Chapter 35
LORENZO
The compound is louder in the afternoon.
I’m standing on the second-floor landing with a cup of espresso I’ve barely touched, and the house is full of sounds.
Rosa’s radio in the kitchen, zydeco and old Cajun standards drifting up through the floorboards.
Her voice carrying over the music: “Marco Santoro, you track mud through my kitchen one more time, I’m feedin’ your dinner to the dog. ”
“We don’t have a dog, Nonna.”
“Then I’ll get one just to make a point.”
“Nonna, you’re allergic to dogs.”
“Then I’ll get a mean cat. Don’ test me, boy.”
A pot lid clangs. The smell of something dark and rich drifts up through the floorboards.
Roux. Rosa makes it from memory, stirring for forty minutes without looking at the pot.
Giada’s voice somewhere below, low and measured, the particular tone she uses with patients when she needs them calm.
Marco’s footsteps on the back stairs, too heavy, too fast.
And underneath all of it, the quieter sounds. The ones you’d miss if you weren’t listening.
Sofia Vitale is eighteen years old and she hasn’t spoken since we found her.
I watch her from the landing as she moves through the downstairs hallway, trailing Isabella by four feet.
Not three, not five. Four. Consistent across days.
Four feet. Close enough to confirm Isabella is still there. Far enough to run if she needs to.
She maintains it with the precision of someone who learned, in the worst possible classroom, exactly how much space a body needs to escape.
But the distance is growing. Last week it was three. Before that, two. She’s loosening her grip. Not letting go, not yet, but letting go enough that the space between her and Isabella looks more like a choice and less like a leash.
She doesn’t speak. But she tracks Isabella through every room now with an attention that borders on surveillance.
Sofia accepts food from Nonna Rosa. This started five days ago.
Rosa didn’t offer, didn’t coax, didn’t make it an event.
She set a plate of biscuits on the counter while Sofia was with Isabella and went back to her stove without a word.
When Rosa turned around ten minutes later, two biscuits were gone and Sofia’s cheeks were still moving.
Rosa caught my eye across the room. Didn’t smile, didn’t nod.
Just held my gaze with the steadiness of a woman who has been feeding traumatized people for longer than I’ve been alive.
Sofia lets Giada check her bandages now. Sits still while my sister’s careful hands peel back gauze and examine what’s healing and what isn’t. Gia talks while she works, a constant low narration of what she’s doing and why, and Sofia doesn’t respond but she doesn’t pull away either.
“Iron’s up,” Gia told me yesterday, pulling her stethoscope off her neck. “Muscle’s rebuilding. The body does what it does when you give it the right tools.”
“And the rest?”
She paused. Rolled the stethoscope between her fingers. “One thing at a time, Renzo.” Quiet. Measured. “She’ll get there.”
“I’m asking about you.”
That stopped her. The stethoscope froze between her fingers. She looked at me like I’d said something in a language she didn’t know I spoke.
“I’m fine.” The pause told me everything the words didn’t.
Damn it. She looks tired. A slight drag in her step, the third coffee before noon. She’s carrying Sofia. Mila. The aftermath of the raid. Whatever her clinic needs, whatever Dante needs, all five of us. The way she’s always carried all five of us. And nobody has asked her if she’s all right.
The back stairs creak. Nico, taking them two at a time, a slim book tucked under his arm. He stops when he sees me on the landing.
“Renzo.”
“Where’d you get the book?”
He glances at it. The cover is Cyrillic. “Ordered it.”
“When?”
“Before.” He doesn’t elaborate. Before the raid. Before Mila. Before whatever happened in Moscow that taught my brother a language none of us knew he spoke.
“How’s she doing?” I ask.
“She threw a cup at the wall this morning. Good arm.” He’s past me and along the hall before I can respond. The book disappears with him.
Downstairs, a door opens and closes.
Mila. I don’t know her surname. Gia estimates early twenties based on bone structure and dental records.
Nico found her during the raid. She came at him with a piece of rebar she’d sharpened against the concrete floor, and he caught her wrists without hurting her and spoke to her in Russian.
She has her own room now. First floor, east corridor, with a lock that works from the inside and windows that open onto the garden.
Gia chose it. Good light in the mornings.
A hallway door wide enough that Mila can see anyone approaching before they get close.
Small considerations that matter to someone whose survival depended on reading a room before the room could read her.
She threw a ceramic lamp at one of the security detail on the second day and caught him above the eye. Eight stitches. Gia was furious, not at Mila but at the guard for getting too close when he’d been briefed on her triggers.
“I gave you one instruction. One. Give her space.”
The guard had the sense to look ashamed.
Today she’s outside the room. I lean against the railing and watch. She’s standing just beyond her doorframe, bare feet on the marble, her body positioned so she can retreat in one step. Her eyes scan the front door, the kitchen entrance, the staircase.
I know what that looks like. She’s counting. That’s not damaged. That’s adapted.
And then I see Sofia.
Isabella has gone into the library, and Sofia, for the first time since the rescue, hasn’t followed. She’s standing at the end of the hallway near the kitchen. Mila is at the opposite end, near her room. Maybe thirty feet between them. Neither moves toward the other. Neither leaves.
I set my espresso on the railing and watch.
It’s not dramatic. Nobody speaks. Nobody gestures.
Sofia stands where she is and Mila stands where she is and they exist in the same corridor the way two feral cats might share a patch of sunlight.
Each aware of the other. Each maintaining the distance that keeps them breathing.
Neither threatening. Neither trusting. But neither walking away.
Minutes pass. Three. Four. Mila shifts her stance, redistributing her weight toward the wall rather than the door.
Not a retreat. Something looser in her shoulders.
Sofia moves first. Not toward Mila. Just deeper into the space, away from the library Isabella disappeared into, settling onto the floor with her back against the wainscoting.
She pulls her knees to her chest and wraps her arms around her shins and makes herself small.
A minute later, Mila sits too. Against the opposite wall, thirty feet away, mirroring the posture without looking at Sofia. Knees drawn up. Arms wrapped.
Two girls making themselves small in the same corridor, each one choosing to stay. Fuck.
Then, from the first-floor corridor, a voice. Nico’s. Not loud. Not projected. The low, measured cadence of a man reading something aloud. In Russian.
The syllables drift through the corridor with a patience I’ve never heard from my brother, deliberate and careful, like each word is a bridge he’s building plank by plank.
I move to the railing’s edge and look down.
He’s sitting on the floor outside Mila’s room with the book open on his knees.
A slim volume, worn at the spine, pages soft from being turned often.
He’s reading from it. Not performing. Not using the charm that brokers deals and disarms enemies. This is Nico stripped of all of that, practicing a language he has no business knowing, stumbling over a word and then correcting himself and continuing.
A poem. The rhythm is unmistakable even in a language I don’t speak. Something lyrical and old and sad.
Mila is listening. She hasn’t turned toward him. Her posture hasn’t changed. But her head has tilted, just a degree, the way a person tilts toward music. She stops scanning. Fixed on nothing. Just listening.
Nico reaches the end of whatever he’s reading. He pauses. Turns a page. Starts another.
He’s learning her language. And she’s letting him.
Footsteps behind me. I know them before I turn.
Isabella’s walk. Slower than it used to be.
Not limping. Just careful, the way someone moves when they’re still cataloguing what hurts.
She stops beside me at the railing and looks down at the scene below.
At her sister and Mila. At Nico reading Russian poetry to a girl who won’t speak.
For a while, neither of us say anything.
“We’re collecting broken things,” she says. Low. Not sad.
“Not broken.” The word comes out before the rest follows. She looks at me. Waits. My teeth grind. Dio. Nothing.
“Yeah,” she says. “I know what you mean.”
She leans her elbows on the railing. “Nico’s been reading to her. In Russian.”
“I noticed.”
“Gia couldn’t get an answer out of him either.” She glances at me. “Family trait.”
“You’re all terrible communicators. It’s a miracle anything gets done around here.”
“We get things done.”
“By shooting at them.” She looks at me. Her eyes go light. “I’m teasing.”
“I know.”
“Do you? Your face doesn’t change.”
“It changed.”
“Where?”
“You missed it.”
My hand finds Isabella’s lower back. I don’t think about it. My palm settles against the warmth of her and rests there. Not pulling her toward me. Not claiming. Just touching because the distance between us is a problem my body solves without consulting my brain.
She leans into it.
From the kitchen below, Rosa’s voice rises above the radio, carrying through the house the way it’s been carrying for decades.
“Those girls need feedin’, cher.” Her accent wraps around the words like something warm and worn.
“Can’t heal on an empty stomach. Mais, I need to double my biscuit recipe. ”
“Triple it, Nonna,” Marco calls from somewhere. “Nico ate the last batch.”
“That boy eats when he’s thinkin’. And lately he’s thinkin’ a lot.”
Below us, Sofia hasn’t moved. Mila hasn’t moved. They sit in their separate silences and share the corridor and that’s all. That’s everything.
And Nico reads on.
The Russian fills the corridor, soft and steady, and Mila’s head stays tilted, and the hallway changes. I can’t quite pinpoint what it is. But the air pressure drops. Not a threat. A beginning.
I look at this house. Not a compound. Not a base of operations.
My palm stays on Isabella’s back. The espresso goes cold on the railing. Rosa sings along to the radio downstairs. Marco’s footsteps cross the back hall again. Giada’s voice rises and falls behind a closed door. The house holds all of it.
Below us, Mila stands. Walks two steps toward her room. Stops. Turns back to look at Sofia, who hasn’t moved. Mila sits back down. Closer this time. Twenty-five feet instead of thirty.
“Five feet,” Isabella whispers. “She moved five feet.” Her hand covers mine on her back. Her fingers lace through my fingers. “That’s huge,” she says. So quiet.
“Yeah.”
“Five feet.”
My hand tightens on Isabella’s back.
Home. The word arrives without permission. The same way she did.