Chapter Ten
Vito
She comes back out wearing one of her own outfits.
Not one of the new things I had brought for her.
Not one of the dresses suited to the island.
Not the lighter clothes I thought she might choose in this heat once she saw what the days here were like.
She chose something familiar instead—one of her own tops, one of her own pairs of pants, something that belonged to the life she had before she woke up here.
The choice tells me exactly what it’s supposed to.
She thinks of it as me dressing her, and refuses the idea.
Refuses to let any of this feel normal.
I respect that.
I also suspect it won’t last too long.
Not because I think I’ll force her into something else. I won’t.
But because the island will wear at practical preferences faster than pride will admit.
Heat, salt, sun, routine. Three months is long enough for anybody to start choosing function over statement.
Teresa knows that too, whether she wants to admit it or not.
Still, right now, the choice matters.
I make the decision not to gloat when she finally gives in. Not externally anyway.
She steps into the kitchen, very obviously more herself than she was before.
Her hair is damp, brushed back from her face. Her skin is scrubbed clear of whatever was left of last night.
The fresh clothes make the whole situation look even stranger somehow. Less like the immediate aftermath. More like the beginning of something.
I have already plated the lasagna and salad.
The dishes are set on the island instead of the dining table. Deliberately. The distance feels better like this. Less formal. Easier to leave if she decides she can’t tolerate sitting across from me for long.
She pauses when she sees the plates.
Not dramatically.
Just enough for me to know she’s taking in everything again—the food, the silverware, the glasses of water, the fact that I left her candle-weapon exactly where it was while she was in the shower, the fact that I’m standing near the counter and not blocking the exits.
Then she sits.
Because she’s hungry.
Because she’s smart enough to know she needs her strength.
That, more than anything else, reassures me.
Not the compliance. I’m not fool enough to mistake practicality for surrender.
The intelligence. The instinct to preserve what she’ll need later. Teresa is not wasting herself on gestures that feel righteous and accomplish nothing. She’s already conserving energy. Already triaging the situation.
Good.
I take the stool across from her and watch her pick up the fork.
She does everything carefully now. More carefully than before the shower.
Cleaner, steadier, thinking more clearly.
I can see the difference in the way she looks around the room before she eats, the way her posture holds itself tighter, the way her eyes keep returning to me not in panic now but in active study.
She’s still frightened. No question. But the immediate chaos has burned off enough that what’s left is sharper, more alert.
After a night of sleep, she’ll be sharper still.
That thought should feel reassuring. That she’s capable of doing what I brought her here to do.
Instead, it makes me feel a bit uneasy.
Because I know I made the right choice. I know she is who I need.
But somewhere under that certainty, something else is taking shape too, something I don’t enjoy.
I’m intimidated by her.
The realization sits badly with me.
Not because I think she can overpower me. She can’t. Not physically. Not with the island set as it is, not with what I know and what I’ve prepared for.
There’s no chance of escape, and she’s coming to realize that.
But mentally? I can’t compete. Not only is she one of the stars of her field, but she’s a child prodigy. Highly intelligent and highly observant.
I’ve lived my life in secrecy. It comes with the territory. The only ones who are able to read me are the ones who know me best. The ones I allow to know me. My family.
Until now. And I have a feeling that she already sees more than anyone else I know. That she’ll know more, maybe too much, by the end.
That makes her dangerous. I might have just handed her a weapon that I don’t know how to defend myself against.
She takes one bite of the lasagna. Then another, chews slowly. Not because she’s enjoying it, though maybe she is.
Because she’s thinking while she eats. I suspect she’s always thinking. That brain of hers must get a lot of exercise.
I wait.
The salad sits mostly untouched for now. The water in her glass is gone almost immediately.
Then, as expected, the questions begin.
Not rushed or demanding. She sets them in front of me on with the appearance of small talk, and the choice almost makes me smile.
“Where are we?” she asks.
No accusation in the tone. Just the question.
“An island,” I say.
One eyebrow lifts. “Obviously.”
I take a drink of water. “Conti Cay.”
Her expression doesn’t change much, but I see the information churning behind those eyes. Name, ownership, implication.
“And where is that?”
“The Caribbean.”
That gets a pause.
Not a dramatic one. Just enough to show she had already guessed that, and I was only confirming it.
She cuts off another piece of lasagna. “How long was I out?”
“It’s Saturday.”
Her eyes flick up. “That’s not very specific.”
“No.”
“So be specific.”
I hold her gaze for a second. “Long enough to bring you here.”
That earns me a look sharp enough to cut.
“I hate that answer.”
“It’s the only one you’re getting.”
She takes another bite anyway, chews, swallows, and shifts tracks without acknowledging the irritation.
“Who else knows I’m here?”
There it is.
Who knows. Who can help. Who is looking. Who will notice.
I set my fork down. “No one.”
“How is that possible? No one? Not a one? Not a pilot, not a captain, not a security guard? Or anyone who helped you bring me here?”
“No one,” I repeat. “Pilots and captains don’t ask questions about cargo when you pay them enough. Security was off the island before we got anywhere near it.”
“And all of these cameras and microphones?” She looks around to indicate everything.
“I am the only one with access while I’m here, but,” I continue before she can speak, “if you think that means you can somehow get away with something—harming me or whatever—don’t bother.
All the footage is archived in my personal drives, but if I don’t check in with the system personally daily, it sends out an alert with that footage.
You don’t want to come face-to-face with someone in my family after something like that. Trust me.”
That makes her go still. She lets out a slow breath.
I’m not interested in lying to her.
That would only create more work later, and Teresa will know the lie eventually anyway.
Better she understands what I’ve done than waste time hoping for a rescue based on assumptions that were never true.
Because of that, I continue.
“And as to your work, I left word with your office that you had an emergency you needed to attend to out of state,” I say. “And to activate your contingency plan.”
That gets her.
The look that crosses her face is brief, but I catch it: surprise first, then something more complicated. Frustration. Calculation. The sudden collapse of a hope she didn’t want to show.
She was hoping I didn’t know about that.
Hoping a patient or a member of her staff would grow suspicious before long if she simply vanished without the right plan in place.
So I put the plan in place.
Her eyes narrow slightly, and she leans back just enough to study me.
I can see the thoughts working through her, rearranging what she already knew about me, about this, about how far in advance I planned it to know about her contingency plan and how to activate it.
She looks at me then in a way that has nothing to do with food or ordinary conversation.
Assessing. Measuring. Noticing the small things. The details of my posture, my timing, the way I answer and don’t answer, what I volunteer, and what I make her drag out of me.
It makes me want to squirm under her gaze, which surprises me enough that I nearly shift in the chair.
I don’t.
But I feel the urge.
That’s new.
I understand something in that moment I should have understood already: even here, even now, even frightened and angry and taken completely out of her world, she cannot turn it off.
The doctor. The observer.
The part of her that is always working.
Yes, impressive.
Unsettling, too.
She takes another bite, wipes the corner of her mouth with her napkin, and says, “For someone who apparently has an impulse control issue, you don’t seem to be very impulsive.”
That makes me pause.
Not so much outwardly. Inside my head, however, the voices come back and echo.
You don’t think, Vito. That one is my father’s. Flat and dismissive. There’s been some variation of it since I was fifteen.
You’re going to ruin everything one day if you don’t learn how to stop for five fucking seconds. Antonio. Angry. Pacing. Blood on his knuckles.
He’s too hotheaded. Roberto, in that quiet way he has, to Giovanni, like I wasn’t standing close enough to hear.
Sometimes, Vito, you don’t know when enough is enough. Giovanni this time, which somehow made it worse. Giovanni was the only one who had faith in me at first, the only one who took the time and effort to teach me, to take me under his wing when my father went to prison.
I thought I was learning, too. He was pleased, giving me more responsibility. Really showing me how to be the leader I was meant to be. For years, I thought I was on the right track.
I had confidence. I was teaching myself to be a better man, a better leader, a better businessman.
And then…
Then I guess I wasn’t. Then I was impulsive again, just like when I was a kid and used to get into fights in school. I was angry and brash. Thought with my fists, not my head.
That’s another one my father likes to use. When are you going to start thinking with your head and not your fists?
I don’t really know when it happened, but I can’t seem to make this backslide stop.
Even Nico—my brother, the one who knows me better than anyone—had warned me:You don’t get to act first and think later forever.
He wasn’t wrong.I just never cared—until now.
The memory hooks hard on that one and drags me backward before I can stop it—
—the warehouse, cold concrete, metal echo, Nico turning toward me with that look on his face while I walk away to find another jack—
I cut the thought off there.
Hard.
Back in the kitchen, the room has gone too quiet.
Teresa is still watching me.
Not because she knows where I went. She doesn’t.
But she knows I went somewhere. I can see that in her face immediately.
The sharpened attention. The waiting. The way she doesn’t fill the silence because she wants to see what I do with it.
Dangerous.
I was right. She’s dangerous in her own way.
Not because she can beat me. Not because she can leave this island.
But because she sees too much, much more than I anticipated, even after everything I read about her on paper.
She notices the pause. The flicker. The hitch in thought. She tracks the internal movement without needing the content.
That is the sort of thing most people miss entirely.
When it’s obvious I’m not going to say anything to her last comment, she exhales slowly and finally takes another bite.
I do the same, more out of rhythm than appetite.
The house is quiet around us. The island beyond it, quieter still.
Water somewhere in the distance. Wind in the palms. Security out on the water somewhere.
Everything arranged. Everything in place.
And none of that changes the fact that she can sit here, and with only a few words, make me feel more exposed than I planned to be.
That is the part I didn’t prepare for.
I prepared for anger. Fear. Resistance. Intelligence. Questions. I even prepared for contempt.
I did not prepare for the way Teresa’s attention makes the room feel smaller.
For the way she can turn one sentence over and leave me hearing my family in my own head.
For the way a simple observation—you don’t seem very impulsive—can drag me halfway back to that warehouse before I even know I’ve gone.
She sees too much.
And it is going to be a problem.
Not because it was a miscalculation. Because it was the right calculation, and right doesn’t always mean comfortable.
She is exactly who I need.
That’s the trouble.
I watch her finish another bite and know with a certainty that settles deep and cold that having Teresa Donato here is going to be a lot harder on me than I planned.