Chapter 36
ISABELLA
Lorenzo takes my hand. No warning. No explanation. He finds me in the library where I’ve been pretending to read the same paragraph for twenty minutes, and his fingers close around mine with a certainty that leaves no room for questions.
“Come with me.”
Low. That unhurried cadence where every syllable lands like he chose it on purpose. I set down the book I wasn’t reading and let him pull me to my feet.
“Where are we going?”
“Outside.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s enough of one.”
His thumb moves once across my knuckles.
Silence sits over the compound in that particular way it gets at golden hour, when the day’s business is done and the evening hasn’t started yet.
We pass the kitchen where Nonna Rosa’s radio plays something slow and accordion-heavy, the rubboard keeping rhythm.
The hallway smells like garlic and roux.
“You’re being mysterious,” I say.
“I’m being quiet. There’s a difference.”
“Not with you there isn’t.”
We turn left at the back hall instead of right toward the stairs.
My pulse kicks.
Left leads to the garden. His mother’s garden. The rose trellis and the stone bench and the space where I’ve seen him sit at three in the morning, alone with Mrs. Santoro’s ghost, showing it what the rest of the world never sees.
He’s never brought me here. I’ve found him here. Stumbled across him. Watched from the second-floor window. But he’s never taken my hand and led me toward this space.
I know what that means. My chest does something complicated.
The woman who hacked her way into a crime family’s network from a studio apartment with a fire escape that was actively rusting off the building is being led by the hand to a rose garden. By an enforcer. For what is clearly about to be a feelings conversation.
“Lorenzo.”
“Don’t talk yet.”
“I’m going to talk.”
“I know. Just not yet.”
The back door opens onto the garden path, and the scent hits me first. Jasmine from the bushes along the path, thick and sweet, alive in a way that makes the humid air feel textured.
The evening light has gone amber, painting the compound walls in tones of honey and old gold.
Mrs. Santoro’s trellis is heavy with roses, dark red blooms so deep they’ll turn black once the light goes.
Lorenzo stops near the trellis. Releases my hand. I miss the contact. My palm is still warm from his.
He stands with his back to the trellis. His fingers brush his pocket once, brief, a passing touch over the rosary’s outline. Then they drop to his side.
I wait.
His shoulders shift. A rolling motion, subtle, like a man loosening for a fight. His throat works. His gaze finds mine and holds.
“Isabella.” Low. Rough. “I need to say something.”
My chest tightens. “Okay,” I say. Not filling the space. Giving it to him.
“I don’t know how to do this.” Rough. “I never learned. Or I did, and I buried it, and now I’m trying to dig it up and it’s coming out wrong.”
“It’s not coming out wrong.”
“You don’t know what I’m going to say.”
“Then say it.”
His throat works once before the words come.
“I was dead before you. Empty.” His voice cracks on it, then steadies. “A weapon and nothing else. I turned everything inside me off because keeping it on meant remembering. Meant feeling. And feeling meant knowing what I did. Who I wasn’t there for.”
His mother. The woman who asked for him while she was dying, who said his name to an empty room.
Nonna Rosa told me that story in the kitchen one morning, her accent thick with grief even after all these years.
He was gentle, cher. Quiet, sure, but gentle.
Mrs. Santoro said he had a soft heart wrapped in silence.
I want to reach for him. Every instinct says close the distance, touch his face, pull him out of whatever dark water he’s wading through. But I know Lorenzo. If I touch him now, he’ll stop. He’ll let the contact replace the words, because contact is easier.
He needs to finish. I need to let him.
“For years, that was fine.” A fact. Recited. “The nothingness was useful. You can walk through blood when you don’t care about anything. You can become what your family needs and never wonder what you need, because the answer is nothing.”
A pause. He swallows.
“Then you showed up with your cold coffee and your suicide mission and your mouth that never stops, and you—”
He stops. Not because the words are gone. They’re crowding behind his teeth.
“You made me feel again.”
“I don’t know if I should thank you or hate you for it.”
“Which is it?” The sentence lands steady. I’m proud of that.
“Both.”
Then he’s kissing me. His hand finds my jaw, thumb tracing the bone beneath my ear, and his mouth meets mine with precision that has nothing to do with urgency and everything to do with intent.
Slow. Deliberate. He tastes like the espresso Nonna Rosa makes.
Dark, bitter, grounding. He slides to my nape, fingers spreading into my hair, and I grip the front of his shirt because my knees have stopped being reliable.
When he pulls back, his forehead presses to mine. His breath on my lips.
“I’m keeping you.” The words vibrate against my mouth. “That’s not a deal.” His voice is low. Wrecked. Steadier than I’ve ever heard it. “That’s not a negotiation. It’s just the truth.”
My fingers tighten in his shirt. “And if I don’t want to be yours?” I ask because I’m still me. Because the woman who looked at the second most dangerous man in New Orleans and said try again needs this to go both ways.
His thumb traces my cheekbone. His gaze burns into mine from an inch away.
“Then you shouldn’t have saved my mother’s rosary.” My lungs lock. “You shouldn’t have seen me.” His voice drops lower. “When everyone else just sees a killer, you saw what was underneath. And you kept looking until I couldn’t hide from it.”
“You shouldn’t have stayed.” His forehead against mine. His palm on my cheek. The jasmine and the amber light and the garden where a woman from Palermo once put seeds in the ground and chose to make things grow. “You did.” A whisper. “All of it. So this is it. You and me. And that’s the end of it.”
I let go of his shirt. Frame his jaw in my palms, his stubble rough against my skin.
“Say it again,” I tell him.
“I’m keeping you, Isabella.”
“And you’re mine.” I say it like it’s a law of physics. “That’s the end of it.”
For a long moment, nothing happens. Then his mouth changes. A pulling at the corners. A lifting. The faintest rearrangement of muscles that haven’t been used for this purpose in years.
Lorenzo Santoro is smiling.
It transforms him. The hard lines soften. Dimples cut into both cheeks, deep and impossible on a face built for violence. The scar along his cheekbone catches the last of the light.
My vision blurs. I blink and feel the wetness track down my cheeks.
“I see you,” I whisper.
Somewhere in my chest, the girl who lived on cold coffee and paranoia and the specific loneliness of being the only person looking for her sister is watching this happen and not quite believing it.
She keeps checking the exits. Old habit.
There aren’t any out here. Just roses and the man I was supposed to use and the terrifying possibility that I get to keep this.
He kisses me again. Slower. Just I’m here. You’re here. That’s enough.
I slide from his jaw to his neck. He gathers me against him, and I press my forehead to his chest where his heartbeat has steadied into a strong, even rhythm.
“Don’t let go,” I say.
“I wasn’t planning on it.”
“Good.”
“Good.”
My eyes shut. His chin rests on top of my head. His thumb traces slow circles on my shoulder blade.
“Stella mia,” he says into my hair. So quiet the words are more breath than sound.
My star.
“Your mother would have hated me,” I say into his chest.
“No.”
“I have a tattoo and I swear too much and I once ate cereal for dinner seven nights in a row.”
“She would have loved you.” His voice roughens. “She would have known exactly what I needed before I did.”
The garden holds us. The jasmine blooms. The evening goes quiet and golden and still. Sofia is upstairs, asleep in the room next to mine. Alive. Healing. Surrounded by people who will protect her.
I found her. I promised I would, and I did.
His arms tighten around me.
When we move, it’s together, toward the warm light spilling from the compound’s windows. He keeps my hand. I keep his.
Behind us, the garden goes dark.