him, and I've seen him surprised exactly never. I don't think death surprises him anymore. He notes it, files it, moves on.
"We're moving," I tell him. "Rome. Four hours."
He nods once and pours himself coffee from the pot.
"You drive lead. If something is set up for us, it'll be ahead, not chasing." I take the second cup he pours. "Fabio's already in Rome. Apartment's in Trastevere. By the time we pull up, he'll know every face on that street and which ones belong there."
"Trastevere." Luca pours sugar into his coffee. "Crowded."
"Crowded is the point. We're hiding her in a city of strangers instead of an empty house anyone can drive a truck into." I drink. The coffee is terrible, but I don't care. "Fabio runs the inside. You run the route. I handle Amanda."
The corner of Luca's mouth moves a hair, the closest thing to an opinion he allows himself. "You handle Amanda."
"Don't start."
"I haven't said anything."
"You don't have to. I know that look.”
Amanda
I sit on the edge of the bed with my hands in my lap, pulling the sleeves over my knuckles because I don't know what else to do with them.
My phone would be in my lap right now. I would be scrolling. Posting something. A photo of the window. The coffee mug on the nightstand. Anything.
It's been—I don't know. A day. Two days. I can't count right. I have never gone this long without it.
The posting was never the point. It just filled the empty spaces. The quiet dinners. The birthdays spent at someone else's table. The feeling that if I stopped talking, nobody would notice I was gone.
I tried therapy once. Four sessions. By the fourth, I was making jokes instead of answering questions and counting down the minutes until I could leave. She told me things I didn't want to hear. Things that hit too close. I never went back.
I pull the sleeves farther down, and then the tears come.
I am so tired of being the girl who's fine.
The door opens. He stops in the doorway like he hit a wall. I don't turn my face away. There's no point. He's already seen me.
He crosses the room and lowers himself until he's crouched in front of me, forearms on his knees, those scarred-up hands hanging loose between them. His eyes are level with mine.
"I can't watch you do that," he says, his voice low, rougher than usual.
"Do what?" It comes out wet. Not my best work.
"Cry like that. Like you're trying to make it quiet. Like you're trying to take up less space while you do it."
I let out a breath that's half laugh, half hurt. "Careful, Conti. You're getting chatty."
"If there's something I can do," he says, ignoring that, "so it doesn't happen again, you ask. Whatever it is. I'll handle it."
And there it is. The Sartori reflex. A problem named, a problem solved, somebody bleeds for it and the ledger balances.
I picture him out there with a gun in the dark, hunting down the source of my tears, and the source is a fourteen-year-old at a dinner table in Chicago.
"You can't fix this one," I tell him. "There's no one to kill. I checked. Believe me, if there were, I'd hand you the address."
He almost smiles.
"Then tell me what you need," he says. "I'm not good at guessing. People around me usually want things I understand. Money. Protection. Someone gone."
"And me?"
"You, I don't understand."
"Okay." I wipe my face with the heel of my hand, smearing the tears into my sleeve. "Then here's what I need. An answer."
"Ask."
"Why did you take so long to kiss me?"
For a second, he just breathes.
Then his shoulders drop, his head ducks, and the sound that comes out of him is so unexpected I almost don't recognize it. A laugh. Low, dragged up from somewhere rusty. He scrubs one hand down his face and shakes his head.
I slap his hand away from his face. "Don't laugh at me."
"I'm not laughing at you." He catches my wrist before I can hit him again, his fingers warm and rough against my skin.
The last of that rusty sound dies in his chest, but the corner of his mouth stays up.
"I'm laughing because you asked what took me so long like it's a thing I could've fixed by trying harder. "
"You could have."
"No." He shakes his head. "When, bella? Tell me the day.
We've been in the same room maybe ten times in five years, and every one of them you were across it.
Vittoria on one side of you. Some man you'd brought along.
" His thumb moves over my pulse, like he doesn't know he's doing it.
"There was never this. You, three feet from me, no one watching.
It took five years because we never had five minutes. "
"So if I hadn't kissed you first," I say, "you would've let this go on forever."
He doesn't answer.
Which is its own answer.
After everything that's happened, this shouldn't be what hurts.
It does.
"Oh," I say. "Okay." I look down at my own knees. "That's... yeah. Okay."
His hand leaves my wrist. For half a second I think he's pulling back, and the disappointment hits before I can stop it.
Then his fingers close around my chin and tip my face back up. His jaw is tight, his eyes fixed on mine.
"No," he says. "Not okay. Don't make this mean I didn't want you."
My face burns. I try to look down again, but his hand stays at my chin.
"Listen to me. You're twenty-five, and I'm thirty-eight. You're my little cousin's best friend, and Vittoria would skin me if I touched you. She'd be right to. You walk into rooms like sunlight, and I walk into them like pure darkness."
His fingers tighten on my chin. It isn't hard. It doesn't hurt. But it pins my attention in place, pulls every scattered thought in my head back to him.
"Those were good reasons. For five years, they were good reasons.
But they don't mean a goddamn thing anymore, because you're so tangled up in me that if you tried to walk out that door, I'd find a reason to drag you back.
Every time. I'd lie about the road. I'd lie about the Basiles.
I'd invent a threat that doesn't exist just to keep you in a room with me.
" His jaw works. "It was never because I didn't want you, bella.
It's because I knew wanting you wouldn't stop at one kiss. "
I have stopped breathing. Heat crawls up my throat and into my face. I should be horrified. Maybe part of me is.
He just admitted he would lie to keep me close, and the worst part is not that I believe him. The worst part is that something in me settled when he said it.
Like some broken, needy piece of me heard finally and decided that was close enough to love.
"That's a terrifying thing to say to a woman," I whisper.
"You asked for honesty."
"I did." I'm already moving. "I really did." I take his face in both my hands and kiss him hard. He makes a sound low in his throat, and I climb straight into his space before he can think better of it.
The shift throws him off balance. One second he's crouched in front of me, and the next his back hits the floor, his arm wrapping around me before my head can follow.
I pull back an inch. His pupils are blown wide. His chest is heaving under my palm.
"Fuck me," I tell him. "Right now."
He freezes, and the look in his eyes turns dangerous. So dangerous, I feel it everywhere.