Chapter 14
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Valentino
The car lurches before Elio's door shuts.
"Get us out of here," I tell him. "Now."
"I'm going, I'm going—"
"Faster."
Elio takes the corner like something's burning behind us. Given what I left in that room, it is. Amanda's head rests against my chest. One of her shoes is gone, and an unnatural desire to go back and kill Aldo again over that shoe possesses me.
My phone rings, and I dig it out with my free hand, refusing to let her go.
"I'm at the front," Luca says. "Valentino. Something's off."
"Talk."
"Guards. Four of them, moving in fast. Suits, but they're carrying like soldiers, not waiters. They came from a black SUV that wasn't here ninety seconds ago." He pauses. I hear him breathing the way he does when he's measuring a room.
"Then get out. Right now."
"Already gone."
"Bergamo," I say. "The place outside the city. You remember it."
"I remember it."
The line dies. Luca never wasted words. Tonight I'm grateful. I have nothing left to say. I’m grateful for it, because I don't have a single spare word in me that isn't already spoken for.
Elio's eyes find me in the rearview. Wide. Young. He shouldn't be doing this work and I knew it the second Bruno told me whose idea it was.
"What did they—" His voice cracks down the middle. "What did they do to her?"
"Drive."
"Valentino—"
"Shut your mouth and drive." I don't raise my voice. Quiet commands get better results than raising your voice, and Elio’s tightening shoulders prove it.
Amanda stirs in my arms. The movement is small. A slight turn of her head against my sternum, her cheek dragging on my lapel, and her lips part like she's surfacing from very deep water.
"Valentino." It's barely a sound. My name on her breath.
I look down. Her eyes are half open, glassy, pupils blown wide. Almost no blue-green left. Just… dark. She doesn't see me.
But she reached for me anyway.
"I'm here," I say, rough and raw as if I’ve swallowed gravel. "I've got you."
"Six minutes." Her mouth barely moves. "You said—six minutes."
I stood by the bar and counted the minutes like a fool instead of following her. And when six passes, I waited a little longer because I thought she was safe.
Sei un idiota. You did this. You and your fucking six minutes.
"You found me," she whispers. Her fingers grip the front of my shirt. Weak, but she holds on.
"I should have been there sooner."
"S'okay." Her eyes slide shut again, the drug pulling her back under. "You—came."
"Stay awake, bella." I shift her higher against me, pressing two fingers against her throat, feeling her heartbeat. It trips along under my fingertips, fast and thin, but there, furious with itself for being slow. "Stay awake. Be angry with me—at me, but stay awake."
A sound comes out of her. It might have been a laugh, if she had anything left in her. She's helpless in a way that kills something in me.
Elio's eyes are on the mirror again, shining with moisture.
I don't tell him to look away this time.
She goes limp against me before we hit the highway, and I let her be because fighting the drug is worse than letting it run its course.
So I do what I'm good at. I go through the night, moment by moment, looking for where it went wrong.
Plenty went wrong. But one moment keeps coming back to me.
Aldo Basile, youngest son of the Don, sitting in the back room of a palazzo crawling with money, and he had no muscle with him. None. The four soldiers Luca spotted at the front came after.
Which means when I kicked that door in, Aldo Basile was running his little reminder with two men who weren't his father's people.
They didn't move like soldati. They didn't reach for guns first. One of them tried to talk to me, for Christ's sake, hands up, mouth open, like a man who'd never once considered that a night could end with him bleeding out on a marble floor.
Civilians maybe. Or close enough to it. Fashion-world hangers-on, the kind of men who photograph girls and call it art.
That tells me something I don't like. Aldo wasn't on family business in that room.
He was running his own play, the dirty kind Enzo would gut him for if he weren't so busy looking the other way.
No guards because guards would see. No witnesses with a code.
Just men who'd stay quiet for money and a thrill.
Which means I didn't walk in on a Basile operation tonight. I walked in on a secret.
That changes everything. And what’s worse, somehow she’s become involved.
Why her? Forty, fifty girls move through that agency a season. Half of them never return home. And yet, Aldo Basile picks the American to make an example of?
Vittoria Sartori's best friend, though he wouldn't know that name. At least I hope he doesn’t.
He picked her because she asked about a bruise. At least that’s what I’m assuming after considering what she told me about her conversation with Francesca Renauld
A warning not to ask questions.
I look down at Amanda's face. She will remember something. She has to. When she wakes, she'll have fragments, and they are my only lead to who those men were and how far up this goes. I need her to remember.
But I want her to forget. I wish she didn’t have to relive a single second of tonight.
"Valentino." Elio's voice, smaller now. "Is she—"
"She's breathing. Watch the road."
I run my free hand down her body, checking, hating that I can do this so calmly. No purse. The little clutch she'd carried on her wrist when I picked her up is gone. Her phone went with it.
Her phone, with my number typed into it. With Vittoria's number.
I run through the next moves in my head, cold and orderly, the way it always does when the rest of me is screaming.
Delete her phone history remotely if I can get Dante on it. Get word to Vittoria before she sees a headline or a silence she can't explain. Have Basile’s body handled before he shows up in a ditch with my fingerprints on his body. Especially before Bruno decides if we’re declaring war.
Because I just killed a Don's son with my fists. Somewhere in Sicily, he will wake up tomorrow and realize his son is gone, and he’ll want to know who did it.
And the only living person who can tell me what really happened in that room is asleep on my chest.
I press my lips to the top of her head. The smell of hairspray fills my nostrils and a hint of someone’s cologne. I stiffen with the urge to turn this car around.
"Faster, Elio," I say quietly. "She needs to wake up somewhere safe."
Amanda
The ceiling is wrong.
It's white, cracked too low with a brown waterstain. And it smells like old stone. Nothing like home or the hotel room.
I turn my head left. Wall. A wooden chair with my shoe on it. One shoe. Where's the other—
I turn my head right and the room tilts, sick and slow, like I'm on water. My stomach rises. My mouth tastes like dirty pennies and soured milk.
Then I remember.
Not all of it. Pieces. A room with too many lamps. A hand under my jaw. Wet breath on my ear. The slap.
I try to sit up. My body won't cooperate. My arms go slack, elbows folding wrong, and panic hits all at once, cold up the back of my neck. No. No, no, no. My legs won't work. Nothing works. They drugged me. I'm in a strange room. Somebody could be coming. Somebody could already be here—
A shape moves above me.
A man. Leaning over. Big. Blocking the ceiling. My chest seizes. I try to scream but my throat locks. Air catches. My lips move—no, no, please, no—but no sound comes. My hands scrabble against whatever I'm lying on. I try to crawl backward and go nowhere.
"Shh. It's me." A pause, deliberate. "It's Valentino."
His name cuts through. Pulls me out inch by inch.
I make myself look. Gray at the temples. Dark eyes searching my face. A jaw that looks like it was carved from granite. And hat stillness he carries.
Valentino.
My Valentino.
My breathing slows on its own. I keep my eyes on his because the room spins when I look away. His face stays still.
"How are you feeling?" His voice is barely there. Then the corner of his mouth moves. Another almost a smile.
I lift my hand and watch it drift toward his face, slow and unsteady, like I'm not the one moving it. My fingers find his bottom lip. Warm. I press there, checking if the smile is real.
"Hello there," I tell him, the sound raw and rough.
His hand closes around my wrist. Big. Rough. Gentle. I expect him to push me away, but he doesn’t. Instead, he presses his mouth against my skin, holding it there for a moment, looking as if he’s unsure what he’s allowed to do.
The ceiling is still wrong. The room still rocks. But his thumb moves slowly over the inside of my wrist, over my pulse, and I think…
Is he counting?
I want to ask him what we are. Where my other shoe went. Whose blood is dried on his broken knuckles.
If I'm safe.
Did he kill the man who slapped me?
Nothing comes out though. My eyes are too heavy. The dark is rolling back in, gentler this time.
"You—" I manage. My fingers curl against his lip. "You said six minutes."
I feel rather than hear the sound he makes. Low in his chest. My hand goes slack in his.
I fall asleep with my fingertips still touching his mouth.