Chapter 26
The afternoon light was grey through her kitchen window, and I couldn't stop staring at my phone like it held answers to questions I hadn't figured out how to ask yet.
Her text was still on the screen.
I could picture her typing it the way she would have been biting her lower lip, the way she would have bounced on her heels a little before hitting send, the way she would have smiled at her phone afterward, waiting for me to reply.
She always waited for me to reply, even when she pretended she didn't.
I typed: We should go somewhere together.
Then I just stared at the words, my thumb hovering over the send button.
We. Together. Two words that should have meant nothing to a man like me, but somehow they felt like a confession I wasn't ready to make.
I had been pretending to be someone I wasn't for weeks—someone who could stay, someone who deserved her, someone who wasn't already halfway out the door.
Then I typed: I'm proud of you.
I stared at that one for a long time too, because it was true and that was exactly the problem.
I was proud of her. I was proud of the way she worked, the way she cared, the way she had picked herself up after that bastard had torn her down.
I was proud of her in a way that made my chest ache, and that ache was dangerous, and I couldn't afford to let it show.
I deleted that one too.
Finally, I typed: I have some work and will be late. Don't wait up.
I sent it before I could change my mind, and then I set the phone down like it had burned me.
Her reply came a moment later.
Okay. Come home safe.
Home.
She had called my apartment home. Not hers. Home. Like it belonged to both of us now. Like I belonged there.
I picked up my jacket and left before I could do something stupid, like stay.
Romano was waiting in the car when I finally came down, his hands resting on the steering wheel and his eyes fixed somewhere on the middle distance.
He didn't ask where I had been or why I was late, but I could feel the weight of his silence pressing against the inside of my skull like a headache I couldn't shake.
"The chain," he said finally, his voice careful in that way he had when he was choosing every word like he was defusing something.
I looked out the window at the grey city slipping past. "I haven't found it."
"You haven't looked for it, either."
I didn't answer, and that was its own kind of answer.
"Boss." He said it the way he always did when he was about to say something I didn't want to hear soft, measured, the voice of a man who had known me since I was ten years old, who had watched my parents get buried,
who had stood outside my door every night for a year after because I couldn't sleep without someone there.
"You've been gone for weeks. The business needs you. Drago is getting restless. Seraphina is asking questions I don't know how to answer."
"Then handle it."
"I am handling it." His knuckles were white on the steering wheel, and I realized with a start that I had never seen Romano look tired before. He looked tired now. "But I can't handle everything, and I definitely can't handle it when you're not there to make the decisions that only you can make."
I looked at him properly for the first time that day.
His father had run the business after my parents died, had kept the wolves from the door while Nonna raised me in that big empty house with all its locked rooms and shadowed corners.
Romano had been seventeen then, already broad-shouldered and serious, already watching the world with eyes that had seen too much for someone his age.
He had never left my side after that, not really, and I trusted him more than anyone alive more than I trusted myself, most days.
"I'll get the chain," I said, but even as the words left my mouth I could hear how hollow they sounded.
"When?"
"Soon."
He didn't push, because he never pushed, but the silence between us felt heavier than it had any right to be, and I spent the rest of the drive staring out the window and trying not to think about the way she had smiled at me that morning.
The day dragged itself through meetings and reports and decisions that made my head ache in a dull, persistent way that no amount of coffee could fix.
Drago called twice about the eastern situation, his voice grainy and insistent through the phone, and I told him the same thing I had told him last week because the truth was that I hadn't been paying enough attention to come up with anything new.
He didn't like it, but I didn't particularly care Drago had been a problem for years, and he would still be a problem tomorrow, and none of it felt urgent compared to the way my chest had been hurting since I sent that text.
Then Seraphina showed up at the estate unannounced with a hand over her pregnant belly, which was never a good sign.
She didn't knock, because she had never knocked on a door in her life, and she didn't wait for me to acknowledge her before she settled into the chair across from my desk with her eyes already sharp and assessing.
"You look terrible," she said.
"I'm fine."
"You're lying." She plopped onto the chair and leaned back like she had nowhere else to be and all day to sit there until I told her the truth.
"Romano said you've been gone for weeks. He didn't say where, which means you told him not to tell me, which means it's something you don't want anyone to know about."
"Romano talks too much."
"Romano is worried about you, which means I'm worried about you, which means you're going to sit there and tell me what's going on or I'm going to make your life very difficult until you do."
She was five minutes older than me, and she had been using that five minutes to get her way since we were children. It had worked then, and it worked now, but I wasn't ready to talk about Elera not with Seraphina, not with anyone, maybe not even with myself.
"There's nothing to worry about," I said, and I could hear how unconvincing I sounded.
She watched me for a long moment, her eyes narrowing in that way they did when she was trying to read something in my face that I wasn't saying out loud.
"You're a terrible liar," Seraphina said quietly. "Be careful. Whoever she is, whatever you're feeling... just be careful."
I looked at her then at the sister who had held my hand at our parents' funeral, who had snuck into my room at night when the nightmares were too bad, who had joined the family business against everyone's advice because she refused to let me face it alone.
"I know," I said.
She stood up and crossed to my chair, pressing a kiss to the top of my head the way Nonna used to. "You're an idiot," she said. "But I love you anyway."
She left before I could respond, and I sat there in the quiet of my office with my hand pressed over my chest and wondered when exactly I had become the kind of man who let himself feel things again.
I made it back to her apartment by midnight, and the door was unlocked because it was always unlocked now because she trusted me, because she had stopped being afraid of the dark and of coming home to an empty apartment,
because she had decided somewhere along the way that I was someone worth leaving the door open for.
The kitchen was dark, and the stove was cold because she hadn't even bothered to eat.
She had been waiting for me instead, and she had fallen asleep on the couch while she was waiting, curled on her side with her knees tucked up and her cheek pressed into the cushion and her hair spread out around her like a dark halo in the low light.
She was holding the plush toy. The one she thought I hadn't noticed her buying, the one she had tried to hide in the bottom of her closet like she was embarrassed to still want something soft at her age.
Her lips were slightly parted, her breathing was slow and even, and she looked so peaceful that I couldn't bring myself to move for a long time.
I just stood there in the doorway of her small apartment, watching her sleep, and I thought about the first night I had spent here—the way she had covered me with a blanket without waking me up, the way she had tucked it around my shoulders like I was something worth taking care of,
the way she had gone back to her room and left me there with the warmth of her kindness still lingering in the fabric.
She didn't know me then. She had just seen someone cold and done what she always did, taken care of someone who needed it.
And now I was the one leaving.
I moved to the kitchen, and her bag was still on the counter where she had dropped it after work.
The same bag she carried everywhere, to work, to the grocery store, on the subway, into every room of her life without ever knowing what she was carrying.
I had watched her pull out her phone and her wallet and her keys a hundred times, and I had never once seen her pull out the chain because she didn't even know she had it.
I opened the main compartment first, and her lipstick, keys, and charging cable were all tangled together in that familiar mess she called organized. Things she had shoved in hurry, all there, but the chain was nowhere to be seen.
My fingers found it before my eyes did, tucked under a corner and slipped to the edge, the weight of it, the familiar shape, the sun pendant cool against my palm after all these weeks.
I pulled it out and held it up to the light.
Three generations of Valerius men had worn this chain.
My grandfather, who had built an empire from nothing and died in his own bed with his family around him the only Valerius in living memory to have that luxury.
My father, who had worn it the night he was shot in the street, who had died wearing it while my mother bled out beside him because someone had wanted to send a message and we had been in the wrong place at the wrong time.