Chapter 9 Atlas
Atlas
The cobblestone steps were uneven. She moved quickly, turning down narrow lanes that wove through the older part of the city. Clotheslines hung overhead. Window shutters creaked. People sat outside their doors talking in low voices, barely glancing at her.
She walked like she’d done that route a hundred times.
She turned into a tight alley where the buildings leaned toward each other, almost touching. At the end of it sat a small restaurant that was nothing more than a doorway, a faded sign, and three tables set outside. The kind of place locals relied on and tourists never found.
She greeted the old man standing at the entrance with a small nod. He didn’t offer her a smile, but a small grunt of recognition. She took an apron from a hook by the door, tied it around her waist, pushed her hair behind her ears, and walked inside.
So that was where she worked.
I stepped back into the shadows and waited.
Through the open doorway, I could see enough. She moved from table to table, taking orders quietly. Her smile was polite but distant, like she was giving the bare minimum required to function. When men looked at her for too long, she lowered her gaze and shifted her body away from them.
She never let anyone stand too close and appeared to be listening to every sound around her.
I saw the way her shoulders tensed each time the bell above the door rang.
She still carried her trauma after fifteen years. I wondered if she ever had anyone to help her deal with it, or if she fought it alone.
Hours passed. The light shifted from afternoon to early evening.
She moved through the heat, wiping tables with quick, practiced motions, keeping herself small even when the room filled up.
For a place buried in a side alley, the restaurant stayed busy—more crowded than I expected, almost every table occupied.
She’d managed to build a life there. But I could see she hadn’t rebuilt her sense of safety.
When her shift ended, she slipped out the side door with her head down. She didn’t rush, but she moved with purpose, walking fast enough to avoid anyone getting close. She took narrow streets instead of the main road, choosing routes with fewer people, fewer eyes.
She never looked over her shoulder, but her posture said she was tracking every sound behind her. Every footstep. Every shuffle of movement within reach, telling me she had good instincts.
I followed her from a distance until she reached her house, unlocked the door, and slipped inside.
A small lamp flicked on, and the glow revealed her moving through a house smaller than most closets I’d walked through.
I stayed on the other side of the street, hands in my pockets, watching.
I could have walked across and pushed that door open with one hand. I could have ended this right then and there. Finished what I’d failed to accomplish fifteen years ago. Put my unease to rest; one less problem to worry about.
But that would have drawn attention. A neighbor might hear something. Someone might look out a window. The police might actually give a damn in a neighborhood like this. Killing her now would have been messy, stupid, and desperate. And I didn’t do desperate.
I looked back at the window. She moved slowly through the room, stretching her neck like she was exhausted. Life didn’t break her. It just changed her shape. Bent her into something that wasn’t easy to categorize as either victim or threat.
And that was what gnawed at me.
Because the longer I studied her, the less I understood what the hell I was doing here.
She didn’t look dangerous. She didn’t look connected. She didn’t look like the kind of woman whose existence could bring an empire crashing down.
She looked like someone trying to stitch together a life out of scraps. She was ordinary. Unremarkable. Alone.
If she were a clear threat, this would have been simple—clean, decisive, done. But watching her … she was just a woman who survived something and kept moving. And I couldn’t tell if ending her would have been an act of mercy, a mistake, or the beginning of a disaster I couldn’t walk back from.
The question slid in, unwelcome and insistent: what was the point of killing someone who wasn’t even fighting to live?
And worse—why did I even care?
I turned away and headed back toward the beat up old Volvo.
My family owned property everywhere. Tuscany was no exception.
My penthouse—the one I didn’t use as much as I should—sat twenty minutes away, perched above the rooftops like it was dropped there from another world.
It didn’t belong to the region, to the rolling hills and sun-warmed streets. It barely belonged to me.
The elevator opened straight into my living room. Glass walls. Black steel. Stone floors polished within an inch of their life. Everything was cold, modern, efficient. Nothing like Neve’s small, lived-in home. There was no softness there. No warmth. No welcome. Just the echo of my footsteps.
I stripped as I walked. Jacket first. Then my shirt. Belt. Everything fell where it fell until I was left in slacks and a pulse that wouldn’t settle. I poured a drink and stepped onto the balcony.
Night had laid itself over the city, scattered with lights from homes, restaurants, the lives of people who still got to be normal.
Laughter filtered up from the street. A bar played music a block away, something upbeat and careless.
It felt like a different universe entirely. One I no longer recognized.
I tried to steady myself, but my thoughts kept tugging in the same damn direction.
Neve Trimboli was here in Tuscany. Breathing. Existing. Carrying scars that traced back to me. She shouldn’t have been here, let alone in my orbit. Not in my world. Not in my shadow. But she was.
I told myself the answer was simple, and that I should end it. Tie off the loose thread before it unraveled the whole tapestry. Protect the family. Protect the throne. Protect everything I’d sacrificed to hold.
But when I closed my eyes… I saw her in that restaurant. Her shoulders squared even while fear twisted under her skin. Her jaw set like she’d rather choke on her own pride than hand it over. She was stubborn. Stronger than she had any right to be. Still fighting for survival after all this time.
The whiskey burned down my throat, but it didn’t settle anything.
I needed to kill her. That was the rule. The logic. The clean solution.
But for the second time in fifteen years… I didn’t know if I had it in me to do what needed to be done. And that terrified me far more than she ever could.