Chapter 5 #2
We pass one bedroom. Then another. A study with a heavy oak door left slightly ajar, bookshelves visible through the gap.
Then two more bedrooms, both closed. The hallway curves slightly, and the carpet runner beneath our feet feels longer than it did on the way up, like the house is bigger on this side than it looked from the outside.
I count without meaning to. Four doors. The study. Then Valeria stops at the last door at the far end and rests her hand on the handle.
“This one’s yours.” She smiles.
I look back the way we came. Mary's room is completely out of sight.
“Um, Mrs. Capello—”
“Please, call me Valeria.”
“Can I be closer to Mary?” The question comes out before I've finished deciding to ask it.
“To her room. I just—we've always shared a bedroom. She has nightmares sometimes, and when she does, she needs—” I stop, and try again.
“I just like to be close. In case she needs me. I can even sleep on a mattress in her room.”
Valeria looks at me for a moment. Not unkindly. Patiently, the way a teacher is patient with a question that has an obvious answer she's choosing not to embarrass you with.
“Nazareth.” She says my name again. “You're her brother. Not her keeper.”
“I know. I just—”
“It would be quite unusual.” Her voice stays warm, stays gentle. “A boy your age, sharing a bedroom with his little sister. Wanting to be that close.” A small pause, perfectly weighted. “People would find that strange. Don't you think?”
The word lands somewhere soft. Strange. I turn it over. Think about what it looks like from the outside, how the other kids at the group home would look at me funny when I told them my sister and I used to share a bedroom.
Heat climbs my neck.
“I wasn't trying to be strange,” I say quietly.
“Of course you weren't.” She reaches out and touches my jaw—brief, light, just her fingertips, the same gesture from the doorstep. “You love her. That's a beautiful thing. But she needs her own space now. Room to feel settled. To grow.” She tilts her head. “You want that for her, don't you?”
I look at the carpet. Cream and deep, my footprints visible in the pile.
“Yes,” I say. Because she's framed it as something Mary needs, and I would hollow myself out for what Mary needs.
“Good.” She opens the door and gestures me inside. “Now. Let me show you your room.”
We're about to walk in when footsteps come down the hall—unhurried, authoritative, the footsteps of a man who has never once needed to announce himself because the space rearranges around him automatically.
“Ah. Rowan, darling.” Valeria's voice changes. Just slightly. A tightening, barely perceptible, like a string tuned up half a note. “I was just about to show Nazareth his new room.”
Rowan steps in beside her. He's tall. Older than her, silver at the temples, a navy suit that looks like it was measured to fit only him.
“Mr. Capello,” I greet, and he looks at me the way you would at a piece of furniture you're considering for a room. Assessing. Taking in the dimensions. Deciding if it fits.
He extends his hand. “Nice to meet you, Nazareth.” Then he steps past his wife into the room. “Come tell me what you think.”
I follow him, and the bedroom is nothing like Mary’s.
No fairy lights, no window seat, no shelf arranged by color.
But it isn't bare either. Navy walls, dark wood furniture, a desk by the window with a green-glass lamp already switched on, casting a warm pool of light across the surface.
The bed has a charcoal duvet pulled tight and flat, the kind of tight that takes effort.
And the bookshelves—two of them, floor to ceiling on either side of the desk—are full.
I cross to them before I even mean to.
Encyclopedias, a whole set, spines in matching burgundy with gold lettering.
An atlas thick enough to use as a doorstop.
And then the others—shelved in a row like they belonged together, like someone had thought carefully about the order.
The Art of Judo. Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu: Theory and Technique.
Karate-Do. The Complete Book of Throws. Book after book, the whole shelf of them, discipline after discipline.
Rowan tilts his head toward the self-defense shelf. “Do any of those interest you?” The question is easy, unhurried. Like he has nowhere else to be and the answer genuinely matters to him.
I look at the clean spines, the waiting pages. Something stirs in my chest—not quite excitement, more like recognition. Like the room already knows something about me that I'm still figuring out.
“Yeah,” I say. “All of them.”
Rowan looks at me for a moment. Then, “Can you fight?”
“No, sir.” A beat. “Not yet.”
Something shifts in his face. He goes still the way people go still when something catches their attention they weren't expecting—like a lens finding its focus. He looks at me properly for the first time since he walked in. Really looks.
“Not yet,” he repeats. Quiet. Almost to himself.
I'm still looking at the books when Rowan crosses to the desk. There's a box on it that I didn't notice before. He opens it without ceremony and steps back so I can see.
Inside, on a bed of dark fabric, is a curved knife.
The handle is a deep midnight blue, the kind of blue that shifts when the light catches it, darker in shadow, almost black, almost the color of deep water.
It's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.
I don't know how I know that immediately, but I do.
I don't touch it. Not yet.
“A knife?” My voice comes out younger than I want it to.
“Not just a knife. A karambit.”
I look at him.
“Every Capello son has a karambit,” he says like it's a fact that existed before either of us arrived in this room. “This one is yours.”
I look back at the box. At the blade lying there waiting in its dark bed, that specific blue catching the light from the green-glass lamp. Something moves through my chest to the space where a boy who lost everything is being handed something that has meaning.
Rowan lifts the box, offers it up in both palms, steady and careful. “Take it.”
I pick it up, and the weight of it settles into my palm. I turn it over and watch how the light plays along the edge, how it moves with my hand like it's been waiting for me.
“It's how we protect ourselves,” Rowan says, his voice low. “How we protect the family. The blade is your responsibility now. Understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
He nods once, claps a hand briefly on my shoulder. The touch is brief and straightforward, the kind that doesn't ask anything from you.
“Good,” he says simply, then disappears out the door.
Valeria watches him go. Something moves across her face, quick and controlled, gone before I can read it. Then she looks back at me, and the warmth is all the way back, full and seamless, like it never left.
“I’m afraid Mr. Capello’s work requires him to be away from home a fair bit,” she says, brushing her palms across the bed comforter, like she saw a crease that needs erasing. “But when he’s home, he’s present. You’ll find he takes a deep interest in boys with potential.”
She tucks the covers around the comforter, straightens a pillow that doesn’t need it, and gives me a small smile. “I hope you’ll be comfortable here,” she says and waits just long enough for me to answer.
I nod. “Thank you, Mrs. Capello.”
“Not only a pretty face, but manners, too,” she says softly. “Such a good boy.”
Good boy.
Two words that would define the rest of my life.