Nick #2
“I hate what they did to you. That doesn’t mean I hate everything about who you’ve become.” I stir the meat after seasoning, keeping my eyes on the pan. “You spent a long time there. I want to know what it was like.”
She’s quiet for a while, focused on the garlic now, mincing it into pieces so small they’re almost invisible.
When she speaks, her voice has lost some of its edge.
“Rome is beautiful. I lived there for the first few years, in a house near the Villa Borghese. Vincenzo had a place there. It was... large. Cold, mostly. Marble floors. The kind of house where sounds echo, and you can’t really get away with anything. I’m sure he liked it that way.”
I scrape the onions and garlic into the pan with the beef. The smell fills the kitchen immediately—rich, familiar, warm. I can’t help but give her a hopeful glance, but she’s as far away as ever. Lost in her memories.
“The cook was named Elena,” she continues. “She was the closest thing I had to a mother figure. She taught me how to make fresh pasta when I was seventeen. How to debone a fish. How to make a proper risotto.” A pause. “She was kind. One of the few people in that house who was.”
“What happened to her?”
Her face hardens. “Vincenzo let her go when I was twenty. He said she’d gotten too attached to me.” Her voice is flat when she says it, but I hear the loss underneath. Another person taken from her by the man who stole everything.
She talks more as we cook, and even more while we sit at the counter with our wine as the sauce simmers.
About the training—not the killing, not the missions, but the physical conditioning.
The hours of hand-to-hand combat, the language lessons, the tradecraft.
She describes it the way a soldier might describe boot camp: brutal but formative, the thing that made her who she is.
She tells me about the safe houses she’s lived in across Europe. The cities she knows like the back of her hand. The languages she speaks. Italian, French, Czech, enough Russian to get by. I won’t bother telling her she barely passed basic Spanish in high school.
I listen to all of it, and while I’m listening, a thought takes shape that I haven’t really let myself consider until now.
What if I’m not going to help Laura get her memory back? What if, instead, I’m going to get to know Ivy?
The doctor’s words circle back. Dr. Feld was careful not to promise anything. He said long-term amnesia, especially trauma-induced, is unpredictable. There’s no guarantee. There’s no timeline.
“The doctor we consulted,” I tell her while draining the pasta, “warned us that recovering memory after this long isn’t always possible.” Because she deserves the truth. The full story. There was so much taken from her already.
She stops stirring the sauce and looks at me. “Then why are we here?”
“Because he also said it can be done. The right environment, the right triggers. Being around people and places from your past. It’s not a sure thing, but it’s the best shot we’ve got.”
“And if it doesn’t work?”
“Then we deal with that when it happens.”
She holds my gaze for a beat longer than usual. Then she turns back to the stove without a word.
We eat at the small table by the kitchen window.
The sun is setting behind the trees on the far shore, turning the water into something that looks like liquid copper.
The bolognese is good. Even better than good, actually, which I’m sure has to do with her knife work and whatever the Russo cook taught her.
I tell her so, and she accepts the compliment with a nod that’s almost gracious.
We don’t talk much during the meal. The silence is different now, though. Less hostile. Less electric. It’s the kind of silence that happens when two people have said enough for one day and are okay to sit and eat and coexist.
After dinner, I wash while she dries. The kitchen is small enough that we’re constantly in each other’s space.
Reaching past each other for the dish rack, stepping aside at the sink, shoulders brushing.
The music is still playing, something low and warm, and the cabin smells like garlic and tomatoes and the wood smoke from the fire I lit in the hearth while the pasta was boiling.
She’s standing next to me, drying a pan, when I make the mistake of looking at her.
Not a glance. Not the careful, controlled observation I’ve been maintaining since Prague.
An actual look, the kind where your eyes settle on someone’s face and your brain stops doing anything useful.
The low light from the fire catches the angle of her jaw, the curve of her neck, the way her dark hair falls against her shoulder.
She’s still wearing the blouse I picked out for her, and somehow, despite everything, she looks like she belongs here. In this kitchen. In this light.
She catches me looking. Of course she does. She catches everything.
But this time, she doesn’t call me on it. She doesn’t say you’re staring, or raise an eyebrow, or go for a weapon. She just looks back. And for a long, silent moment, neither of us moves.
I don’t know who closes the distance. It might be me. It might be her. It might be mutual, the way two people sometimes drift together when the current is stronger than either of them.