Portia
The knock at my door comes just after noon, sharp and familiar. I’m halfway across the room, already hoping.
Jayla stands in the hallway looking smaller than I remember, a thin white bandage still visible along her hairline, but upright, steady, very much alive in a way that makes my chest ache with relief the second I see her.
“You’re here.” I pull her into a careful hug, breathing in the familiar smell of her shampoo underneath the antiseptic hospital scent still clinging to her skin. “I thought they weren’t releasing you until this afternoon.”
“I’ll look at you however I want. I almost lost you.”
“You didn’t, though.” She squeezes my hand, warm and grounding, and for one full breath everything feels almost normal again.
Two sisters standing in a hallway, safe, together, the worst of it behind us.
I take in the small details of her, the ones I’ve cataloged instinctively since we were kids, checking her over without meaning to.
Her eyes track clearly, no lingering confusion from the concussion.
Whatever fear I carried through yesterday’s phone call finally starts loosening its grip.
Then I notice Adagio.
He’s standing a few feet behind her, jaw clenched hard enough a muscle jumps along the side of it.
His hands, usually loose and expressive even at rest, curl into fists against his sides, knuckles pale.
Some instinct honed over years of reading rooms for a living picks up on the wrongness of it before he even opens his mouth.
“Adagio.” My eyes narrow. “What’s wrong?”
He doesn’t answer right away, and that silence tells me more than words could. Jayla’s smile falters too, catching whatever I’m reacting to a half-second behind me.
“Where’s Rafael?”
“He’s alive.” Adagio gets it out fast, like he knows exactly which words matter most and wants them ahead of whatever worse thing I might imagine in the silence. “But he’s hurt, Portia. Bad.”
The floor tilts slightly beneath me. “How bad?”
“Gunshot. Side of his stomach.” He runs a hand through his hair, some of his usual composure cracking around the edges.
“Missed anything vital, from what we could tell on the ground, but he’s lost a lot of blood.
Maurizio’s bringing him now. We couldn’t risk a hospital, not with what happened tonight. ”
“What happened?” My hands start shaking, fear giving way to anger, my jaw tightening, fingers curling into fists at my sides. “He told me it was supposed to be a straightforward op.”
“It should’ve been. Vito had more men at the port than our intel accounted for. Way more. We walked in thinking eight, and it was closer to twenty. Had to fight our way out.”
“Fight your way out.” I press a hand against my mouth. “With guns.”
“With everything we had. We lost Enzo.”
The name shocks me to my core for someone I barely knew, a soldier I’d exchanged maybe a dozen words with total during our brief overlap at the villa.
Grief doesn’t care about the size of a connection when it’s stacking on top of terror for someone I love.
I press both hands against my face, trying to breathe through the tightness closing around my chest. Beside me, Jayla’s hand finds my shoulder, steady, silent, present the way she’s always been since we were kids clinging to each other through storms neither of us understood yet.
The door slams open, and the whole room goes still for one suspended second.
Maurizio half carries, half drags Rafael through the entrance, blood soaking through the makeshift bandage wrapped around his midsection, his face pale and slick with sweat, barely conscious, feet dragging uselessly with each step Maurizio forces forward.
“Rafael!” I move without deciding to, hands hovering uselessly the same way Adagio’s did the night of the fire, terrified of making anything worse by touching wrong.
“Get him to the bed. I already called the doctor. She’s discreet. Ten minutes out.”
We get him onto the narrow bed together, and I press my palms against the wound without thinking, applying pressure the way I remember from some first-aid class I took years ago and never expected to actually use in a moment like this.
“Stay with me. Rafael, look at me. Stay with me.”
His eyes flutter open briefly, unfocused, finding mine for just a second before sliding shut again. “Portia.”
“I’m here.” Tears blur my vision now, hot and useless, doing nothing to help the actual crisis in front of me. “I’m right here. I’m not going anywhere.”
The doctor arrives in what feels like both seconds and an eternity, a sharp-eyed older woman introduced only as Dr. Renata, who takes one look at the scene and starts issuing orders in rapid Italian, motioning for space, for hot water, for anything sterile Concetta can find on short notice.
Someone pulls me back from the bed, useless again, and I watch from the doorway as she works, hands steady, movements sure, cutting away Rafael’s shirt to get a clear look at the wound.
She doesn’t flinch at the blood the way I do.
She just works, murmuring instructions to Maurizio, who holds Rafael down through the worst of it, keeping him from thrashing while she cleans and probes the wound for anything that shouldn’t be left inside him.
Rafael groans once, low and guttural, a sound that scrapes straight down my spine, and I press my knuckles against my mouth to keep from making a sound of my own.
Jayla wraps an arm around me from behind, and I let myself lean into her the way I haven’t allowed myself to lean into anyone since this whole nightmare started, watching the only man I’ve ever loved bleed out on a stranger’s bed in a country neither of us was born in.
I’ve never felt more helpless in my entire life.
The doctor finishes an hour later, exhausted but satisfied, explaining in broken English that the bullet missed anything vital, he’ll need rest and antibiotics and careful monitoring, but he’ll survive this.
I barely hear half of what she says, too busy watching Rafael’s chest rise and fall, steady now, proof he’s still here despite everything the past couple of days tried to take from us.
Everyone clears out eventually, giving us space.
I pull a chair beside the bed and take his hand in both of mine.
His skin is cool and clammy against my palms, and I press my thumb gently against his wrist, counting his pulse just to have a steady rhythm to focus on, proof of life I can measure and hold.
I think about every version of tonight that could have gone differently.
A few inches to the left, and this conversation never happens because there’s no one left to have it with.
A few seconds slower getting him out of that port, and Maurizio’s carrying a body instead of a barely-breathing man.
I think about the argument we had before he left, the anger I let sit between us instead of softening it, and I hate myself a little for how much of our last real conversation was spent fighting instead of holding each other.
I also think about every version of my life before Rafael, back when danger meant a late-night phone call about a story gone sideways instead of a man bleeding out on a bed in front of me.
I used to believe I understood risk. I covered it for a living, stood outside crime scenes describing the aftermath in clean, professional sentences for people watching from the safety of their living rooms. None of that prepared me for this—for loving someone enough that his blood on my hands feels like my own wound, for realizing danger isn’t a story anymore; it’s the only life I’ve got left to hold onto.
He stirs sometime later, eyes fluttering open, hazy with whatever the doctor gave him for pain.
“Portia…”
“Don’t talk. Rest.”
“You’re still here.” Surprise crosses his face, like he expected me to have left the second the crisis passed, like sitting beside him through this was ever a question in my mind.
“Where else would I be?”
“We fought.” His eyes struggle to stay open, exhaustion pulling at him even as he fights it. “I thought—”
“I know what we fought about.” I brush a strand of hair back from his forehead, my hand trembling slightly despite my best efforts to steady it. “It doesn’t matter right now.”
“It matters.” His hand tightens weakly around mine, barely more than a twitch of pressure, but I feel it anyway, feel what it costs him. “I almost didn’t come back. There was a second, lying on that dock bleeding, where I genuinely didn’t think I would.”
My breath catches painfully in my chest. “Don’t.”
“I need to say it,” he says. “I thought about you the whole time. Not the mission, not Vito, not any of it. Just you and how angry I was that the last thing I said to you before leaving wasn’t gentler.”
“You told me to stay safe. That wasn’t nothing.”
“It wasn’t enough. I love you. I need you to know that. Whatever happens next, whatever’s still broken between us because of what I didn’t tell you, that’s never once been in question. Not for one single day since I met you.”
I press his hand against my cheek instead, letting myself feel the warmth returning slowly to his skin, the proof he’s still breathing.
“I was so scared. Watching Adagio’s face when he walked through that door, I knew before he said anything. And all I could think about was every angry thing I’d said to you and how unfair it would be if those were the last words you ever heard from me.”
“They weren’t the last words.” His thumb moves weakly against my palm, a small, exhausted gesture that undoes the knot lodged tight in my chest. “And they won’t be. I promise you that.”
“You can’t promise that. Not really. Not in this life.”
“True… but I can promise I’ll fight like hell to make it true anyway.”
I lean forward, resting my forehead gently against his, careful of the bandages, careful of everything fragile about him right now, and let myself cry quietly for a long moment, all the fear and anger and love finally breaking loose at once, no longer separable into neat, manageable pieces.
“I forgive you,” I whisper eventually, the words arriving somewhere I didn’t consciously decide to go, surprising myself as much as him. “Not all of it. Not yet. But enough to know I can’t lose you, Rafael. I won’t survive losing you too.”
His eyes close, some of the tension finally easing from his face at the words, sleep pulling him back under before he can respond.
I stay exactly where I am, forehead pressed to his, holding his hand through the rest of the night, watching him breathe, terrified to close my own eyes even for a second in case he needs me and I’m not paying attention.
Somewhere outside, the sun starts rising over the olive grove, indifferent to how close we came to losing everything tonight.
I don’t move from his side.