LOGINELLIE Somewhere around the end of the second week, it starts feeling almost like before. Not fully, none of us are pretending it's fully anything, but there are mornings where I come downstairs and Silas is already in Noir's face about whatever meaningless thing he's decided to care about today, and Lorenzo is at the table with a book, and the coffee is already made, and I stand in the doorway and my chest does this small, quiet thing where it loosens. Just a little. Just enough to breathe differently. We fall back into each other the way you find your footing after a bad fall. Carefully first, testing each step, and then less carefully, and then not at all. Silas engineers reasons to be in whatever room I'm in, which is so transparent it should be annoying and isn't. Noir's hands find my waist when he passes me in the kitchen...this two-second press of warmth that goes as quickly as it comes... and I've stopped pretending it doesn't do things to my pulse. Lorenzo reads beside me i
ELLIESomewhere around the end of the second week, it starts feeling almost like before.Not fully, none of us are pretending it's fully anything, but there are mornings where I come downstairs and Silas is already in Noir's face about whatever meaningless thing he's decided to care about today, and Lorenzo is at the table with a book, and the coffee is already made, and I stand in the doorway and my chest does this small, quiet thing where it loosens. Just a little. Just enough to breathe differently.We fall back into each other the way you find your footing after a bad fall. Carefully first, testing each step, and then less carefully, and then not at all. Silas engineers reasons to be in whatever room I'm in, which is so transparent it should be annoying and isn't. Noir's hands find my waist when he passes me in the kitchen...this two-second press of warmth that goes as quickly as it comes... and I've stopped pretending it doesn't do things to my pulse. Lorenzo reads beside me in t
ELLIEThe ceiling is wrong.That's the first thing I register before anything else — before the dull throb at my temple, before the brightness of the room, before the fact that I'm in a bed that isn't mine wearing clothes I don't remember putting on. The ceiling is too high, pale plaster with a thin crack running toward the window, and the window is throwing morning light at an angle that matches no room I've woken up in for the past six months.I sit up too fast and the room tilts violently and my hand flies out to grip the edge of the mattress. That's when I feel the pull at the inside of my elbow.I look down.IV line. Taped to the crook of my arm, running up to a drip stand beside the bed.My heart slams up into my throat so hard I feel it in my teeth.I swing my legs over the side, plant my feet on the floor, stand — the room sways and I grab the drip stand and drag it with me to the door and yank it open, and the two men standing in the hallway spin around fast, hands going to t
SILAS"Put the gun down, Mr Giuseppe, and I'll make sure Eliana walks out of here alive."I've heard a lot of bullshit in my life. I grew up in a place that manufactured it. But Vittorio Castellano says it with the kind of calm that makes your skin prickle — not because you believe him, but because he believes himself, and that's so much worse.Lorenzo doesn't move. The gun doesn't move. I know his jaw, I know every version of what that jaw does, and right now it says he's not deciding anything. He's waiting. Buying seconds."You have my word," Vittorio adds.Noir's laugh is barely a sound. More like an exhale with an edge on it. "I'd much rather just kill you both and be done with it."He means it. I feel it from across the corridor, that flat certainty of his. His eyes have been moving between Vittorio and Elijah and back again since they walked through that door, and I've fought beside Noir enough times to know what that particular stillness means. He's already decided. He's just w
LORENZOThe estate is too quiet.I notice it the moment we clear the perimeter wall — not the absence of sound exactly, because there's wind through the hedges and the distant push and pull of the sea somewhere beyond the grounds. It's the absence of the right sounds. No patrol at the east corner. No movement through the upper windows. The silence of a building that has been emptied deliberately, by someone who knew we were coming and wanted us to come.I hold up a fist. Silas and Noir stop behind me without a word.We crouch in the shadow of the hedge line and I scan the grounds — the path to the service entrance, the camera mounted at the corner of the east wing that should be sweeping and isn't, the faint light in the ground floor window that has no business being on at this hour."It's wrong," Silas says, very quietly, beside my ear."I know.""Could be a skeleton crew. Vittorio's at the warehouse, his people followed.""Or," Noir says from my other side, his voice flat, "he's not
ELLIE"First of all, I want out."Adrian drops it into the middle of the table like a stone, and the silence that follows has weight to it. He has his elbows on his knees, coffee cradled between both hands, eyes on the floor between his feet."Out," I repeat."Gone." He looks up, and his eyes are steady in a way I haven't seen from him before — no calculation in them, no angle working underneath. "New name, new country, new everything. I'm done with this world. I've been done for a long time." He sighs, and for the first time since I met him, I hear the true exhaustion in his voice. "I just want to be free of it."He's been my father's right hand man since he was twelve, been in this ice since he was born and sold to Vittorio before he even stopped breastfeeding. He doesn't know anything but this. I thought he would've wanted the power for himself, once Vittorio was brought down but I guess I don't know him as much as I thimk I did.I look at him for a long moment. At the bruise deep
SILAS My eyes hadn't left Ellie since we got in the car. She sat in the backseat between me and Lorenzo, her body so tense I could practically see the tremors running through her. Tears streamed down her face silently—no sobs, no sounds, just an endless flow of salt water that she didn't bother wi
SILASShe didn't speak. Just looked at me for a long moment, her expression unreadable. I felt like she was trying to peer through my skull and into my brain, trying to figure out if I meant it or if this was some kind of manipulation. I dipped my other hand in my pocket, suddenly restless. I held
"Lorenzo..." My throat closed up, "I'm so sorry."I didn't have perfect parents either, my father abandoned me and my mother used me to fill her bank account, but even so I couldn't fathom the amount of pain Lorenzo would've gone through at that point in his life. "I was out studying and learning
ELLIE "Elijah."I inhaled so deeply I felt strain in my lungs, my brother's name dropped like a bomb between us as my mind struggled to grasp the reality of what Dylan was saying, what it meant. What the past few years of my life was. "That's impossible. Elijah was already in Italy by then. He d







