Chapter 27
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Valentino
Her breathing slows against my chest.
The sheet is pulled to her waist, one arm draped across my ribs, her fingers resting over the tattoo on my left pectoral.
"You keep this with you," she says.
She points at the rosary.
I'd set it on the nightstand when we entered here. Her fingers brush the wooden beads, then close around them, pulling the strand across the sheets between us. She lifts her head.
"Yes."
"Why?"
"My father believed in God," I say. "My mother still does. I was raised with it. The rosary was his. He carried one in his pocket the way some people carry a lighter."
"So it's a habit?"
"It started as his habit. Now it's mine."
She rolls the crucifix between her thumb and forefinger.
"Do you actually pray?" she asks.
"Sometimes the motions are the prayers." I watch her fingers on the beads. "You say the words enough times, something underneath starts listening. I don't know if it's God or just the repetition wearing a groove into your soul. Either way, it works."
"Works for what?"
"Keeping me from doing something I can't undo."
She goes quiet. Her thumb stills on the crucifix. Then she sets the rosary back on the nightstand, aligned the way I'd placed it, and settles her cheek against my chest again.
"What happened to your father?" she asks.
My jaw tightens.
"He was shot," I say. "When I was twelve."
"Where?" she asks.
"Outside our house. He'd come back from a meeting in Palermo. Business I didn't understand yet, though I understood enough to know he left the house differently on those days. Quieter. Checked the mirrors twice. Kissed my mother longer."
The memory is sharp even now. Twenty-six years later and the edges haven't worn down.
"He was getting out of the car. I was at the kitchen window. My mother had me setting the table. Three shots from across the road. He made it two steps toward the front door."
Amanda's breathing changes. Slower. Controlled. She's listening the way she listened on the drive from Sicily. Not just to the story. To the things underneath it.
"My mother ran outside. I watched her through the window.
She knelt beside him and held his head in her lap.
She didn't scream. That's what I remember most. She didn't scream.
She talked to him quietly, the way she talked to me when I had a fever.
Low and steady, like she could still keep him here if she just kept talking. "
"But she couldn't." Amanda's voice is barely above a whisper.
"No."
I stare at the ceiling.
"He was dead before the ambulance arrived. The rosary was in his pocket. My mother took it out and pressed it into my hand. She told me to hold it for him. I never stopped."
"Did they find who did it?"
"Yes."
I take a breath.
"My uncle found the man. Giuseppe. He was alive then.
He handled it the way things are handled in our world.
I was twelve, so nobody told me the details.
By the time I was old enough to ask, the details didn't matter.
My father was still dead. Knowing what happened to the man who killed him wasn't going to put him back at our table. "
Amanda nods against my chest.
She doesn't push for more.
I respect her for that. She knows when to ask and when to let something rest.
"Tell me about him."
I look up at the ceiling again.
"He wasn't a big man. Not like me. He wasn't tall. But people stopped talking when he walked into a room. He had that kind of presence. I don't know how to explain it."
"You have it."
I kiss the top of her head.
"He taught me how to shoot. Not well. Not enough to make me dangerous.
Just enough to hold a pistol properly and respect what it could do.
He taught me how to tie a tie for church.
He taught me proper Italian. Real Italian, not just Sicilian.
He said if I was going out into the world, I needed to speak the way the world spoke.
He taught me how to cook, too. My mother gave me the recipes, but he was the one who stood beside me and made sure I learned them. "
She presses her face into my neck.
I feel her smile.
"Keep going."
I smile despite myself.
"He held the rosary when he worried. When my mother got sick one winter. When I was little I had a fever. I remember waking up in the middle of the night and seeing him sitting beside the bed with those beads moving through his fingers."
"Your mother," Amanda says. "She always seems... strong isn't even the right word."
"She's the strongest person I know. She buried her husband and raised a son in a house full of his absence."
My thumb traces her shoulder.
"She told me once that grief isn't the price you pay for love. It's proof that you had it."
Amanda lifts her head.
Her eyes are wet but steady. Lamplight catches the blue-green in her irises and turns the edges gold.
"That's beautiful," she says.
Amanda
My throat aches.
"I'm sorry," I say.
Valentino glances at me. "For what?"
"For your father." I pull the sheet higher around my shoulders. "He must have been a good dad."
"He was." Valentino's voice is quiet. "He wasn't perfect. He was in the life. He made choices I wouldn't make now. But when he walked through the door at night, he was mine." His thumb presses into his palm. "Every night, he came home."
That is the part that gets me. Not the shooting. Not the rosary. Not the grief. The certainty of it. I can't remember a single night in my life when I waited for someone and knew they were coming.
"Your parents," Valentino says. "Tell me."
"You already know."
"I know what Vittoria's told me. I want to hear it from you."
I let out a laugh. There's no humor in it.
"There's nothing to tell. That's the problem."
Valentino watches me for a long moment. Patient. Unmoving. Waiting me out.
"Amanda."
"What?"
"Nothing doesn't make people cry."
Damn him.
I pull my knees up beneath the sheet and wrap my arms around them.
"I don't know where to start."
"Anywhere."
I stare down at the blanket gathered around my legs and take a breath.
"Sometimes I miss something I never had."
Valentino doesn't interrupt. He doesn't tell me he understands. He doesn't rush to fill the silence. He just waits.
"I don't miss them. Not the way you miss your father.
I miss the version of them I made up when I was a kid.
The parents who came to school plays. The parents who remembered birthdays without being reminded.
The parents who sat in the audience and looked for me.
The parents who showed up because they wanted to, not because someone put it on a calendar. "
My throat tightens.
"My mother's assistant puts my birthday on her calendar. That's how I get the text. My mother doesn't write it. She just forwards whatever her assistant sends."
Something shifts in Valentino's expression. Not surprise. Not pity. Something darker than that.
"I'm not trying to make it sound worse than it was," I say. "They didn't hit me. They didn't starve me. I had nannies. Money. I had every opportunity. Everything people point to when they want to prove a kid had a good life." I look down at my hands."I just never had them."
The words settle between us. Neither of us speaks for a moment.
"I hear you talk about your father coming home every night, and I can see it.
The door opening. A kid running to meet him.
I can picture it so clearly. Sometimes I think I miss that more than I miss my actual parents.
" The admission sits heavy in my chest. "Because I've never had that feeling, Valentino. Not once.
"I spent Christmases at Vittoria's. Thanksgivings at Vittoria's.
Aria came to my high school graduation. My mother was in Tokyo.
My father said he had a meeting in London.
I looked it up later and there wasn't a conference.
He was just... somewhere. I don't know where.
Just not there." I keep talking because if I stop, I'll think.
"And here's the really fucked-up part." My voice catches.
"You lost your father, and it destroyed you. "
Valentino doesn't say anything.
"If my father died tomorrow, I wouldn't feel that." I look at him through eyes that won't stop burning. "I'd be sad. I'd go to the funeral. I'd wear black. I'd say all the right things. And then I'd go home and my life would look exactly the same, because he was never really in it."
A tear slips free. I wipe it away with the heel of my hand. "Some days I hate myself for that. What kind of person thinks that about her own father?"
Valentino reaches for me. His hand settles around my ankle through the sheet, rough and warm.
"Nothing's wrong with you," he says.
I look at him.
"Nothing is wrong with you." He says it again, slower this time. Certain. "Having a child doesn't make someone a parent. They can't all do it, Amanda. Some people don't know how. Some people never learn. That's not your failure."
"You don't know that."
"I do."
His hands come up to my face. His thumbs catch the tears before they fall.
"You are not hard to love. You are not someone a person fails because of what's wrong with you. If your parents failed you, that's about them."
My throat closes.
"If your father dies and you don't cry, that isn't your failure either." His voice stays steady. "He had twenty-five years to be your father. Twenty-five years to show up. Twenty-five years to build that bond. If it isn't there, that's on him. Not you.”
I open my mouth, but nothing comes out.
Being overlooked stops feeling like something that happened to you and starts feeling like something true.
The sky is blue. The water is wet. Your parents don't really see you.
You learn it so early that it settles into everything else, this quiet certainty that you are simply not the kind of person people stay for.
And you build everything on top of it. Every smile. Every joke. Every version of yourself you send into the room first, hoping one of them will be enough.
"My mom wanted a lawyer," I whisper. "My dad wanted a son. Or a travel buddy. Or a daughter who was less..." I wave my hand vaguely. "Less. They got me instead, and I've spent my whole life being too much of the wrong thing."
Valentino's thumb moves across my ankle bone. Slow. Deliberate. Back and forth, grounding me to the mattress, to the room, to him.
"You're not too much," he says.
"You've known me for ten years. I'm objectively too much. I talk too loud, I laugh too hard—"
"Amanda." His voice drops into that low register, the one that makes my ribs vibrate. "You are not too much."
The tears come again, silent this time.
I'm already against him, but his arm tightens, drawing me closer until my face is tucked into his shoulder. His skin smells like soap from the shower and something underneath it, warm and cedar-dark, that I've been breathing in for days without naming.
"I sat at a dinner table when I was fourteen," I say into his neck. "Crying about something stupid. A school thing. I don't even remember what it was. My parents were in Geneva. The nanny was new. She didn't know me, Valentino."
His hand tightens in my hair.
"I've never told anyone that," I add. "Not Vittoria. Not anyone."
Valentino exhales through his nose, long and controlled. "Then they don't deserve the tears."
"Valentino."
"What?"
"I don't—" I stop. I don't know the word, but he waits with so much patience. "I know Vittoria has said things like that. I know she has." My fingers curl against his skin. "But hearing it from you feels different."
He doesn't move.
"I think because part of me always assumed she had to love me. She's Vittoria. She's family." My voice breaks smaller. "You don't have to."
Valentino's hand slides slowly through my hair.
"And you said it anyway." I press my face into his neck and cry harder than I have since the palazzo. Harder than I cried in the bath. Harder than when Vittoria was on the phone.
He holds me.
He doesn't say anything.
He just stays.
Valentino
The phone vibrates.
I lift Amanda's hand off my chest. She makes a sleepy sound and I press my mouth to her knuckles before setting her hand on the pillow. She shifts toward the empty space beside her, chasing the heat, and settles back into sleep.
I close the bedroom door behind me and answer.
"Tell me."
"Enzo knows. They pulled the palazzo's backyard security footage. Exterior cameras caught you carrying her out. Your face was visible. Enzo had someone in Milan PD run facial recognition against his database. He matched you in under six hours."
I walk to the kitchen window and look down at the street.
"He's put money on you. Whoever finds you brings you to Enzo alive. He's not paying for a body."
Alive.
That one word is enough.
"How much?"
"Enough that every freelancer between Naples and the Alps is about to develop a sudden interest in their surroundings."
I rest my forehead against the glass.
"Have you communicated with them officially?"
"No. And I won't. Not yet. If Enzo doesn't find you on his own, he'll declare the vendetta formally. Through Palermo. Through the proper channels. The way it's supposed to be done. That takes time. A bounty doesn't."
"So we're running against the freelancers, not the family."
"For now. Which is worse. Freelancers are stupid and desperate."
I close my eyes.
"I need to get her out of here."
"That's what Vittoria said." Bruno exhales. "Demanded, actually. Her exact words were that if we don't get Amanda on a plane within forty-eight hours, she's coming to Italy herself."
"Cazzo."
"Exactly."
I rub a hand across my face.
"Get Amanda to the airport. Get her on a plane. We'll handle everything else from this end."
"Okay.”
"The passport's on its way. Luca will have it by morning."
"What name?"
"Canadian. Real enough to hold up. Fabio has the route. Fiumicino to Toronto, Toronto to O'Hare. Not direct. Direct flags."
"When?"
"Tomorrow night. Two of Luca's men stay with her through the terminal. Dmitri's people pick her up in Toronto. Our people meet her at O'Hare. She won't be alone between here and Vittoria's front door."
The plan is clean. Amanda will be safe. She disappears into a life without safe houses, bounty hunters, and a man whose name is now worth money to every desperate bastard with a gun.
"She won't leave," I say.
Bruno doesn't answer right away.
“What do you mean she won't leave?"
"I mean she won't get on the plane if I'm not on it."
"Then put her on the goddamn plane, Valentino. You're not asking her permission. You're keeping her alive."
He hangs up.
If I put her on that plane and stay behind, I become every person who's ever walked out of a room she was in. I become what she expects. She won't forgive it.
There's no version of this where I'm not the person who leaves.
I have until morning to figure out how to be the man who stays while still being the man who makes her go.