Chapter 34
ISABELLA
I wake up and he’s not there. The absence registers before the hour does. His side of the bed is cool, not cold. The pillow holds the impression of his head. I press my palm into it without thinking. Pull my hand back.
The clock on the nightstand glows red beside his mother’s rosary.
The room pale with new light. But a question tugs at me.
Not fear. Not the old frantic pulse when something’s wrong.
This is quieter. A question I’ve been avoiding because Sofia’s rescue was louder in my brain.
Now it’s quiet, and the question gets louder.
I get up. My body protests. The soreness from last night sits low and deep, a tenderness I press into without meaning to. The ache is a reminder that what happened in that bed was real. I gave him everything. He gave it back. My body is keeping the receipt.
My feet find the tile and the cold shoots up through my soles, grounding me in the present the way cold always does.
I’m wearing one of his shirts because mine are still in the room I don’t sleep in anymore, the room that’s become Sofia’s by silent agreement.
My hair is loose and tangled from sleep and I don’t fix it.
There was a time when I wouldn’t have left a room without checking three exits and cataloging every potential weapon within reach.
Now I walk down a dark hallway in bare feet and an oversized shirt.
The most dangerous thing I’m worried about is stubbing my toe on the credenza Nico keeps moving as a joke.
The house never goes quiet. Not fully. Pipes settling.
The distant hum of the security system I helped redesign after the raid.
Somewhere on the second floor, a door closes, probably Giada checking on Sofia or Mila.
This house never fully sleeps, but it rests.
I used to find that unnerving. Now I find it soothing.
The kitchen light is on. Not the overhead, just the small one above the stove that Nonna Rosa leaves burning because she says a dark kitchen is a sad kitchen. It throws a warm circle across the counter, catches the edge of a glass of water, glints off the blade in Lorenzo’s hands.
He’s standing at the island. Cleaning a knife.
I know his weapons the way I know code. By shape.
By function. By the particular attention he gives each one.
This is a fixed blade, black handle. The kind that exists for one purpose.
He’s running a cloth along the edge in slow, deliberate strokes, the same precision he brings to everything he touches.
The blade is already clean. He’s cleaning it again.
I lean against the doorframe and watch him for a moment before he registers me.
Or maybe he registered me the second my feet hit the hallway tile and he’s just giving me the space to arrive on my own terms. That would be like him.
The man who learned that caging me was the wrong kind of love and has been practicing the right kind ever since.
“Hey,” I say.
He looks up. In the low light, his face is all angles and shadow, the scar under his collarbone disappearing into the collar of his shirt.
His expression does that thing it does when he sees me now, a subtle rearrangement I couldn’t have read a month ago but have become fluent in: the line between his brows easing, the set of his jaw loosening a fraction.
Not a smile. Lorenzo doesn’t waste smiles.
But something adjacent. The expression that says you’re here and that’s good.
“Couldn’t sleep,” I offer, though he didn’t ask.
He nods. Goes back to the knife. The cloth moves in even passes.
I cross to the counter. Pour myself water from the pitcher Nonna Rosa keeps cold because she insists room temperature water is “a crime against hospitality, cher.” The glass is cool in my hands. I drink. Set it down. Watch him work.
The island between us. The knife between his hands.
The thread pulls tighter.
I’ve known for days. Maybe longer. Since the morning I woke up and found his knuckles freshly split, a detail he didn’t hide because Lorenzo doesn’t hide the evidence of what he is.
He wears it. Since the conversation I overheard between him and Dante in the study, voices too low to catch words but the tone unmistakable: business concluded, account settled.
Since the particular quality of stillness that settled over him afterward, not the old emptiness but resolution. He finished what he needed to finish.
I didn’t ask. I wasn’t ready. I’m ready now.
“Paolo?”
One word. It sits between us on the stone countertop like a coin laid down.
Lorenzo’s hands don’t pause on the blade. His eyes come up to mine. Steady. No wince, no guilt, no performance of remorse. His even gaze. He did what he did and is not sorry.
“Handled.”
One word back. The cloth stops moving. He sets the knife down on the counter, the blade aligned with the edge, and folds the cloth once, twice. Puts it aside. Gives me his full attention.
My jaw unclenches. My breathing evens.
“He sat at our kitchen table,” I say. My voice sounds strange in the quiet.
“He walked Sofia to school. And then he sold her to clear a poker debt because she wasn’t his and her life was worth less to him than his comfort.
” Lorenzo watches me. Doesn’t interrupt.
“He didn’t hate her. He just didn’t value her.
” I set the glass down. “That’s worse. Hate at least acknowledges that a person is real enough to provoke a feeling. ”
“Are you okay?” His voice is low. Careful in a way he never used to be.
“I should be horrified.” I look at my bare feet on Nonna Rosa’s tiles.
“The old Isabella would have a problem with it. The one with the merit scholarship who believed in courtrooms.” I meet his eyes. “She’s not here tonight.”
A breath.
“Good.”
His expression rearranges. The room is quiet. The stove light hums.
“I should feel something,” I say. “About Paolo. Right? Normal people feel something when someone dies.” Lorenzo watches me.
Doesn’t answer. Doesn’t need to. “What happens to the house? Our house. His stuff?” I pick up the glass again just to have something in my hands.
“Not that I care. I don’t. I’m just. My brain does this thing where it goes logistical when it doesn’t know how to process the emotions. ”
He sets the cloth down. “I know.”
“My mother is going to call. Eventually. When she finds out.” I take a sip of water. Set it down too hard. “Or she won’t. That might be worse.”
His palms go flat on the stone. Waiting.
“My mother?” This one is harder. It comes out rougher than Paolo’s name did, catching on something in my throat that I didn’t expect.
Because Paolo is simpler. Paolo is a man who sold a child and deserved what he got.
But my mother braided my hair before school.
Sang off-key in the car. Kept a magnet on the refrigerator that said This Kitchen Is Seasoned With Love in cursive script.
“She married a man who gambled and numbed herself with prescriptions until she was too far under to fight for her own daughter.” I’m talking too fast. The words spilling out the way they do when my brain doesn’t know how to go quiet.
“She knew. She knew what he did and she stayed because the alternative was scarier than complicity.” Lorenzo doesn’t move.
Just listens. The way he always does. “Last time I talked to her, I begged her to help me find Sofia. She said sweetheart, you need to move on in a voice so medicated it barely sounded human.” I pick up the water. Put it down. “I hung up. That was it.”
Lorenzo straightens. He rounds the island, picks up the water I poured, sets it closer to me. A habit now. Constant low-grade caretaking that used to infuriate me and now just makes me lean into it.
“She’s in a facility. Good one. Private.” His voice is low, factual. A beat. Like he’s deciding how much to say. “She’ll get help. If she wants it.”
I set the glass down. The sound is sharp in the quiet kitchen.
“You handled Paolo. You placed my mother. Both without telling me.” My voice is steady but my hands aren’t. “What else have you decided about my life?”
He absorbs it. Doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t argue. A long silence.
“You’re right.” Two words. No justification. No explanation. Just the concession, laid flat on the counter between us.
“If you want to see her someday,” he says, “that door’s open. If you don’t, it stays closed.” He meets my eyes. “Your call.”
“I don’t know what I want,” I say. “Since Sofia was taken, I’ve always known.
Find Sofia. Save Sofia. That was the engine.
And now she’s sleeping in the next room and I’m standing here with no objective.
” I press the heel of my hand against my eye.
“I don’t know if forgiveness is something I can give her. Or should.”
“You don’t have to know yet.” Ordinary words. In his mouth, in this kitchen, at this hour. Permission.
I round the island to him. Four steps. Moving toward the solid fact of him. The way I’ve been moving toward him since the night he kicked in my door and didn’t kill me.
I press my face into his chest. His shirt is soft and warm and smells like laundry detergent and skin. Not cologne. Not the sharp ozone of a recently fired weapon. Just the lived-in scent of a man awake in the small hours, mind still turning.
His arms fold around me the way arms are supposed to. No hesitation. His chin comes down to the top of my head.
And he holds me. In this kitchen where Nonna Rosa makes gumbo and Marco leaves coffee cups on every surface. In this room that smells like cayenne. I am held by a man who remembered how to touch because of me.
That’s enough. For now.
I keep waiting for the part where it breaks. Good things always do. Every safe place I’ve ever had came with an expiration date.
His arms tighten. Like he heard it.
I hold on anyway.