Chapter 38
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
TWO WEEKS LATER
Amanda
The seatbelt sign dings on somewhere over Lake Michigan, and Valentino ignores it.
He sits sideways in the leather seat across from me, one shoulder against the cabin wall, his back a careful six inches from the cushion. He has held some version of that position since we left the hospital. In the car. At the dinner table in the house outside Rome. Now here.
A man measuring every surface before he lets it touch him.
Forty stitches did that. Forty stitches and a surgeon who kept saying incredible under his breath like Valentino was supposed to find that comforting.
"You're staring," he says without opening his eyes.
"You're sitting like the seat might betray you. I'm allowed to stare."
One corner of his mouth lifts.
He doesn't argue, because we both know if he leans back, he'll feel Basile's rope all over again, and he'd rather chew glass than let me see it happen.
Outside the window, Chicago comes up through the haze. Gray water. Gray sky. The skyline at the edge of both, familiar enough to make something twist unexpectedly in my chest.
Home.
I look back at Valentino because he's easier than the city.
A week in the hospital and another in the farmhouse outside Rome left him leaner.
The bruising under his eye has faded to yellow.
I told him yesterday it somehow made him look even more annoyed with the world than usual.
He asked what that was supposed to mean.
I told him I had no idea, and he called me impossible.
He made one of those almost-laugh sounds through his nose, and I have been living on it ever since.
The phone in my lap buzzes.
New phone. Dante handled it. Same apps, same contacts, same life waiting for me like I hadn't disappeared into a nightmare.
Three weeks away from the internet, and I returned to four hundred DMs, two brand inquiries, and a comment thread debating whether I'd gotten work done because my last post was apparently giving different energy.
My mother texted twice.
The first one asked if I'd seen the Loro Piana resort collection. The second was a forwarded article about Milan restaurant openings with, for your next trip!
"You're doing it again," Valentino says.
"Doing what?"
"Reading the phone with your jaw locked."
His eyes are open now, dark and steady on me. No escaping that look. Not in a safe house, not in a hospital, not thirty thousand feet over Illinois.
"Your mother?" he asks.
"She thinks I should try the new place in Brera. Apparently the chef trained under someone important." My voice comes out light. Automatic. "I disappear for three weeks and my mother's contribution is a tasting menu."
He doesn't answer right away.
He just watches me.
Not waiting for me to make it funny. Not rushing to smooth it over or tell me it isn't that bad. Just there.
That's still new enough to scare me.
"You laughed," he says, "when I said you should go home and talk to your family."
"Because it was funny."
"It wasn't a joke."
"That's what made it funny."
I set the phone face-down on the seat beside me.
"My family knows how to send money, recommendations, and links to articles. They're good at staying in touch with the version of me that looks fine from a distance. You want me to feel safe? You're the one who carried me out of a palazzo. You're the safety plan. My parents are..."
I stop.
The words I usually use are waiting there. Something sarcastic, something easy. But none of them fit.
The cabin hums around us. Recycled air. Leather. The faint smell of the espresso Valentino made an hour ago because apparently plane coffee is a personal insult.
"They're people I'm related to," I say.
It lands flat.
True.
Valentino shifts, slow and careful, and reaches across the aisle for my hand. I catch the wince before he buries it. He knows I catch it. Neither of us says anything.
His knuckles have healed into new scars over the old ones. I run my thumb across them.
"Ferraro says we're clean," I say, because the silence got too honest. "The FBI got their warlord, the prosecutor got her trafficking case, and we got to be victims. Which we were. Still weird. There should be a card."
"There is a case file."
"Less useful."
"Less flattering photo."
I look at him. "Three weeks ago, you didn't make jokes. I've ruined you."
"Completely."
He says it dry, but his thumb moves once over mine, and my chest does something stupid.
The plane banks. Chicago fills more of the window.
Valentino looks past me at the city. His family lives there. His work lives there. Whatever happens next lives there too. The thought tightens his mouth.
"Amanda."
The way he says my name changes the air between us.
"It won't settle just because we land," he says. "Chicago isn't the end of it."
"I know."
And I do.
I've done the homework. Lying awake in the farmhouse outside Rome, listening to him not sleep beside me.
"Elio's in federal custody," I say. "There's going to be a trial, or a deal, or whatever the FBI does when a man flips for a trafficker. And someone gave the Basiles our route to the airport. Someone knew which car. Which road. Which hour."
His hand tightens around mine.
"Bruno's people are working on it."
"I know that too."
Elio is the neat answer. Elio knew the family. Elio knew Aldo. Elio knew enough to sell us.
Except Elio was already in custody when Luca and I were hit.
He had no phone. No access. No way to know the route Fabio gave Luca that morning.
So someone else knew.
Someone else told Enzo.
"What?" Valentino asks.
I look at him.
He's watching my face now, not the window. Of course he is. The man notices everything I don't want noticed.
"Nothing." I squeeze his hand and force a smile I don't feel. "Landing nerves."
He studies me a second too long.
Then the wheels touch down, Chicago rushing gray and bright past the windows, and he lets it go.
I don't.
Valentino
The car stops inside the gates, and Amanda is out of her seatbelt before the tires finish settling on the cobblestone.
I don't blame her.
Three women stand in the doorway of the main house. Aria in the center like the queen she never stopped being, Vittoria already crying, my mother beside them with both hands pressed to her mouth.
Amanda gets the door open and runs.
Vittoria meets her halfway, and the sound the two of them make carries across the drive. They collide and hold on, talking over each other at full volume, neither one listening, both of them understanding anyway.
Women have a language for this. The rest of us stand nearby pretending we aren't emotional while hoping nobody asks us to say something meaningful.
I get out slower.
Everything I do now, I do slower.
My mother comes to me with tears in her eyes. She doesn't say anything. She just opens her arms.
She comes up to the middle of my chest, which means I have to bend. My back hates bending more than anything.
I do it anyway because I would never deny her this. Some things matter more than pain. Hugging Carmela Conti after she's spent weeks praying for me is one of them.
She grips the back of my neck the way she did when I was twelve and my father died in the street. Her fingers find the same place.
"Figlio mio," she says into my shirt.
Nothing else.
The pain in my back flares.
I let it.
What I don't tell her about is the mirror in the farmhouse outside Rome. Two weeks ago. The first time I stood still long enough to see what the rope had left behind.
I've never cared much about my appearance. But a man's body is still his own, and mine now bears the marks of the night I almost left Amanda alone in the world.
My mother pulls back and looks up at my face.
She knows.
Of course she knows.
Then she grabs my arm with both hands and starts hauling me toward the house.
"Inside. You eat."
"Mamma, I have things to settle first. Bruno is waiting, and there is still—"
She stops on the steps and turns with one finger raised.
Thirty-eight years old, tied to blood and business and men who would kill if I gave the word, and I still shut up when my mother points at me.
"You will eat first," she says. "You haven't eaten properly in a month. Don't lie to me. I can see your ribs through that shirt. Business waited two weeks. It can wait one more hour while my son sits at a table like a human being."
Men have died in Sicily after negotiating harder than I am about to.
"One hour," I say.
"We'll see," she says.
That means two.
Aria touches my face as I pass. I cover her hand with mine for a second, then we move through the doors into the foyer.
Garlic and roasting meat drift from Giulia's kitchen. Light spills across the marble. For one second, the house looks untouched by all the things that happened outside it.
Bruno stands at the bottom of the staircase.
Relief crosses his face, raw and unguarded for a heartbeat, before he smooths it away.
He was on the phone for all of it. The safe houses. The routes. The night I hung up on him and drove to Basile's gates alone. My cousin. My Don. The man who ordered me to live and swore he'd kill me himself if I disobeyed.
The logic was bad.
The love wasn't.
"You're late," he says.
"Traffic on the way back from the dead."
His mouth pulls sideways.
He crosses the marble, takes my hand, then my shoulder. Careful. Deliberate. A man who knows what it costs to be touched wrong after doctors and blood and too many people deciding what your body can survive.
"We've been waiting for you two," he says. "And Antonella is starving, so you have about four minutes before this becomes a hostage situation."
Antonella steps around him, one hand resting on the curve of her stomach.
"Valentino." She kisses both my cheeks, then leans back and looks me over. Sweet face, brutal assessment. "You look terrible. Better than Bruno described, but terrible."
"She'll start complaining in about ten minutes," Bruno says. "The baby has opinions about mealtimes."
"The baby is right," Antonella says. "The baby is the only one in this family with sense."
Across the foyer, Amanda is still wrapped around Vittoria.
Aria has an arm around both of them. My mother is already fussing at the edges, moving everyone toward food because Conti women have handled grief, joy, blood feuds, births, funerals, and bad news the same way for generations.
Sit down. Eat something. Then we decide who dies.
Amanda looks up over Vittoria's shoulder and finds me.
Just a glance.
One corner of her mouth lifts, only for me.
We made it, that look says.
I nod once.
We did.
Bruno's hand lands on my shoulder again, lighter this time, and his voice drops below the noise around us.