Chapter 38
NICO
Renzo’s footsteps fade down the corridor, and the smile I gave him dissolves like sugar in rain.
It was a good one. Easy. Warm. The kind that says everything’s fine. Brother, I’m just sitting on a floor outside a locked door in the middle of the night. No reason at all. Nothing to see here.
“Only a book. Progress.” Perfect delivery. He even bought it, or near enough.
So why does the performance leave a taste like copper on my tongue?
I resettle against the door. My tailbone went numb an hour ago. The hardwood floor has memorized the shape of me by now, the same way this hallway has memorized my nights. Same position. Same silence from the other side.
I’ve been here every night since we brought the girls in. If anyone in this family has caught the pattern, they’ve had the good sense not to mention it.
Except Renzo. He walked past with new eyes and a woman in his bed.
Saw more of me in thirty seconds than I’ve shown anyone since I came back.
Gia would have words for that. Warm ones.
Precise and impossible to deflect. My twin reads me the way I read everyone else, which is why I’ve been avoiding her since the raid.
The questions she’d ask are the ones I don’t have answers for.
Why her? Why this door? Why do you speak Russian, Nico? When did you learn? What happened in Moscow that turned the charm from something real into something you wear?
On the other side of this wall, a girl who looked at me during the raid. Saw through every layer I’ve built since Russia.
The old walls creak around me. Pipes murmuring behind plaster. Rosa’s kitchen two floors down holding the ghost of tonight’s red beans and rice. I tip my head back against the wood. Let the dark settle in.
The room where I found her. Basement level.
Concrete. A mattress on the floor. She was in the corner.
Feral. Coiled. When I came through the doorway she launched at me.
Fingernails. Teeth. A sound that wasn’t a scream but something more animal.
More desperate. The noise of a creature that’s been fighting so long the fighting is the only thing left.
I caught her wrists. She bit my forearm. Drew blood. And I said the first thing that came to my mouth. Not English. Not Italian. Not any of the five languages I use to negotiate and charm and manipulate. Russian. Raw and unpolished and dragged up from a place I sealed shut years ago.
My hands went cold. Not nerves. Something older. A body response I haven’t felt since a concrete room with no windows. A voice asking questions in the same language I’d just used to comfort a stranger.
I shut it down. Pressed my palms flat against my thighs until the blood came back.
“Tishe. Ty v bezopasnosti.” Quiet. You’re safe.
She froze. Not the way people freeze when they’re afraid.
Her whole body went rigid. Her eyes found mine, and what I saw in them wasn’t fear or relief or gratitude.
She looked like she knew exactly what she was looking at.
Not the Santoro consigliere. Not the charming brother.
Her gaze cut through all of it like you look through glass.
Takes one to know one.
I started to step back. Give her space. That’s what the training says. That’s what Gia would do. Don’t crowd a trauma response, let the body come down on its own terms.
But when I shifted my weight toward the door, she made a sound. Not a scream. Not a word. A whimper so raw it went through me like a blade.
And she moved. Not away from me. Toward me.
She launched off that mattress and her hands found my shirt and she clung.
Fists knotted in the fabric. Face pressed into my chest. Body shaking so hard I could feel her teeth rattling through the cotton.
She held on. I stood there. Arms at my sides.
Not touching her. Not holding her. Just standing still while a girl I didn’t know gripped my shirt like a lifeline. Shook against my ribs.
My hands opened. Fingers spread wide at my sides, useless, trembling.
She needed me. I don’t know why. I don’t know what she heard in the Russian or what she saw when she looked at me. But her fists found my shirt and she held on like I was the last solid thing in the room.
I stayed. The extraction team had to work around us. I carried her out of the building because she wouldn’t let go of my shirt. She weighed nothing. Her bones were bird bones beneath the thin fabric, and her grip on me was the strongest thing in the room.
That was two weeks ago. She hasn’t spoken since.
Not to Gia, who approaches with steady hands and medical competence and gets a thrown water glass for the effort.
Not to the guards, who she attacks on sight.
Not to Sofia, though something happens between those two that’s quieter than language. Not to me.
But she doesn’t attack me either.
Every night I come here. Sit here. Exist nearby without pushing, without entering, without performing. I bring Russian. Low and patient through the wood. The way you’d speak near a wounded animal that doesn’t believe in gentle hands.
She shouldn’t. Gentle hands have lied to her before.
They’ve lied for me too. I’ve used every version of soft and kind and patient that exists, and every single one was a tool.
None of that works here. Mila doesn’t play the game.
She attacks, or she doesn’t. She screams, or she’s quiet.
No performance. No contract. Just a girl behind a locked door who has no reason to trust the voice on the other side.
She’s already a real person. Stripped to the studs. Nothing performed. Nothing hidden. I’ve never met anyone like that.
Which makes her the most dangerous person in this compound.
Renzo has his guns. Dante has his empire. Mila has something worse. She exists without a mask, and every second I sit here she makes mine harder to put back on.
I run my hand through my hair. The hallway sconce casts the mahogany in amber. The gap beneath her door is dark.
A guard rounds the corner. Young. New rotation. I open my mouth to do the thing I do. The grin. The easy line. Hey brother, rough night. The version of me that makes people feel safe. Harmless. Fun. Not a man sitting outside a locked door at 3 AM.
Nothing comes.
My mouth is open and the charm isn’t there. The guard passes. Gives me a look. I stare at the wall until his footsteps fade.
The mask is heavier tonight. Maybe because of Renzo.
Watching him walk these halls. Seeing clearly for the first time in over a decade.
Present in a way that makes the compound feel different around him.
If the emptiest man I know can come alive again.
A woman with purple hair and a sharp tongue refusing to let him stay dead.
What does that mean for the man who’s been putting on an act since Moscow?
I press my palm flat against the wood. Solid. Old brass hardware I can feel through the grain.
“Ya ne uydu.” I’m not leaving.
The Russian comes from somewhere deeper. When I speak it, the charm is gone. Just syllables without performance. Honest in a way I haven’t been in English since I stepped off the plane at Louis Armstrong International. Blood on my knuckles. Grin back in place before anyone could see the difference.
Silence from the other side. Expected.
“I can wait,” I say. English now. Almost the old Nico. “I’ve got nothing but time.”
The hallway holds its breath.
Then.
Not a scream. Not a word. A lock turning.
The door opens three inches. No more. The gap is dark, but I can see the edge of her face.
One eye. A cheekbone sharp enough to cut.
She’s looking at me through the crack with an expression that has no performance in it.
No fear. No gratitude. Just assessment. The clear, animalistic calculation of a creature deciding whether what she’s looking at is a threat or something else.
I don’t move. Don’t smile. Don’t deploy a single tool from the playbook that has gotten me through every room I’ve ever entered.
I sit on the floor and I let her look.
Her eye holds mine for five seconds. Ten. Twenty.
Then the door closes.
The lock doesn’t turn.
I press my forehead against the wood. Eyes shut.
The door stays unlocked.
Progress.