Chapter 31
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Amanda
Isit on the edge of the bed in jeans and a sweater that doesn't belong to me. The jeans are too big. The sweater smells like a shop.
My hair is dry. My face is clean.
The suitcase by the door isn't mine either, but my things are inside it. What's left of them. A toothbrush. Valentino's hoodie, folded on top because I asked for it. A passport with a Canadian seal and a name that isn't my name.
So I wait.
Forty minutes. Maybe an hour. The minute hand barely moves, and somehow every second still passes.
I told myself I wouldn't cry before the car. I told myself a lot of things.
If I listen to my head, leaving makes sense. He can't think with me here. He can't plan. Can't move without wondering where I am, who can reach me, who might use me against him. Every place I go becomes another place Enzo Basile's men can find, and Valentino already has a price on his head.
If I listen to my head, I get in the car.
If I listen to anything else, I stay right here. If he wants me out, he'll have to carry me.
I pick my head. It's what mature people do.
I hate mature people.
The door opens, and Valentino stands there in black and his watch on his left wrist. He's been on the phone for an hour, handling whatever comes next like this isn't the worst moment of my life.
He looks at the suitcase first. Then at me.
"Luca is in the living room."
"Okay."
Neither of us moves.
The suitcase sits between us, packed and waiting, and I hate it for being ready when I'm not.
I stand up. My legs work. I guess that's something.
I walk to him without rushing, wanting to savor the four steps. The light from the hall over his shoulder. The line of his jaw. The way he looks at me without asking me to make this easier on him.
I put my hand on his chest. His heart thunders under it, faster than I've ever felt it beat.
"I need to ask you something," I say.
"Ask."
"Is there a chance you come out of this alive?"
He looks at me, and I hate that he thinks about it. I hate that he respects me enough not to lie fast.
"Yes," he says.
"Yes what?"
"Yes. There is a chance."
"A good one?"
His jaw shifts. "A real one."
I nod like I believe him.
I don't.
I know what a good chance looks like. I know what a bad one looks like too. This lives somewhere between them, and I don't have the strength to figure out what that is.
But he said yes, so I take it.
"Okay," I say.
I don't move my hand from his chest. It feels like it might be all that's holding me up right now.
"I want to tell you something."
"Tell me."
"I thought I'd feel guilty."
His eyes sharpen. "For what?"
"For this. For the bounty. For Chicago. For all of it. I thought I'd get to the door and feel like I did this to you."
"You didn't do anything."
"I know."
I look up at him.
"That's what I'm telling you. I know. Because if it had been a stranger in that room, Valentino. If it had been a girl you had never seen before. You still would have gone through that door."
He doesn't answer.
"You would have."
"Yes.”
"You tried to save Chiara before you even knew how. You saved me. You would have done the same for Nadia, or for a girl whose name you never learned. That's not me. That's who you are."
His eyes darken.
"Bella."
"I'm not done."
I put my other hand on his chest. His heart still pounds under my palms.
"I thought I'd hate that part of you. I thought I was supposed to. The part that moves before it calculates the cost. The part with two-million on it right now because it couldn't stand by and do nothing." My fingers curl against his shirt. "But I love it."
His breath catches.
"And I'm not going to feel guilty for being the girl you saved. You would have done it anyway. I just happened to be the one in the room."
He rests his forehead against mine.
For a long moment, neither of us says anything.
"You're wrong about one thing," he says.
"What?"
"You didn't just happen to be there."
"Valentino."
"I knew who was in that room before I opened the door. I heard your voice through the wall, bella. I heard the sound you made, and something in me broke loose." His hand comes up to my face, but he doesn't touch me yet. "I would have gone in for someone else. But I knew it was you."
My eyes fill.
"Okay," I whisper.
He kisses my forehead and stays there. His hand slides to the back of my neck, under my hair, holding me close.
I might come apart anyway.
He doesn't let go.
When he pulls back, his thumb moves along my jaw once. He looks at me for another second, seeing what I won't say out loud.
Then he picks up the suitcase.
I follow him into the hall.
Luca stands by the window in the living room.
I haven't really looked at him before. I've seen him, but never long enough to take him in.
I do now.
He's tall. Lean. Not broad like Valentino. Narrower through the shoulders, sharper in the face.
Dark short hair. Rough jaw. A man's face. Nothing strange until my eyes move lower.
His neck.
Ink climbs from his collar to his jaw. More disappears beneath his sleeves. His wrists. His hands. His knuckles. A thin black line runs down the side of his throat and vanishes under his shirt.
He turns when we come in, and his eyes meet mine for half a second. Then he looks away. The window. The door. The suitcase in Valentino's hand. Anywhere but me.
He looks again because I'm moving through the room, and he can't help tracking it.
Then away.
Fast.
Like someone told him not to.
I almost laugh.
It's ridiculous, and I want to tell him I'm not that fragile.
I don't say a thing, because I know exactly what happened. Valentino talked to him. Whatever he said, Luca decided looking at me too long is a mistake.
I swallow the laugh.
"Luca."
His eyes drop before they can settle on my face. "Signora."
"Thank you for driving."
"It's the job." His gaze stays on the floor.
Valentino sets the suitcase by the door. Very careful. Too careful. He lines it up with the wall, adjusts the handle, then adjusts it again. The bag gives him something to fix besides this.
"Five minutes," Valentino says.
"Yes, capo."
Luca moves past us without coming close. The space he leaves feels almost insulting, except I don't think he means it that way. He goes into the hall to make a call.
The suitcase pulls my eyes back to the door. Valentino hasn't moved from it.
"He won't look at me."
"No."
"You told him not to."
"I told him to drive you to the airport and put you on the plane."
"Valentino."
His mouth pulls like it might smile, then doesn't.
"I told him not to look at you. Yes."
"Why?"
"Because I'm sending you away," he says. "And right now, even another man looking at you feels like something else I have to give up."
I don't have a response to that.
My mouth opens, then closes. He notices.
"It's not about him," he says. "If I didn't trust Luca, he wouldn't be here. I chose him because he'll get you on that plane no matter what happens after you walk out this door."
"He isn't going to do anything."
"I know."
"Then why?"
"Because I'm already giving up too much today." His voice stays even, but barely. "I don't have enough left in me to be reasonable about another man looking at you."
"He literally can't look at my face."
"I know."
"It's ridiculous."
"I know."
I am not going to fight him on this. Not today. Not on the last day.
From the hall, Luca says something in Italian, short, to someone on the phone.
Valentino steps close to me. Close enough that I have to tilt my head back.
Valentino
I look down at her. Her hair is in a knot at the back of her neck. Her eyes are red and shining. And my chest hurts.
Not metaphorically. A real pain, low and deep behind my ribs.
I breathe in through it. Breathe out.
It stays.
I have cried three times in my life. For my father, when they lowered the coffin.
For Chiara, two nights after, when I sat on the curb outside her house because she wouldn't come to the door.
I stayed until the sun came up. She never came out.
I went home and cried in the bathroom so my mother wouldn't hear.
For my grandmother, near the end, when she stopped recognizing me when I walked into the room.
Three times.
Never for a woman I loved.
I have loved women before. Not like this, but I have. Some left. Some I left first. I buried men I grew up with. Stood beside their mothers. Kissed their sisters on both cheeks. Went back to work the next morning because there was always work waiting.
Death doesn't scare me. Neither does the number on my head or the men coming to collect it.
Her leaving does.
I lied in the bedroom. I told her I had a real chance. I have a chance. I don't know how real it is. Enzo wants me alive, and that means whatever he has planned is worse than dying. I know what men like Enzo do to men like me. I have done it to other men.
I don't care about being dead.
I care that I only had three days.
Three days with her after five years of almost. Five years of looking away because she was twenty, and I was the man who knew better. I had time. Years of it.
I didn't take them.
Now I want the things I never let myself want. A month with her. A bad one, even. Her angry at me over something stupid, a plate in the sink, a text I didn't answer. Her at a window we chose together. Her hair in light I haven't seen yet. Rome for ten days.
"Valentino."
"Bella."
"Say it. Whatever it is."
I put my hand on the side of her face, my thumb along her cheekbone, where I touched her the first night.
"I am going to tell you something, and I do not want you to argue with me about it."
"Okay."
"If I don't come back..."
"Valentino."
"You said you wouldn't argue."
She closes her mouth. Her eyes are already wet.
"If I don't come back, you live. You hear me? Not halfway. Not hidden. You get old. You get gray in your hair. Lines on your face. You keep every one of them because they mean you lived. And you do not make yourself small for the rest of your life because someone hurt you. Do you understand?"
"Valentino, stop."
"I'm not done."
My thumb moves over her cheekbone. Slow.
"But while I'm alive, you're mine, bella. I should have said it years ago. I didn't. That was cowardice, not restraint. If I come back, I come straight to you. Wherever you are. You won't have to ask."
Her breath catches.
"And if any man puts his hands on you because he thinks I'm dead, bella, he better be right."
Her mouth trembles before she loses the fight.
She takes my face in both hands and holds it hard. Tears are running down her face. Not pretty. Real. Beautiful.
"Don't you — don't you dare—"
"Bella."
"Don't you dare say if. Don't you dare."
"Okay."
"Say when."
"When."
"Say it again."
"When I come back."
She pulls my face down to hers and kisses me.
It is not soft. Her mouth opens under mine. She is crying into it, shaking with it, but she does not pull away. She bites my bottom lip, not hard. Kisses the place afterward. Then she comes back harder, angry enough to keep standing.
I take the kiss the way she gives it. No gentleness. No pretending this does not hurt.
When she pulls back, her forehead stays on mine. Her hands are still on my jaw. Tears keep running down her face.
"You better," she says. Her voice shakes. "You better get back to me, Valentino Conti. You hear me? You walk through whatever door you have to walk through, and you come back to me."
"Yes."
"Say it like you mean it."
"I mean it."
She kisses me once more. Short. Hard.
Then she steps back.
She wipes her face with the sleeve of my hoodie, then she lifts her chin. "Okay," she says. "Call Luca.”