Chapter 37
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Amanda
Dante Castellani stands in the doorway.
In Italy.
In my hospital room.
"Thank God," I say.
It comes out wet because I'm already crying. The tears come fast, no warning, like my body waited until I saw someone familiar before it let go.
"Oh, thank God. Thank God."
He crosses the room without hurrying and takes my hand in both of his.
"Hello, Amanda," he says, like we ran into each other at dinner.
I hug him.
He stiffens immediately. Dante hates hugs the way some men hate confession, and I don't care.
I press my face into his lapel and hold on.
He smells like cigarette smoke and expensive wool, and under it, something familiar enough to hurt.
Chicago. Vittoria's house. Sunday dinners.
Men talking low in the next room while Aria kept putting food on my plate.
I grew up on the edges of these people.
Right now, Dante is the closest thing to home I have.
After a second, his hand comes up and pats my back twice.
For Dante, that is practically weeping.
"Where is he?" I pull back and grip his sleeves. "Where's Valentino? Nobody will tell me anything. I've asked everyone. I asked a janitor, Dante."
"Next room." He watches my face when he says it. "The doctors are with him. They hurt him badly enough that he needs them."
Badly enough.
My stomach drops.
"But he's alive." My fingers dig into his arm hard enough to wrinkle the suit. Under normal circumstances, that would be a capital offense. "Right? He's alive?"
Dante nods once.
I'm already sitting, but somehow my legs still give out. I fold forward on the edge of the bed, one hand clamped over my mouth.
Alive.
One call away.
Breathing on the other side of painted drywall while doctors put back whatever Enzo tried to take from him.
Alive, and I still can't get to him.
Dante reaches into his jacket and hands me a phone.
"Call whoever you need," he says. "I have to speak with the police and our lawyer." He says police like an inconvenience and lawyer like a weapon. His mouth tilts a quarter inch. "Don't escape. The man outside the door is nervous."
"He should be." Something warms in his eyes, barely there, before he leaves.
I dial the number I've known by heart since college. It rings once.
"Hello?"
"Vee."
The sound Vittoria makes breaks me open. She's crying before I finish the syllable, raw and breathless, the kind of crying I've heard from her maybe twice in fifteen years.
"You're okay," she keeps saying. "You're okay. Tell me you're okay."
"I'm okay. I'm in a hospital bed wearing a gown that doesn't close in the back, so my dignity is in critical condition, but I'm okay.
" My voice wobbles. I push through it. "You should see the bruise on my head, though.
Spectacular. I can't even post it. Instagram would ban me on sight. Violence guidelines."
She laughs.
It comes out soggy and surprised, and then I'm laughing too. Both of us laugh-crying into the phone like idiots, and it's the best sound I've heard in days.
A deep voice says something behind her, low and accented.
"Is she all right?"
"Tell Dmitri I'm fine," I say. "Also tell him when I get home, I need a full week with you. Alone. No husband. He can patrol the perimeter or whatever it is he does."
Vittoria relays this. There's a pause, then Dmitri's voice comes closer to the phone.
"I'll think about it."
"He'll think about it," Vittoria says.
Then her voice changes. Softer. Lower. The voice she saves for me when there is no audience.
"Amanda. Are you okay okay?"
I look at the wall.
The one with Valentino on the other side.
"Not really," I say. For once, I leave it there. No joke. No bow. "But I will be."
She breathes out slowly. Vittoria has never needed me to pretend I was okay for her, which is probably why I love her more than my actual family.
"Take me off speaker," I say.
A rustle. A door closes on her end. Dmitri's low murmur cuts off.
"Done," she says. "It's just me."
"Valentino and I..." I stop. Start over, quieter.
"Something happened, Vee. We got close. Closer than close. Then they took him into a room to kill him, and he smiled at me like he was saying goodbye."
My throat tightens until I can barely get the next words out.
"He was going to die. He walked through their gates on purpose so they'd let me go. All of it feels like it happened to someone else, and I'm the one stuck with the bruises.
Vittoria is quiet for a long moment.
When she speaks, her voice is steady, but I can hear the worry underneath it.
"There are things that need to be settled first," she says. "When they are, you and I are sitting down, and you're telling me everything. All of it. From the beginning."
"Okay," I whisper.
"Amanda."
"Yeah?"
"He doesn't let people close. Nobody."
I press my hand flat against the wall beside my bed, against the cool paint, like I might feel him through it.
"I know," I say.
Valentino
The doctor leaves me on my stomach, head turned sideways on a pillow that smells like bleach.
"Weeks," he told me. "You won't lie on your back for weeks."
Then he left.
Here I am, stitched from shoulder to hip, pinned to a hospital bed with my face toward the floor and an IV line taped to my hand.
I hate it.
The pain hasn't arrived yet. Whatever they gave me keeps most of it at bay, but I can feel it there, waiting. The pull of every stitch. The heat under the bandages. The deep ache in my shoulders from the rope.
Footsteps move fast in the corridor.
Not a nurse. Not the doctor.
Then a sob catches at the door.
Amanda.
I lift my hand off the mattress. The effort sends a sharp pull through my back and shoulders. I keep my hand up until her fingers close around mine.
Warm.
Shaking.
Alive.
Her face comes into view, turned sideways to meet mine. Her hair falls forward, pale under the hospital lights. There's a bruise at her temple. Her eyes are swollen from crying.
I hold on to her hand and look at her like I need to memorize every detail.
She studies me for a long second. Then her face twists like she's trying not to cry, and she's angry at herself for losing.
"So," she says. "Comfortable? You look comfortable. Very dignified. Ten out of ten."
I almost laugh.
Almost is enough to hurt.
"Hell no," I say.
"Good."
She leans down and kisses me. Soft. Careful. Not uncertain. She kisses me like she needs to know I'm really here.
When she pulls back, her palm stays on my cheek. Her thumb moves once over the stubble there.
"You're going to pay for what you did tonight," she says.
Her voice doesn't shake. That worries me more than if it did.
"You traded yourself like you were completely disposable."
"It got you out."
"It almost got you killed."
"I knew the terms."
Her thumb stops.
I keep her hand in mine.
"The woman they had with you. Who was she?"
Amanda exhales and sits on the edge of the bed, careful with the mattress, careful with me.
"Francesca." She shakes her head once. "Her sister disappeared at eighteen. Aldo. The agency. She spent years getting close to him. The job, the parties, all of it. She was gathering evidence to burn him down."
I think of Francesca at the bar. The smile. The deflection. The way she moved through that room like every man in it had mistaken her for decoration.
"She pointed you toward the corridor at the gala," Amanda says. "She found you on purpose."
"After?"
"She took my purse from the room. My phone. She didn't want it ending up with Basile's men. They grabbed her anyway. They had her for days, and she gave them nothing."
That doesn't fit.
If Francesca had Amanda's phone, if Basile's men took Francesca, if the route still got sold to Enzo, then the leak doesn't start where I thought it did.
The drugs make it hard to keep the thought together.
"Later," I say. "Not like this."
"Liar," Amanda says softly. "You're already thinking about it."
"Not well."
Her mouth trembles once before she gets it under control.
I tighten my grip on her hand.
"Luca," I say. "I need to know."
Her face changes.
"Dante's finding out. He said—"
"I said you'd want it from me directly," Dante says from the doorway, "because you don't trust secondhand information."
He walks in wearing a suit clean enough to annoy me. His eyes move once over the room. Door. Window. IV stand. Amanda. Me.
Then he looks at the way I'm lying and one corner of his mouth lifts.
I already hate whatever he's about to say.
"For the record," he says, "I have a photo."
"Delete it."
"No."
"Dante."
"It may be useful one day."
"To who?"
"Me."
Amanda makes a sound that almost becomes a laugh.
Dante's expression changes before mine can. The humor leaves him fast.
"Luca needed blood," he says. "A lot. Skull fracture, punctured lung, broken ribs. They stopped the internal bleeding an hour ago."
Amanda's hand tightens around mine.
Dante looks at me. "They say he'll make it."
I close my eyes.
The breath that leaves me pulls at every stitch.
He turned the car into the impact to keep it from hitting Amanda's side.
I don't have a word big enough for that.
"Good," I say.
Dante nods like he understands everything the word fails to cover.
"There's more," he says. "We're working on how they knew."
I open my eyes.
"The route," he says. "The timing. That truck was waiting exactly where it needed to be. Maybe six people had enough information to make that happen."
"Elio's in federal custody."
"He's one of the six. Not the only one."
Amanda goes still beside me.
Dante slides his hands into his pockets. "Enzo is with the FBI. Sealed off for now. Whatever he knows about who gave him the route, we can't get to it yet."
"So we don't know."
"Not yet."
Amanda doesn't speak.
She doesn't have to.
Someone sold the information.
Someone is still out there.