The File

POV: Luciano

"You should sit down for this." Elena set a folder on my desk that evening, thin, but she looked at it like it weighed a hundred pounds.

"I do not sit for paperwork." I opened it anyway, because Elena did not say things like that without reason, and I trusted her more than I trusted anyone left in my life.

The first photo stopped me cold.

It was her. The woman from the stairwell, younger, maybe nineteen, standing beside a man I recognized instantly because his face had been in the news for two decades. Her father. Except the caption under the photo did not say Mara Soto.

"Kira Quezada," Elena said, watching my face carefully. "Only daughter of Rafael Quezada, Quezada Shipping and Freight. Officially deceased three years ago. Car accident, no body recovered, closed casket funeral with a photo instead of a coffin, according to the report."

"Except she is very much alive and mopping my stairwell." I laughed

"Except that, yes." She said eyeing me

I sat down after and smiled 

"There is more," Elena said, and from her voice I already knew I was not going to like it. "Her father had an arrangement in place before she disappeared. A marriage contract. Kira Quezada, promised to secure a business partnership."

"Promised to who." I already had a terrible feeling I knew.

Elena did not answer right away. She had known me since I was a boy who cried at his own father's funeral, and I watched her decide how gently she could say the next part before deciding there was no gentle way to say it at all.

"Marco Igliozzi," she said.

The room went very quiet.

"She was supposed to marry my uncle." I said it slowly, like saying it slowly might make it make more sense.

"She ran instead. Faked her death rather than go through with it. Whatever your uncle is, Luciano, she was terrified enough of him to disappear from her entire life instead of marrying him. That should tell you something."

I thought about the way she had looked at me on the stairs. Steady and careful. Like a woman who had spent years learning exactly how much of herself was safe to show a stranger.

"Does she know who I am," I asked. "Related to him perhaps."

"I do not know. I would guess not, or she would never have taken a job in this building."

I closed the folder. My hands were steadier than I expected them to be, given everything sitting behind my ribs at that moment.

"Luciano." Elena's voice sharpened, the way it did when she thought I was about to do something reckless, which, in fairness to her, was often. "What are you thinking right now." She asked 

"I am thinking my grandmother wants a wife in this family before she dies. I am thinking my uncle wants a woman he lost three years ago and has apparently never stopped wanting. And I am thinking there is exactly one person in this city who could hand me both of those things at once." He smirked

"You cannot be serious." Elena finally said shaking her head 

"I have never been more serious in my life." I smiled once again 

"She ran from a marriage once already, Luciano. What makes you think she will walk into another one just because you ask nicely."

"I am not my uncle and who said I was going to ask nicely" The words came out sharper than I meant them to, and Elena's eyebrows lifted, because we both knew that was not entirely an answer to her question.

"No," she agreed slowly. "But you are about to walk into a woman's home and ask her to marry a man whose last name she has spent three years terrified of. However careful you are about it, Luciano, that is going to feel like the same thing to her at first. You need to understand that before you knock on her door."

I sat with that for a moment, because she was right, and I hated that she was right. "Then I will make sure she understands the difference."

"And if she says no." She added

"Then I will have lost nothing I did not already stand to lose." I said it evenly, but it was not entirely true, and some part of me already knew it. "Marco will still be circling. My grandmother will still be dying. At least this way, someone else in this city understands exactly what he is, instead of me being the only one carrying it."

Elena studied me for a long moment, the way she had studied me since I was a boy too proud to cry in front of anyone but her. "Be careful with her, Luciano. Whatever she survived to get this far, it was not nothing."

"I know." I shrugged 

"I do not think you do, atleast not yet." She gathered the folder and stood, pausing at the door. "But I suspect you are about to find out either ways."

I stood up, buttoning my jacket, already halfway to the door before I answered her.

"I am not going to ask nicely," I said again. "I am going to offer her something she cannot afford to say no to. Everyone has a price, Elena. Even the ones who disappear to avoid paying it."

I did not sleep that night. I spent it planning exactly what I would say to a woman who had spent three years becoming a ghost, and how I would convince her to come back to life for me instead.