Chapter Twenty-Four #3
“Greco’s people sent flowers to the clinic with a note that just said ‘Get well.’” Santino scoff. “The balls on them. Still… They’re not trying to remove the seat.”
I nodded once. Even that hurt.
Santino leaned closer. “They could have killed you clean. They didn’t. That means they want you in the seat. They just want you quieter. And they want you to feel it every time you stand.”
He was quiet for a moment, then added, voice lower, “I used to think the only way to keep the people I loved safe was to stay hard enough that nothing could touch me. It almost cost me Aurora. Don’t make the same mistake with your wife and the little girl.”
Santino sat back a fraction. “There’s someone else here to see you.”
I knew before the door opened. The air changed the way it always did around him. No rush. No wasted movement.
Leonardo Moretti came in like the room had been built around his patience.
The same eyes that had measured the distance between my pulse and the nearest exit at every table we had ever shared.
Chiara’s husband. The man who had poisoned our father and left my sisters and me to live in the hole he made.
I felt my jaw lock. Even that small thing sent a fresh line of pain down into the brace. Santino did not leave. He stayed in the chair like a witness. Or a guard. I could not tell which, and I did not ask.
Leo stopped at the foot of the bed. He looked at the brace first. Then at my face. He did not offer sympathy. He never had. “Matteo.”
“Leonardo.” I smirked. “Or do you prefer The Serpent still?”
The names sat between us like old debts. I could have told him to get out. Part of me wanted to. The twelve-year-old who had cleaned blood off a floor was still in this room, and he still looked at Leo and saw the end of one life and the start of another he had never asked for.
Leo set something against the side of the mattress. A cane.
Black lacquer. Heavy. The handle was a skull in twenty-four karat gold, the crown on it slightly crooked, like it had been made for a man who had no interest in looking holy. It caught the clinic light and threw it back too bright.
I stared at it. “I don’t want a gift from you.”
“It isn’t a gift,” Leo said. His voice was the same as it had been the night he congratulated me on the seat. Neutral. Final. “It’s a fact. You’re going to walk out of here on something. You can do it on hospital steel, or you can do it on this. Chiara had it made.”
He said my sister’s name like it was the only part of this conversation that belonged to him. That was worse than if he had claimed the gift himself.
I looked at the skull. At the crooked crown. At the man who had married my oldest sister and given her the kind of fierce, open devotion I had spent years telling myself I would never want.
“You came to watch me limp,” I said.
“I came because I feel a debt to you.” Leo’s gaze did not flicker. “You are my family now. So I come bearing an offering.”
“Which is?”
“Peace,” he said. The word did not fit his mouth. It did not fit mine.
I laughed once. It came out raw. “You poisoned my father. And you want peace.”
“I ended your father because he did unforgivable things to your family.” No heat.
No apology. “I am not asking you to forgive me. I am telling you that Chiara still has a brother, and Aurora still has one, and the little girl in your penthouse does not need you starting a war you cannot finish on one leg. You can’t just think about yourself now. ”
Santino’s eyes moved between us and stayed silent. I looked at the cane again. Twenty-four karat. Ugly. Beautiful. Mine whether I wanted the hand it came from or not.
“If I take it,” I said, “it does not make us even.”
“No.”
“And if anyone from your side of the table uses my wife or that child as a lesson…”
“Then they will have to come through me to reach them,” Leo said. “They come first. I am setting a boundary that includes the women we did not deserve and the children who did not ask to be born in this.”
He stepped back from the bed. The offer stayed where he had left it, gold skull against the white sheet, close enough that I could reach it without sitting up.
I hated him. I hated that the words were clean. I hated that part of me, the part that had stood in a dark hallway outside a guest room and sworn I would not become my father, heard the only version of peace I was ever going to get from a man like Leo.
My hand closed around the cane. The gold was warm from the room. The weight of it was honest. It would click against my floors for the rest of my life. Every step a reminder. Every step a choice.
“Tell Chiara thank you,” I said.
Leo nodded once. Not warmth. Recognition. “You should tell her yourself. Soon. And, Matteo… Walk proudly.”
He left the way he always did. No backward glance.
Santino stood. “Your wife has been in the hall since they let her past the first desk. The little girl is with Aurora. I wasn’t putting a four-year-old in a room that still smells like blood and flowers from Greco.”
I nodded once. The movement still cost me. “Send her in.”
He paused at the door.
“She’s going to see all of it,” he said. “Don’t perform for her. She already knows what you are.”
Then he was gone, and the room was empty.
The door opened again. Morena came in like she had been walking toward this room for days and had only just been allowed to finish the distance.
No makeup. My shirt under her coat. The thin pink line on her cheek.
Her eyes went to my face first, as if she needed proof I was still in it, and then they dropped.
Brace. Bandaging. The gold skull in my fist.
Something raw moved through her expression so fast I almost missed it. Fury. Relief. The particular kind of fear that only shows up when the worst thing has already happened and the person you wanted to hate is still breathing.
She did not run to the bed. She crossed the floor like the tile might give out, stopped at the side of the mattress, and looked at me.
“You said if you were late I should wait for Santino. I waited.” Her mouth trembled once and then she forced it still. “I waited until he came upstairs and told me they had taken your knee instead of your life, and that I was not allowed in here until you woke up enough to look at me.”
I swallowed. “Rena, I’m sorry...”
She sat on the edge of the bed without asking.
Careful of the brace. Close enough that I could feel the heat of her through the sheet.
Her hand hovered over the bandaging and did not land, as if touching it might make it more real.
I reached up. My fingers found the side of her neck, the bare place where the collar used to sit. Her pulse hammered under my thumb.
“I know why you left.” She leaned into my hand, just enough. “You couldn’t stand being made quiet. You never could.”
“They marked me so you would see it.”
“I see it.” Her forehead dropped to mine. Her breath was warm. “I also see you. That’s the part they didn’t plan for.”
I closed my eyes. For a second the clinic disappeared. There was only her mouth close to mine.
“Leo brought the cane,” I said against her skin. “Chiara had it made.”
Morena pulled back just far enough to look at the skull. “Kind of suits you.”
She kissed me then. A closed-mouth, shaking, furious kiss that tasted like she had been holding it in the hall the entire time Santino kept her on the other side of the door.
I kissed her back as much as the drugs and the brace would let me, my hand sliding from her throat into her hair, anchoring her there because I could not stand the idea of her stepping away yet.
When she broke it, her eyes were wet and angry.
“Camilla asked if you were having a bad day like your bird,” she said.
“Kind of,” I smiled. “Take me home, baby.”
“You can’t walk yet.”
“Then get the chair. Get Santino. Get whoever,” I said.“I am not spending another night here.”
Her mouth curved. “ Always such a controlling bastard.”
“Yours,” I said. “If you still want the version that comes with a limp.”
She picked up my free hand and pressed it flat over her stomach, over the secret she had already given me.
She stood. She did not let go of my hand until she had to.
“I’ll get Santino,” she said. “And then you’re coming home.”