Chapter 46
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
Gemma
The footsteps stop outside the door.
Not passing by. Stopped.
I'm off the bed before I've decided to move, my body running calculations my brain hasn't caught up with yet. Nina's still asleep, small and warm under the thin blanket. The deadbolt is turned.
My sneakers are by the door. I grab one. It's not a weapon. It's barely anything. But it's what I have.
The lock clicks.
Something metal sliding against metal, the sound of a tool doing what keys are supposed to do.
I position myself between the door and the bed. My hand is shaking.
The door swings open.
I throw the sneaker before I see anything but shadow. It connects with a dull thud—head height, solid impact—and the shape in the doorway goes still.
"Nina, come here." My voice doesn't sound like mine. Too steady. Too flat. "Come to Mommy right now."
Nina makes a sound behind me, confused and scared, woken up wrong. I reach back without looking, find her arm, pull her off the bed and behind me in one motion.
"The fuck—" The voice is low, rough, annoyed rather than hurt. A man's voice. He steps into the light from the parking lot and I see him clearly for the first time.
He's tall. Not huge, but tall enough that he fills the doorway.
Dark hair cut short. His face is all angles.
Sharp jaw, sharper cheekbones, a mouth set in a hard line.
But it's his eyes that make my stomach drop.
Pale green, almost gray in this light, and completely still.
The kind that comes from knowing exactly what you're capable of.
He's holding my sneaker in one hand.
"You stole my fucking car."
The words land somewhere far away. I'm cataloguing everything else. The way he's standing with his weight slightly off his right leg. The way his free hand hasn't moved toward anything but stays loose at his side, ready.
He looks exactly like the men Dominik used to meet in parking lots. The ones who came to the house when I wasn't supposed to be home. The ones who stopped talking when I walked into a room.
"Stay back." I pull Nina tighter against my legs. She's crying now, quiet little hiccups that break something in my chest. "I'll scream."
"Scream all you want. Nobody in this shithole is calling the cops." He tosses the sneaker onto the floor. It lands with a soft thump. "I'm not here to hurt you. I'm here for my goddamn car."
Of course it had a tracker. Of course I didn't think to check. Of course I'm an idiot who stole a car from someone who could afford to track it.
"Mommy?" Nina's voice is tiny. Terrified.
I don't answer her. I can't look away from him. Can't give him an opening.
Luca
The kid's face freezes.
Not the startled kind of freeze, the way a child might look if a stranger walked in during a game. This is pure terror. I recognize because I've seen it on grown men in the seconds before they understand they're going to die.
She doesn't cry anymore. Doesn't make a sound. Just goes absolutely still behind her mother's legs, eyes too big for her face, fingers twisted in the fabric of an oversized t-shirt.
Fuck.
I didn't think. The tracker pinged, I drove, I picked the lock. Thirty seconds, maybe less. I've done it a thousand times. Walked into rooms I wasn't invited to, dealt with whatever was inside.
But this isn't a warehouse. It's not a back office or a shipping container.
It's a motel room, and there's a kid in it who's looking at me like I'm the monster under her bed.
My chest does something I don't let it do. A pull, low and tight, in a place I thought I'd burned out years ago. The girl is—
Four. Maybe five.
Dark hair. Damp from a bath.
The same age she would have been.
I look away. Force my eyes to the woman instead.
She's barefoot, wearing jeans and a hoodie that's seen too many washes.
Brown hair pulled back, strands escaping around a face that's all sharp angles and exhaustion.
Pretty, in the way people are pretty when they're too tired to hide anything.
No makeup, no armor, just skin and whatever's keeping her standing between me and her daughter.
Her eyes are the color of coffee. They don't leave my face.
She's terrified. I can see it in the rapid pulse at her throat, the way her breathing has gone shallow and fast. But she hasn't moved. Hasn't stepped back. Her body is a wall, and she's not going to let me past without going through her first.
I've seen that look before. On mothers in Naples, in Calabria, in a dozen places where men like me walked through doors uninvited. The ones who would die before they'd move.
"Why'd you steal my fucking car?"
My voice comes out rougher than needed. The girl flinches behind her mother's legs, and I hate myself a little more.
"I thought—" The woman's voice catches. She swallows, tries again. "I thought someone was following me. From work. I saw your car and the keys were there and I just—I panicked."
"So you took it."
"Yes." She doesn't look away. Doesn't make excuses. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have. I was scared and I wasn't thinking and my daughter was with me and I just—"
She stops. Takes a breath.
"I can't pay you back. Not right now. I don't have—" Her jaw tightens. "I don't have anything. But I will. Somehow. I'll figure it out and I'll repay you for whatever damage I caused, whatever inconvenience, I'll—"
"I don't want your money."
The words come out flat. Final.
She blinks. Something shifts in her expression—confusion, maybe, or a new kind of fear.
I could tell her that money means nothing to me. That I have enough to bury three generations and still leave plenty for whoever's left. That there's nothing she could give me that would matter, nothing anyone could give me, because the only thing I ever wanted got lost once and for all—
Cold metal presses against the back of my skull.
The click of a safety disengaging.
"Don't fucking move," a voice says behind me.
Luca Sartori hasn't felt anything in six years.
Then a stolen car, a scared woman, and a silent little girl walk into his life — and the most frozen man in the family finally has something to lose.