Chapter 25
BEA
The new guard at the door hasn’t moved in four hours.
I tried to make conversation with him earlier—asked his name, asked if he wanted water, asked about the weather—and got, in order: Tomas, ma’am; no thank you, ma’am; and the same middle-distance look the other guard gave me yesterday. I gave up after the third try.
It’s now six in the evening, and I’m about to lose my mind.
This is a kind of solitude I’ve never lived in before.
The apartment makes no sound of its own.
The HVAC is too good, the windows are too thick, the floors too solid.
I can’t hear the city. I can’t hear my neighbors.
There are no neighbors to hear. And I’ve been pacing the same loop since yesterday.
This is my life now.
I’m becoming a very specific kind of crazy.
So. Fine. If I’m going to be a hostage in a four-thousand-square-foot apartment, I’m going to learn a few things about my host.
I start in the living room and find nothing. Art I don’t understand. Furniture nobody’s sat on. A coffee-table book about Italian architecture that clearly has never been opened. The kitchen is the same way, unused. The pantry has one good olive oil, one bag of coffee, and a sleeve of crackers.
The study, however, is more interesting.
The desk drawer is unlocked. He hasn’t bothered. I imagine nobody has ever come into his study uninvited. Top drawer: legal pads, a Mont Blanc pen, three cigars, and a pile of contracts in folders sorted by year.
Second drawer: a gun.
My pulse skips a beat.
Of course, there’s a gun. I close the drawer.
Third drawer: another gun. Right.
I close that one too.
How many guns does one person need?
There’s a cabinet by the window. I open it.
More guns. A knife in a leather sheath that looks like it predates electricity. A small box of ammunition. And under all of it, sitting flat on the cabinet floor, a yellow legal-pad page folded once.
I unfold it.
A handwritten list of names. None I recognize. Maybe twelve of them. A date is written next to each one in his small, even handwriting. Some of the dates are in the future. Some are last year.
Some are this month.
I refold the page and put it back where I found it, close the cabinet, try not to think about the dates that are in the past.
The liquor cabinet is unlocked too. Rows of bottles. Not much else.
The bottom drawer is the one I almost don’t open.
Travel brochures.
A whole stack—glossy, the kind real estate agents use. Beachfront condos in Sea Bright. A converted lighthouse in Maine. A villa in Tuscany with a long stone staircase running down to a private cove. A cottage somewhere in the Cotswolds.
My interest is piqued.
Raffaele D’Amico, who probably hasn’t taken a vacation in fifteen years, has been quietly collecting brochures for places he’s never going to go.
Who are you, really?
The elevator chimes.
I shove the brochures back into the drawer and push it closed. I’m standing, hands at my sides, by the time the doors open.
I’m also at least thirty feet from where I’m supposed to be.
He doesn’t notice.
Raffaele steps out of the elevator, and he’s wet—rain, I think, it’s been raining for a while—and he’s wearing a jacket I’ve never seen before, and his expression is…
His eyes are dark, and tired, and off in a way I don’t have a word for. As if a piece of him has shifted while he was outside, and he hasn’t had time yet to push it back into place.
“Raffaele.”
He doesn’t answer. He walks past me to the cabinet I just closed, takes a glass off the rack and pours four fingers of whiskey. No ice, no ceremony. He drinks it standing.
Then he pours another.
My stomach drops. I’ve never seen him this shaken.
“What happened?”
His jaws clenches as he chews on the question.
“Vincenzo is dead,” he finally says.
The silence of the place turns heavy. For a moment, I forget to breathe.
“Wh-What? How?”
“Nico killed him. Killed Victor Senior, too. Shot up the entire fucking casino. About forty minutes ago.”
“Oh my God.”
“No. There will be no gods involved. Only demons. It’s open war now…” He looks at me through sunken eyes. “Which is why you need to leave.”
I freeze.
“Leave?”
I’m genuinely not sure what he means.
“That’s right. There’s a place I keep. Far side of the city. Off the books. Secure. You’ll be safe there until I have this contained.”
“A-a place?”
“Yes.”
I shake my head. “What kind of place?”
“The kind of place that keeps you alive.”
A nervous laugh bubbles up my throat. “You want to put me in a bunker?”
“This isn’t funny, Bea.”
“No. It’s not. It’s insane.” My mind is swirling. Before I know it, my spine has straightened. “I’ve been in this apartment for days. I’ve walked the same five rooms in circles. I’ve nearly gone mad. And now you want to ship me to a bunker?”
“You’ll be safe.”
“I don’t feel safe. I feel like a parcel.”
“This isn’t about how you feel.”
“Then what is it about? Because from where I’m standing, it looks like you want to shove me in a box and come back when it’s convenient.”
“That’s not what—”
“I’m not going to a bunker, Raffaele.”
My heart is racing at a thousand miles per minute, but I can’t back down. My body won’t let me.
“You don’t get to decide that.”
“The hell I don’t.”
“You’re under my fucking protection—”
“I’m not your property—”
His sunken eyes go wide. “You think I don’t know that? You think I haven’t been losing my mind over what you are to me? You think I don’t know what you’ve become—”
And just like that my racing pulse stops dead. The pounding in my heart slows to a near glacial speed.
Tears well in my eyes.
“Then tell me. Because from where I’m standing right now, I feel like a thing you’ve claimed. Not someone you—”
“If anything happens to you—”
He steps closer.
“If anything happens to the one fucking person I—”
He stops.
It hangs there.
I can hear his breath. I can hear my own. The rest of the apartment has gone underwater.
“Raffaele.”
“Don’t.”
“Did you just—”
“I said don’t.”
But the word is in the room with us. It doesn’t have to be said. Both of us know what it is. He’s standing two feet from me. Too close. Not close enough.
I move first. My hands grab his face and yank him down. My mouth crashes into his. For three fucking days, nothing’s felt like mine until this.
He stiffens for half a second, then snaps. The kiss turns vicious. His fingers dig hard into my hips, and I grip him back just as mean.
“What happens,” I gasp against his lips, “to that person. The one who—”
“Shut up.”
He doesn’t unbutton my cardigan. He rips it open, buttons scattering. The shirt underneath gets the same treatment. His jacket hits the floor, followed by the heavy clatter of his gun. I don’t care. My hands are already tearing at his belt.
“Anyone who touches her dies,” he growls, mouth latched onto my throat, sucking hard enough to mark. “Anyone who even looks at her wrong. Anyone who breathes on her without my fucking permission—”
“And her?” I bite out. “What happens to her?”
He pulls back just enough for me to see it—the wrecked, feral dark in his eyes.
“She stays.” His voice is rough gravel. “Locked with me. Forever. Whether she wants it or not.”
We stagger backward. My back slams into the cabinet, rattling bottles. One crashes to the floor, glass and liquor exploding across the wood. Neither of us flinches.
He shoves the torn shirt off my shoulders, lifts me like I weigh nothing, and drops me onto the cabinet’s edge. More bottles fall, spilling expensive alcohol down my thigh in cold, sticky rivulets. His hands shove my legs apart.
I feel the word he doesn’t say in every brutal touch.
Mine.