26. Ivy
IVY
Three days. It’s been three days since I walked away from Nick on a wet street in Milan with my ears still ringing after those gunshots.
Three days since I turned the corner and kept walking and didn’t look back, because looking back would’ve meant staying, and staying would’ve meant trusting.
Trusting is the thing that breaks me every time.
I’m staying at a hotel near the Duomo. Not a safe house. I’m not looking for safety right now. I’m looking for anonymity, which is different. Safe implies you’re being protected. Anonymous means no one knows you’re there, and no one is coming to find you.
No one is coming to find me.
That’s the part I keep coming back to, no matter how many times I tell myself that’s what I wanted.
He let me go. I walked away, and he didn’t follow.
He didn’t chase me down the street or do any of the things he would’ve done a month ago when he was still operating under the delusion he could keep me if he just held on tight enough.
He let me go.
Which is what I wanted, right? It’s what I told myself I needed, in fact. Space, distance. A clean break so I could find out who I am without a mission to define me. The freedom I fought for. The thing I blackmailed a mafia patriarch in order to get.
So why does it feel like I’ve been gutted?
I lie on the hotel bed and stare at the ceiling, listening to the city outside the window.
Hating myself for checking my phone every twenty minutes.
He hasn’t called or texted. There’s nothing.
No messages or missed calls. No sign that the man who flew across the ocean and took a bullet for me, held me in a bathtub, bought me gelato, and stood on a bridge at sunset is making any effort whatsoever to reach me.
This only confirms what I already knew. It was a mission.
It was always a mission. He came to Prague because Liam sent him.
He stayed close because I was the objective.
He was patient and persistent, yes, and impossibly kind.
That was his strategy. Now the strategy worked, the mission is over, and I am no longer the objective.
I served my purpose. I know how that story ends. I’ve lived it before.
The voice in my head that sounds like Nick—the one that says things like you’re more than an asset and there’s nothing more important than your life—tries to argue, but I shut it down.
I’ve been shutting it down for three days, and I’m getting better at it each time.
Practice makes perfect. Vincenzo taught me that.
On the morning of the fourth day, I get dressed and leave the hotel because the walls are closing in and the ceiling has no more answers to give me, not that it ever had any in the first place.
I walk with no direction, the way I used to walk in the years before Nick found me, back when walking was how I processed things and solitude was my only companion.
My feet take me to the piazza before my brain catches up.
To Lucia’s restaurant. The outdoor tables are half-full with the late-morning crowd.
The smell of coffee and something with rosemary makes my stomach ache.
Not because I’m hungry. Because the last time I smelled it, Nick was sitting across from me, choking on his wine.
I should really leave. I should turn around and walk in the other direction and find a different restaurant in a different neighborhood where nothing reminds me of anything.
Instead, I sit down.
Within minutes, Lucia comes out, wiping her hands on a towel. When she sees me, her face does something interesting. First there’s surprise, then warmth. Then I see a flicker of concern when she registers that I’m alone.
“Where is the handsome man?” she asks as she slides into the chair across from me without waiting to be invited. Her eyes search my face. “The one who couldn’t stop looking at you,” she teases.
I don’t see the humor. It feels more like she hit a bruise I didn’t know was there. “Don’t worry about him,” I tell her. “That’s over.”
“Over?” She looks at me the way she always has: directly, with no pretense. The kind of honest attention that used to make me feel seen in a world where I was trained to be invisible. “He didn’t look at you like something that could be over, at least not so suddenly.”
“People look at a lot of things they eventually walk away from.”
She’s quiet for a moment before reaching across the table and covering my hand with hers. Her skin is warm and familiar. “You look terrible,” she says gently.
“Thank you.”
“I mean it. You look like you haven’t slept. Have you eaten?”
“I’m fine.”
“That is not what I asked.” She gives my hand a squeeze before standing. “Stay here.”
She brings food I didn’t order and coffee I never asked for, then sits with me while I eat because she knows me well enough to know I won’t eat if someone isn’t watching.
We talk. Not about Nick, or about the mission, or anything that matters.
She tells me about her sister’s new baby.
The plumbing disaster that flooded the kitchen last month.
The new waiter she hired, who is beautiful and completely useless.
It’s normal and ordinary. It’s exactly what I’ve needed, but it does nothing to fill the hole in my chest.
At some point, her hand finds my knee under the table.
It’s casual, the way it used to be. Testing me, seeing if the boundaries are in place.
I look at her, and she looks at me, and something passes between us that’s made of memory and loneliness and the kind of comfort that comes from someone who already knows your body and doesn’t need a map.
“Come,” she murmurs, tilting her head toward the restaurant and wearing a knowing look I recognize too well. “I want to show you something.”
She doesn’t want to show me anything, and we both know it. The back room is where they store the extra chairs, the cases of wine, and the olive oil they buy in bulk. It’s where we used to go when the restaurant was between rushes; the door could be locked, and no one would notice we were gone.
And I follow her, knowing all of this, because I want to feel something that isn’t what I’m feeling now.
Anything, so long as I don’t have to feel the way I feel right now.
The door closes behind us, and she turns to me in the dim light between the wine racks.
Her hands come up to my face the way they always did, her fingertips light on my jaw.
And she kisses me. Her lips are soft. She tastes like espresso and the honey she puts in her tea, which she drinks after she’s already had enough espresso to make her practically vibrate.
She kisses the way she always did: slow, deliberate, with the patience of a woman who knows exactly what she’s doing and has no interest in rushing.
It’s good, too. It was always good with her. Easy and uncomplicated.
I wait for it to work. For the warmth to spread, and my brain to go quiet. For the gnawing ache in my chest to be replaced by something simpler and easier to manage.
It doesn’t happen. None of it does.
Because I’m kissing her, but all I can think about is pale blue eyes and a rough voice saying my name in the dark.
Hands that are larger than hers, rougher.
Hands that know how to take apart a weapon and how to hold me like I’m something worth being careful with.
The way he drums his fingers when he’s thinking.
The way he looks at me when he thinks I’m not paying attention, like I’m the answer to a question he’s been asking for a long time.
I pull back. Lucia’s eyes open to search mine. She sees it before I say it.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper.
She doesn’t look surprised. She looks like she knows the answer before she asks the question. “It’s him, isn’t it?”
I can’t speak, so I settle for a nod.
She studies me for a long moment, then presses her lips to my forehead in a brief, final sort of way. “Then why are you here with me instead of with him?”
I don’t have an answer. No, that’s not true.
I have too many answers, and none of them are good enough.
Because I’m scared. Because I don’t trust it.
Because every time I’ve let someone matter, they’ve turned into something that could hurt me, and Nick matters more than anyone ever has.
That means he could do more damage than anyone ever has.
Because the thing I’m most afraid of isn’t that he’ll leave. It’s that he’ll stay, and I won’t know how to let him do that.
“Go,” she murmurs, opening the door. “Before you talk yourself out of it.”
I leave the restaurant without looking back. The piazza is bright and busy, and I walk through it the way I’ve walked through every city I’ve ever lived in. Quickly, purposefully, like a woman with somewhere to be, even when she has nowhere to go.
I’m three blocks away from the restaurant when I feel it.
The awareness is instinctive. A change in the air behind me. A presence at the edge of my peripheral vision that matches my pace a half beat too precisely to be coincidence. Someone is following me.
My training kicks in before my brain does. I catalog without turning around. A single person, male, judging by the weight of the footsteps. He’s maintaining a consistent distance—close enough to keep visual contact, far enough away to avoid detection by anyone who isn’t me.
But I’m me.
I angle toward a shopfront with a wide glass window and let my gaze drift casually across the reflection. Dark hair. The outline of a jacket I’ve seen a hundred times. A stride I could identify blindfolded, because I’ve fallen asleep listening to it cross a room.
It’s Nick.
My heart has no right to do what it does. It doesn’t spike with alarm or go cold with anger. It lifts. Despite everything. Despite three days of silence and the wall I’ve built, and the lies I’ve been telling myself about missions and objectives.
I keep walking without speeding up or turning around. I let him follow me, the way I let him follow me in Prague all those months ago, when I was a different woman who thought she had everything figured out.
At the next window, I look again. He’s closer this time. And in his right hand, held low against his thigh and barely visible, is something small. A syringe.
Something cold and practical inside me registers the threat. The same syringe, the same play as Prague. He’s going to sedate me. He’s going to take me now the way he took me then, because I won’t go willingly, and he knows it, and he’s decided he doesn’t care.
I should be furious. Every rational part of me says I should spin around and disarm him, and break his wrist for even thinking about it. A month ago, I would have. I would’ve put the man on the ground without hesitating.
But then my heart has to go and do it again. That stupid, traitorous lift.
Because this is Nick. The man who doesn’t give up. Who doesn’t let go. I told him without saying a word to sit on the other side of my wall and wait, and he waited. But now he’s done waiting.
He’s coming for me. He will always come for me. That’s not a strategy or a mission. It’s just him. It’s who he is. He’s never going to stop. I don’t want him to either.
I slow my pace. Not enough for him to notice—or maybe enough, because he notices everything, doesn’t he? My hand relaxes at my side. My shoulders drop a fraction of an inch.
I keep walking, and I let him close the distance.
The footsteps behind me get closer. Ten feet, eight, five. I can now hear his breathing, controlled and deliberate. I feel the warmth of him at my back.
But I don’t turn around. I don’t fight. I only close my eyes.
The needle pricks the side of my neck, quick and precise, and immediately the world starts to soften at the edges. My knees loosen. My vision blurs. His arm is around my waist before I can sway, catching me, holding me against him with the practiced ease of a man who has done this before.
“I’ve got you,” he murmurs against my hair.
This time, I know. The last thing I feel before everything goes dark is his heartbeat against my back, steady and sure. The last thought I have is that Lucia was right.
I should have gone to him sooner.