Chapter 7: The Hunt

Two men followed her home that night, and Anastasia didn’t notice either of them. Lorenzo did. He’d meant to leave well enough alone—had told himself, walking away from The Bloom House with a funeral arrangement he had no earthly need for now clutched absurdly in one hand, that he’d gathered what he came for. A face. A name. Confirmation, or something close enough to it, that the pendant he’d heard about was not costume jewelry after all, that the girl wearing it had no idea what she was carrying at her throat. He’d meant to leave.

He’d gotten as far as the corner of Eighth Street before some old instinct—the same one that had kept him alive through eleven years of increasingly serious responsibility inside his father’s organization—snagged on something wrong in the rhythm of the street behind him, and he’d turned back in time to see two men fall into step half a block behind Anastasia as she left the shop, moving with the unhurried, deliberate patience of men who had done this before. Not Moretti men. He knew every face in his own organization, and these were strangers—competent ones, which was worse. They kept a careful, unremarkable distance, the kind that would have looked like nothing at all to someone who hadn’t spent his whole life learning to read exactly this sort of choreography. Lorenzo followed.

He kept to the opposite side of the street, coat collar up against the rain, folded bills from the flower shop still creased in his pocket, and watched the two men trail Anastasia through the wet evening streets with a mounting, cold certainty that this had stopped being idle curiosity the moment he’d seen the pendant clearly. Someone else knows. The thought settled into him like a stone dropped into still water, sending out ripples he didn’t have time to fully examine. If Viktor had found her, others could have too—and Viktor worked for men whose interest in a surviving Romano heir would look nothing like careful concern for her welfare. Anastasia turned down a narrower street, one lined with older buildings and fewer streetlamps, oblivious, her pace unhurried, a woman walking home after an ordinary day at work. The two men closed their distance slightly. Lorenzo moved.

He crossed the street at an angle that put him behind the two men without appearing to have any purpose beyond his own destination, and closed the gap between them with the quiet, economical speed of a man who had trained his whole life to move exactly this way—not running, nothing so obvious as running, simply covering ground with an efficiency that ate distance faster than it looked like it should. The taller of the two men heard him first—some shift in the air, some instinct of his own—and began to turn, one hand already moving toward his coat. Lorenzo was faster. He caught the man’s wrist before the hand cleared the coat, wrenched it sideways with a controlled, brutal economy of motion, and used the momentum to drive him face-first into the brick wall of the building beside them.

The second man spun, reaching for something at his hip, and Lorenzo was already moving toward him, closing the distance before the weapon could clear its holster, driving his forearm into the man’s throat and pinning him hard against the same wall, close enough to feel the man’s pulse hammering beneath his skin. Ahead of them, Anastasia had stopped, spinning at the sound of impact, her eyes wide with the particular shock of someone whose ordinary evening had, without warning, become something else entirely.

“Don’t,” Lorenzo said, low, to the man pinned against the wall, before the man’s scrambling hand found the weapon anyway. Lorenzo caught it, twisted it free with an ease that made both men go suddenly, carefully still, and stepped back only once he was certain neither of them intended anything foolish.

“Tell whoever sent you that she’s not available. Not tonight. Not any night.”

“You don’t know who you’re—” the taller man started, wiping blood from a split lip, and Lorenzo’s expression flattened into something that made the rest of the sentence die in his throat.

“I know exactly who I am,” Lorenzo said quietly.

“The question is whether you understand what happens the next time I see either of your faces near her.”

Something in his voice, or perhaps simply the calm, unhurried violence of the last ten seconds, convinced them. The two men exchanged a glance, some silent negotiation passing between them, and then retreated—not fleeing, exactly, but withdrawing with the careful dignity of men choosing not to press their luck, disappearing back the way they’d come and leaving Lorenzo alone in the wet street with a stranger’s unconscious weapon in his hand and Anastasia staring at him from ten feet away like she’d never seen him before, which, in the way that mattered most, she hadn’t.

“You,” she said, and her voice shook, though whether from cold or shock or something else entirely, he couldn’t tell.

“The flower shop. You’re—what was that? Who were they?”

“I don’t know yet.”

It wasn’t entirely a lie. He didn’t know their names, only their type, and the particular flavor of danger they represented. He pocketed the weapon, aware of how the gesture must have looked to her—casual, practiced, the gesture of a man for whom violence was an ordinary Tuesday—and watched her take an unconscious step backward.

“You just—you hurt two men in the street like it was nothing.”

“I stopped two men from hurting you,” he said.

“There’s a difference, even if it doesn’t look like one right now.”

“Why would anyone want to hurt me?”

Her voice had risen, sharp with fear and adrenaline both, and Lorenzo felt something twist uncomfortably in his chest at the sight of her standing there in the rain, soaked and shaking and utterly unprepared for the answer to a question she didn’t yet understand she was asking.

“I’m nobody. I work in a flower shop. I don’t have enemies, I don’t have money, I don’t have anything anyone would want—”

“Anastasia.”

He said her name carefully, the way he had in the shop an hour before, and something in the steadiness of his voice seemed to reach her, cutting through the rising edge of panic.

“You’re safe right now. That’s what matters tonight. Let me walk you home.”

“I don’t even know you.”

“No,” he agreed.

“But you know I just put myself between you and two armed men without hesitating, and that has to count for something, even to someone who doesn’t trust easily.”

She studied him for a long moment in the rain, water running down both their faces, her arms wrapped tight around herself, and Lorenzo watched her weigh fear against whatever strange instinct had made her give him her name so easily in the shop that afternoon.

“Fine,” she said finally, quietly.

“But you’re going to explain what just happened. All of it.”

Not all of it, he thought, guilt settling low and unfamiliar in his chest as he fell into step beside her, close enough to protect, careful to leave space between them that she hadn’t yet given him permission to close. Not yet. Not until I understand it myself. But he walked her the rest of the way home through the rain regardless, watching the street behind them with the same careful vigilance he’d have given his own family, and did not let himself examine too closely why the thought of those two men’s hands anywhere near her had made something old and violent rise up in his chest faster and hotter than duty alone could explain.