28. Lorenzo
LORENZO
The word lands like a gunshot in a quiet room.
Olivia stops dead on the bottom step.
Her hand tightens around the bannister. The joy on her face disappears so fast it leaves her looking hollow, her eyes locked on me like she already knows exactly who I am.
I don’t move from the doorway.
But everything in the room sharpens.
The faint smell of coffee. Elsie’s little fingers fisted in Victoria’s blouse. Mrs. Abena’s quiet intake of breath somewhere behind her.
Everything clicks into place.
Because I know that face.
It takes two seconds for nearly four years of unanswered questions to come roaring back.
Three years and nine months.
And suddenly I’m there again.
My estate. Rain hammering against the windows. Whiskey flowing. Silk masks hiding dangerous faces. A night built on secrets, greed, and bad decisions.
A night that ended with drugged guards, a missing girl, and a ledger that never balanced.
I’d given Mateo one simple instruction.
Secure the girls for the private salon. Keep it contained. Keep it quiet.
No mistakes. No surprises.
Mateo had brought in this lady, Olivia. An easy mark, a casual user known around the downtown blocks, someone desperate enough for a quick payout to follow directions.
Instead, Olivia walked through my doors carrying excuses before anyone asked for them, feeding them to Matteo one after another in a desperate attempt to buy time.
Traffic.
Weather.
Delays.
One lie after another, while the room grew impatient around her.
She’d promised Mateo a full headcount. A clean delivery of ladies.
Instead, she showed up with barely half.
And one of them never lifted her face.
One lady stood there with her eyes lowered beneath the edge of her mask, her whole body radiating quiet fury.
“Lorenzo?”
Victoria’s voice cuts through the silence.
Her arms tighten around the child on her hip. She looks between us, confusion knitting her brow as the warmth drains from the room.
“What is it?” she asks. “Do you know her?”
I don’t answer.
My eyes stay on Olivia.
“You took my money.”
Olivia’s throat works.
She takes a half step back, but the staircase catches her before her legs can give out completely.
“I looked for you,” I say.
My voice drops low enough that I know Enzo will have heard it through the window.
“My men tore apart every drug house to Cicero. Mateo spent three months hunting the woman who drugged my floor guards and disappeared into the night.”
Recognition flashes across Olivia’s face.
Then fear.
She remembers.
So do I.
The rest of it comes back in pieces, clean and undeniable.
The masked party. The music. The private rooms. The drinks laced heavily enough to drop three of my perimeter men within an hour of Olivia arriving.
And the woman.
The masked woman brought upstairs to my quarters.
She hadn’t spoken much. She’d moved like she hated the world and every man in it, but there had been fire in her. Defiance. Anger. Heat beneath whatever haze she’d been fighting through.
I remember her hands.
Her breath.
I remember the way she came apart beneath me, every reaction sharp and real, her moans caught behind the fabric of that mask. I remember the heat of her, the way desire burnt through both of us so hard it drowned out everything else.
And I remember the moment it changed.
The sheer ecstasy of thrusting in her wet inside, carried away, until the exact moment I came inside her.
One second, she was with me.
The next, her body went heavy.
She passed out beneath my hands so suddenly it cut through the alcohol and the noise in my head. I tried to rouse her, wake her. Got nothing but a faint murmur and barely any response.
I remember checking her in the dim light, trying to make sense of what the hell had just happened.
And I remember the scar.
A jagged crescent high on her inner thigh, close to the hip.
Distinct enough to stay with me all these years, when I never saw the rest of her face.
By the time I stepped out to find out why the house had gone too quiet, only one of my men was awake, and barely. Groggy. Disoriented. Fighting whatever had been slipped into his drink.
Olivia had already made her move.
She took the girl.
Loaded her into the passenger seat.
Drove off before the ink on her payout had dried.
And vanished.
Until now.
“No one plays me,” I say, my hand moving slowly toward the inside of my coat. “No one walks out of my house and leaves my ledger bleeding.”
“Lorenzo, please stop.”
Victoria steps directly in front of me.
She shields Olivia with her body.
That alone is enough to turn me cold.
Olivia raises both hands, trembling so hard she can barely keep them up. Her eyes are wide with the fear that only comes when the past finally catches up.
“I didn’t know,” she whispers. “I swear to God, Sir, I didn’t know who you were back then.”
I stare at her.
She shakes her head, tears gathering fast.
“I just needed to get her out of there.”
The words tumble out before she can stop them.
“I’d already used half the money they gave me to get the girls there. I couldn’t get the rest. I found my friend Vicky and brought her in too.” Her voice cracks. “I was trapped. I thought they’d kill me if I didn’t meet up with my own side.”
She swipes at her face with shaking fingers.
“So I did what I thought I had to do. I drugged everyone and ran. I told myself it was the only way to survive.” A sob catches in her throat. “I’m sorry, Sir. I was reckless. Selfish. I’ve changed since then.”
Her shoulders sag like the weight of it is finally too much to carry.
“All I could think about was getting away alive with my friend. I never stopped to think about what it would do to anyone else.”
The words don’t sound rehearsed.
They sound like the truth.
“Step aside, Victoria,” I say.
My fingers close around the grip of the gun beneath my coat.
Victoria doesn’t move.
“I said, please stop!” she shouts.
The force of her voice cracks through the room.
Elsie flinches and buries her face in Victoria’s neck, frightened by the sudden shift in the air. Victoria holds her tighter, one arm wrapped around the child, the other braced like she’s prepared to hold this whole room back by force if she has to.
Her eyes lock on mine.
Bright. Wet. Unshaking.
“Elsie is the result of that night.”
Everything stops.
My hand goes still beneath my jacket.
For one impossible second, there is nothing. No sound. No movement. No breath.
Only Victoria standing between Olivia and me with a little girl clinging to her shoulder.
Elsie.
The child in the yellow jumper.
Blonde curls. Bright eyes. Stubborn mouth.
I look at Victoria.
Then at the child.
Then back at Victoria.
Something tears open inside my chest.
Not rage.
Recognition.
The kind that doesn’t knock before it tears a man apart.
Dr. Luciano’s words slam back into me with brutal clarity.
Temporary amnesia.
A trauma response.
He’d told me the shock had forced Victoria’s mind to retreat, locking away the present and leaving her trapped inside fragments of the past.
Fragments that hadn’t made sense then.
Victoria insisting someone had drugged her.
Victoria crying over a fiancé she swore had betrayed her.
Victoria waking in the middle of the night, terrified and confused, whispering about masks, a party, while Luciano listened.
A dark room.
Silk.
Laughter.
Fear.
Nothing but broken pieces.
Luciano warned me her memories wouldn’t come back in order. Trauma rarely works that way.
For days, she spoke of those memories like they were nightmares.
And all this time?—
All this fucking time?—
She wasn’t describing a nightmare.
She was remembering that night. A one-night stand with her.
My gaze drops to Elsie again.
Her tiny hand is still fisted in Victoria’s blouse.
My blood goes cold.
Then hot.
Then cold all over again.
“The scar,” I say.
My voice is barely more than a whisper, but it lands hard.
Victoria stops breathing.
I look at her fully now.
“High on your left thigh,” I say. “Close to the hip. Crescent-shaped. Do you have a scar?”
The colour drains from her face.
Her lips part, but no sound comes out.
For a second she just stares at me, her eyes widening as the final piece falls into place with a cruelty neither of us can stop.
Then she nods in affirmation.
Once.
Terrified.
Behind her, Olivia sinks onto the bottom step. Her hands cover her mouth, then the rest of her face, her shoulders shaking under the weight of what’s finally been dragged into the light.
Mrs. Abena whispers something under her breath, but I don’t catch it.
I can’t look away from Victoria.
Her eyes shine, but she doesn’t break.
Not yet.
“I didn’t remember the whole night,” she says.
Her voice cracks.
Elsie shifts against her, and Victoria presses a kiss to the child’s temple before lifting her eyes back to mine.
“I remember pieces. The beginning. Enough to know I wasn’t afraid of you. Enough to know I wanted you.”
My jaw locks.
A broken little smile touches her mouth, then disappears.
“I remember the way you touched me. The way my body responded. I remember…” She swallows. “Too much feeling, and then everything started to blur.”
Silence fills the room.
“After that, it was flashes. A mask. A room. Your voice.”
She drags in a shaky breath.
“I was engaged to Francesco.”
The name cuts through the room.
“It was arranged. Political. Perhaps dangerous.” A tear slips free. “When I found out I was pregnant, I knew if anyone discovered the baby wasn’t his, they would have killed me.”
Her eyes drop to Elsie.
When she speaks again, her voice is barely there.
“They would have killed her.”
Elsie has gone quiet, too young to understand the words, but old enough to feel the fear in them.
Victoria’s hand trembles against her back.
“I trusted Olivia,” she whispers. “She helped me hide the pregnancy. No one knew. Not Francesco. Not the family. Only Olivia, my mother Isabelle, and me.”
She looks toward Olivia.
Olivia is crying openly now, folded in on herself on the stair, wrecked by guilt and fear.
Victoria looks back at me.
“I left Elsie here to keep her alive.”
The words gut the room.
No one speaks.
No one even tries.
I look at the child again.
At the curve of her cheek.
The stubborn line of her jaw.
The bright, steady eyes staring back at me over Victoria’s shoulder.
And for the first time in my life, power means nothing.
Money means nothing.
Blood means everything.
I’ve torn men apart for betrayal.
I’ve buried men for less than what Olivia did.
But the little girl in Victoria’s arms is not a debt.
She is not a mistake.
She is not a secret anymore.
She is mine.
My daughter.
My blood.
Looking back at me from the safety of her mother’s arms.
And I don’t know whether to burn the world down for the years stolen from me?—
or drop to my knees because she survived them.