Chapter 23
EMILY
Ifelt numb from the moment I walked out of Pietro's apartment.
Not the cotton-wool numbness of shock. That had worn off somewhere around the second day, leaving behind something less forgiving.
What remained was the numbness that arrived, I had read once, when the nervous system finally stopped bracing for a threat that was no longer present.
I still startled at doors, still clocked exits in rooms. I had spent two days sleeping in four-hour stretches and waking up with my hands fisted in the sheets before I remembered where I was.
The kidnapping happened and I was not pretending otherwise.
What Pietro had done, however, was its own separate wound, and one I was angrier about.
All his beautiful words, all that careful tenderness, all the noble language he wrapped around the decision, and in the end it proved nothing more than a prettier disguise for condescension and cowardice.
The problem, for me, was not even the danger.
That, I could have forgiven.
I fell in love with a man like Pietro Benetti with my eyes open, or as open as they could have been, and despite never wanting to witness that darker side of him so directly, I could have made peace with it.
The fact that I knew that about myself was unsettling enough to make me question several things, including my previous understanding of morality and my taste in men.
But that wasn’t what made me leave without looking back.
What I could not forgive was his complete disregard for my voice in the matter.
The man who had praised himself for giving me choice every step of our relationship, the man who had looked me in the eye and said I did not belong to him just because he loved me, still decided he could unilaterally end us the moment fear whispered he knew best.
He took the one thing he claimed to respect most and stripped it from me the second it became inconvenient.
That was the betrayal.
Not the blood.
Not the violence.
Not even the lie.
His arrogance.
His certainty that because he had the power to decide, his decision was the one that would stand.
I’m writing a whole thesis about men like him.
I, Emily Hart, who spent her academic career mapping exactly this mechanism, had still walked straight into the center of it and called it love.
The worst part was that it was.
I would not fight that.
I had no desire to become a prop in his tragedy, no interest in standing by while he cast himself as the noble protector and me as the woman too fragile to choose her own damage.
If he wanted to be another man deciding my life for me while calling it love, then he could do it without the comfort of my forgiveness.
At least, that was what I kept telling myself as I pulled my coat tighter over the humiliating elf costume and trudged through the snow toward the bus stop for the mall.
I needed the money. I needed to buy Sophie an amazing gift, and now that Pietro opted out of my life, I had taken it upon myself to get her that custom cane myself.
Boston, however, was not exactly overflowing with dignified employment opportunities a few days before Christmas, and it turned out that working on a PhD in history opened fewer festive seasonal doors than one might hope.
So an elf shift at the mall was, for the moment, as good as it got.
According to the woman who hired me, I should have considered myself lucky to get it at all, since they were experiencing something she called an elf shortage with total sincerity.
I honestly wished I were joking.
So here I was, for the third day in a row, making sure the line stayed orderly, that snotty crying children didn’t knock over the decorations, that their little petri dish hands remained off my costume, that demanding mothers didn’t try to jump the queue, and that creepy fathers didn’t attempt to look up my skirt or down the neckline of a dress that showed far more cleavage than I considered remotely necessary for Christmas-related employment.
I was, it seemed, the ideal elf height. At least according to the hiring manager, who had said it with the solemnity of a casting director discovering her breakout star.
Unfortunately, I was also, in her words, “a little more curvaceous than the usual elf,” which meant that even the larger size of the costume was doing some irresponsible work across my chest.
“Excuse me,” a woman snapped, materializing at my elbow with a stroller the size of a military vehicle and the expression of someone never once told no. “We need to go next.”
I gave her my customer-service smile, which felt less like friendliness and more like a hostage negotiation tactic at this point. “There’s a line.”
She blinked, as if the concept itself offended her. “Yes, but my son is getting fussy.”
I looked at the child in question, who appeared to be asleep with a cracker stuck to his forehead.
“That seems like a manageable level of distress,” I said.
Her eyes narrowed. “Do you know who I am?”
“No,” I said. “But the people behind you were here first, so unless you are secretly Santa, I’m afraid the answer is still no.”
The teenage girl behind her snorted so hard she almost dropped her peppermint mocha.
The mother huffed, muttered something about standards, and wheeled the stroller back into place with all the dignity of a defeated warlord.
I had just begun to feel a small, private glow of victory when a man near the front of the line smiled at me in a way that instantly made my skin crawl.
Late thirties, wedding ring, expensive coat, eyes lingering a fraction too long in all the wrong places.
He leaned a little closer when I stepped over to fix the rope barrier.
“Cold out here, isn’t it?” he said.
“That tends to happen in December.”
His gaze dipped. “Bet the costume doesn’t help much.”
I straightened slowly and looked him dead in the eye until the smile on his face began to strain. “No,” I said. “But public humiliation might.”
He coughed, stepped back, and suddenly found the floor fascinating.
I watched him shuffle awkwardly farther up the line and thought, not for the first time that week, that while I understood there were many fetishes in this world, the elf one was most definitely not on my list. What was it with men and costumes, honestly?
Then, as my eyes tracked lazily past him toward the outdoor store across the walkway, my whole body tensed.
A man was standing there watching me.
Not obviously enough to draw anyone else’s attention and not in the greasy, lingering way I had learned to recognize far too easily over the years. This was worse. His gaze was cool, direct, and assessing. It made the hair at the back of my neck rise before my mind had even caught up.
I went still.
The mall was busy, bright, overdecorated within an inch of its life, and full of enough holiday noise to make my concern feel absurd.
I was not alone. I was not in an alley. Pietro and his family made sure the people who took me were dead or as good as, and even if I was no longer part of that inner circle, I knew enough to be sure their reach did not end just because our relationship had.
Adam, too, had ceased to be the threat he once was.
I found that out the night before while on the phone with Sophie, who informed me with shameless delight that his father was arrested for corruption two days earlier and that Adam himself was now under investigation for malpractice.
I had not asked for details. They were not needed.
It had Pietro and Hoka written all over it, or perhaps Alessandro, and while I had no proof, I knew influence when I saw it.
And yet a strand of fear still lived in me, and I hated it.
I held the stranger’s gaze. Fear had taken up enough space in my life already. It had lived there too long, eaten too much, and left too little behind. I was done feeding it.
He kept looking at me, his eyes so blue they seemed almost unreal from that distance, pale enough to look unnatural under the mall lights. Then, slowly, he smiled. Not warmly. Not mockingly. More as if my refusal to look away had confirmed something he had hoped to find.
“Edwina? Edwina!”
My head snapped around with a jolt, momentarily disoriented before remembering, with no small amount of irritation, that my elf name was Edwina, because when I had suggested Emily, the manager had looked at me as if I had proposed ruin Christmas.
“Emily is too common to be an elf,” she had snorted.
“What?” I called back.
“Break time means break room, not existential wandering!” she shouted from the fake candy-cane arch.
I muttered a complaint under my breath and looked back toward the outdoor store.
The man was gone.
I was grateful for the break. I needed a little peace and quiet, although the Christmas Wonderland staff room was less a sanctuary than a bundle of exhausted seasonal workers surviving on burnt coffee, cheap cookies, and despair.
I was looking down at my Kindle, trying and failing to lose myself in a historical murder, when the chair across from me scraped against the floor. The hair at the back of my neck rose before I looked up.
When I did, the man from before was sitting right in front of me.
He was handsome, there was no point denying that, but not in a way that felt remotely reassuring.
He looked to be in his fifties, tall and broad, with a mane of dark hair threaded through with silver and a composed stillness that made the whole room around him seem slightly less safe.
He had the same sort of presence Alessandro Benetti carried.
“This area is for employees only,” I said carefully, keeping my voice level and my hands still on the table.
He lifted one dark brow. “Who says I’m not one of you?”
I looked him over once, deliberately. “No offense, but you don’t strike me as Santa material.”
He rested a hand against his chest with mock injury. “I’m offended, Miss Hart. I’m an excellent gift giver.”
I set my e-reader down carefully. “How do you know my name?”