Portia
The breakfast room smells like espresso and warm bread, and underneath it, faintly, the smoke I still swear clings to my skin no matter how many times I showered last night.
Concetta, the woman from last night, spots me in the doorway before I’ve fully decided whether I’m hungry.
Her name’s stitched into a faded apron worn thin at the pockets, and she waves me toward a small table by the window without asking what I want.
She sets down a chipped white cup and a plate with a single pastry, flaky and dusted with sugar, and disappears back into the kitchen.
No questions. No small talk. I get the sense she’s hosted people running from worse than us.
I wrap both hands around the espresso, letting the heat settle into my palms. Outside, the olive grove looks peaceful in the morning light, silver-green leaves shifting in a breeze that knows nothing about last night’s drive through the dark, nothing about the villa still smoldering somewhere behind us.
A body doesn’t know what to do with quiet after chaos. At least mine certainly doesn’t. My hands haven’t fully stopped shaking since the fire, not really, just enough that I’ve learned to hide it in small motions like this—wrapping a cup, folding a napkin, anything to keep them occupied.
I close my eyes, and I’m back on the stairs again, smoke thick enough to taste, Rafael’s hand locked around mine like he’d rather lose an arm than let go of me.
I keep replaying the sound of that beam cracking overhead, the half-second where Jayla just crumpled and none of us could do anything but watch.
I’ve covered fires before, professionally—stood outside burning buildings with a microphone, describing the damage in clean, detached sentences for a five o’clock broadcast. I never understood, not really, what it does to a person to be inside one instead.
The way your whole body remembers a threat long after your mind’s convinced itself the danger’s passed.
I’m angrier than I expected to still be this morning, and not entirely at Rafael anymore.
Some of it’s aimed at Vito, obviously, a man I’ve never even met who’s already cost me a home I only just started calling one.
Some of it’s aimed at whatever version of my life led me here, chasing a story that turned into an entire existence I never signed up for.
And some small, stubborn piece of it is aimed at myself, for how quickly I forgot to be furious with Rafael the second I watched him nearly die pulling me down that staircase.
I miss my parents—the actual ones, the ones panicking right now on the other side of an ocean over a fire on the news, unable to reach either of us.
I think about my mother’s kitchen, always too warm, always smelling like garlic and whatever she’d insist on cooking even when nobody asked.
I think about my father’s ridiculous laugh, the one that used to embarrass me in public as a teenager and that I’d give almost anything to hear right now.
They didn’t have to take Jayla and me in.
They chose to, and they never once made either of us feel like an obligation instead of a daughter.
I hate that I can’t even tell them I’m safe.
I hate that safe isn’t even true right now, not really, and keeping them in the dark feels like its own quiet betrayal on top of everything else this week has cost us.
I break off a piece of the pastry and eat it slowly, watching an old man walk his dog along the gravel road past the olive trees, entirely unaware that four strangers hiding thirty minutes from a burned villa are watching him do it.
There’s something almost obscene about how normal the rest of the world keeps being while mine’s on fire. I used to chase stories like ours for a living.
…now I’m living inside one and normalcy feels like I’m only allowed to observe from behind glass.
I bring the cup to my lips, finally, ready for that first bitter, grounding sip.
My phone rings before I get it down.
I answer so fast I nearly knock the cup over. “Jayla. How are you? What did the doctor say?”
“Girl, I’m fine. Mild concussion. They’re keeping me one more night for observation. Releasing me tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow.” I exhale, the last of last night’s fear loosening its grip on my throat. “Jayla, I am so sorry. If I hadn’t dragged all of us into this—“
“Don’t. Portia James, don’t start that with me right now.”
“You almost died.”
“I almost got hit by a piece of wood. Not shot execution-style in a back alley. There’s a difference.” A pause, softer now. “And for the record? If you asked me right now whether I’d get on that plane to Sicily with you again, knowing everything I do, yeah. I would. Every time.”
My throat tightens. “You don’t mean that.”
“I absolutely mean that. You’re my sister.
Not because some judge signed a piece of paper when we were kids.
Because you’re the one who used to sneak into my room during thunderstorms and swear nothing bad could touch us as long as we stayed together.
I believed you then. I believe you now, even with a house burned down behind us. ”
I press the heels of my hands against my eyes, refusing to cry into an espresso cup in a stranger’s breakfast room. “I love you. You know that?”
“I know. Speaking of family—Mom and Dad emailed me last night. There’s something on the news back home about a fire at a villa in Sicily, and somehow they connected the dots thinking we might be here.”
My stomach drops. “What did you tell them?”
“Nothing yet. I wanted to ask you first. What am I even supposed to say, Portia? Don’t worry, we’re fine, we’re only running from a mafia don who wants Rafael dead?”
“You can’t say anything. I know it’s hard, but we can’t respond. Not right now. If there’s any chance Vito’s people are watching their inboxes, watching the house—”
“I know.” She sighs, and I picture her exactly, chewing the inside of her cheek the way she does when she’s holding back a worry she doesn’t want to hand off to someone already carrying too much. “I hate leaving them hanging. They’ve got to be terrified.”
“I hate it too.” I look out the window again, at the olive trees swaying in that same indifferent breeze.
Some part of me wants to tell her everything I’ve been sitting with this morning—the guilt, the grief, the strange new fear that our parents exist somewhere on the edges of a world I never knew touched ours.
I don’t. Not yet. Not until I understand it myself.
“We’ll make it up to them. Once this is over. ”
“Once this is over.” She repeats it slowly, testing whether she believes it. “Okay. I trust you.”
We talk a few more minutes about nothing important—the hospital food, the ugly gown they’ve got her in, whether Adagio’s been sleeping in the chair beside her bed or actually going back to a hotel at night (he hasn’t, obviously), the small ordinary things sisters say to remind each other they’re still breathing.
A nurse interrupts on her end eventually, and Jayla has to go.
I set the phone down, staring at the now-lukewarm espresso, my throat still tight with everything I didn’t say out loud.
I sense him before I hear him, a shift in the air beside me I’ve never been able to explain, not even to myself.
Some instinct that’s been tuned to his presence since long before I understood what it meant, back when I still thought of it as nothing more than attraction instead of whatever complicated, tangled thing it’s grown into since.
He sets a bowl down without a word—handmade pasta, still steaming, tossed simply in olive oil and herbs I don’t recognize, clearly Concetta’s work rather than anything from a box. Rafael slides into the seat across from me, watching my reaction more closely than the gesture probably warrants.
“You never ate. Jayla called before you finished breakfast. I noticed.”
I stare down at the bowl, my chest tightening at the plainness of it—that he noticed at all, that he fixed it without turning it into anything bigger than what it is.
I spent half of last night furious with this man and the other half terrified of losing him in a fire that wasn’t even his fault.
Both feelings are still sitting inside me right now, uneasy roommates refusing to fully make peace with each other.
“Thank you,” I say quietly.
“You don’t have to thank me for food, Portia.”
“I know.” I pick up the fork, twirling a small bite around the tines without lifting it yet. “It’s not really about the pasta.”
He doesn’t answer that directly. He just watches me, careful and unguarded at once, a man relearning how to sit across from someone he hurt without flinching away from what he did.
“Jayla’s being released tomorrow,” I say.
“Good. Adagio will be relieved.”
“Yeah.” I take the bite finally, the pasta simple enough that it makes my eyes sting for reasons that have nothing to do with the food itself. “Our parents emailed her. Panicking about the news.”
His jaw tightens. “What did you tell her?”
“To say nothing. For now.”
He nods slowly, a familiar calculation working behind his eyes, the same look he wears when he’s mapping out a threat before it’s fully formed. “That’s the right call. The fewer people who know where you are, the safer you stay.”
“I know how this works, Rafael.” It comes out sharper than I mean it to, old frustration resurfacing despite the fragile peace of the morning. “I’ve spent years reporting on families like the Belluccis. I understand operational security.”
“I know you do.” The beginnings of an apology flickers across his face. “That’s not what I meant.”
“I know.” I set the fork down, some of the tension easing back out of my shoulders. “Sorry. Long night.”
“You don’t have to apologize to me. Not after everything.”
We sit a moment longer in silence, everything unresolved from dinner still hovering underneath the surface. It’s a different silence than the one on the terrace, though. Less like a wall. More like a held breath; the kind two people share when they’re both waiting to see who moves first.
I think about how easily I could lose him—how close I came to actually watching it happen last night—and how none of that fear canceled out the hurt I have. I don’t know yet how to hold both feelings at once without one eventually swallowing the other whole.
“Rafael,” I murmur. “Thank you for last night… and this.”
“You don’t have to thank me. I told you. I’ll always get you out.”
I don’t have an answer for that yet. But I hold his gaze a beat longer than I should, long enough that Concetta clears her throat pointedly from the kitchen doorway, amused by whatever she’s just walked in on.
Rafael breaks first, clearing his throat and standing, color rising faintly along his jaw.
The tension inside me recedes, my heart lighter.
For the first time since this nightmare started, I feel like I might, eventually, breathe again.