LOGINI was still on the bottom stair.The question sat in the room between us and I looked at his face and understood something before I'd fully processed it. He already knew everything. The market. The exit I'd used. Where I'd gone. How long I'd been there. His men were good at their jobs and I'd known that when I went anyway.I came down the last stair and walked into the room.If this was happening it was happening properly. Not from a staircase."Yes," I said. "I lied to you."He looked at me."I'm sorry okay? I went to see my parents. I didn't tell you because you would have come and I needed to go alone." I said. "That's the truth."He said nothing."My mother has the Lions Heart," I said. "My father didn't lose it. She took it from him weeks ago. She's had it the whole time."I said, hoping it'll change something. Something moved in his expression. Fast and controlled."I found that out a day before yesterday," I said. "I came home and I didn't tell you and I know how that looks, b
I woke up, and he was still there.That was the first thing. Every other morning, he'd been up before me, already somewhere else in the house or already on his phone. This morning, he was just lying there beside me, looking at the ceiling. I watched him for a moment without moving. He turned his head and looked at me. "Heyyy, you're staring," he said stretching a little. "I'm looking," I said. "There's a difference." Something moved at the corner of his mouth. He looked back at the ceiling. We lay there. Neither of us got up. The morning light came in slow through the curtains, and the house was quiet around us, and I couldn't remember the last time I'd been in a bed and felt no urgency to leave it. "Tell me something, hmm, about the café," he said. I looked at him. "What about it." "What was it like?" I thought about it. "Small. Six tables inside, two outside when the weather was good. The owner was a woman named Rosa who came in every morning and tasted the coffe
The address came through at six in the morning. I read it, memorised it, deleted the message. Then I lay there with my phone face down on my chest and listened to Luca breathing beside me and thought about what I was about to do. He was still asleep when I got up. --- Downstairs the kitchen was quiet and the morning light coming in pale through the window above the sink, and I made coffee and stood at the counter and thought about my mother's word. Alone. Not bring Luca. Not come through his channels. Just me and an address and a decision I'd already made in the dark last night. Luca came down twenty minutes later. He looked at me at the counter and came and took the coffee from my hand and drank from it without asking and handed it back and I looked at him and thought about the address on my deleted messages and felt sick. "You slept well," I said. "Yeah, better than usual," he said. He went to make another cup. We had breakfast. He said something about the architect thing,
I woke up before him. The room was grey and still, early light coming in thin through the curtains, and for a moment I just lay there and let myself feel the absence of dread. No car to get back into. No road to watch. No mirror to check. Just a room and a bed and the sound of someone breathing beside me. I turned my head. Luca was asleep. Actually asleep. Not the sitting-in-a-chair-by-the-window version I'd seen in every motel and borrowed flat. Properly asleep, on his back, one arm across his chest, his face doing nothing at all. No jaw working through a calculation. No eyes processing a room. Just his face, still, and he looked younger than I'd ever seen him look and I didn't stare but I noticed. I got up quietly and went downstairs. The kitchen was clean and stocked and the morning light came through the window above the sink and I stood in it for a moment and then I made breakfast. Real breakfast. Eggs that weren't Enzo's, toast that wasn't motel bread, coffee that didn't t
A pool of blood formed already when I reached there. I let out a sigh of relief when I saw who the bullet hit. Silvio groaned in pain as Enzo knelt down beside him, his face full of fear, maybe thinking about what if it wer him the bullet hit.Silvio was taken out on a stretcher. Alive. Shoulder wound, serious but survivable. He didn't say anything when they lifted him. He just looked at Luca once and Luca looked back and nothing was said.The room cleared slowly.Family heads filing out, their people behind them, the specific shuffling exit of people who had witnessed something they needed time to process before they could decide what it meant for them. Ferrante stayed until Luca nodded at him and then he went too. Caruso was escorted out by two of Luca's men, not gently, his face carrying the particular blankness of a man who knows exactly what's coming and has stopped pretending otherwise. I stood against the wall and watched it all empty out. My legs had stopped shaking somewh
Nobody moved.The room that had been fracturing two minutes ago was completely still now. Every person in it frozen in whatever position they'd been in when Silvio's arm went around my throat.The gun was cold against my temple.I couldn't breathe properly. His arm was too tight around my neck and I had to make a decision to take very small careful breaths and stick to them and not do anything that could be interpreted as movement.I was terrified.I want to say I was thinking clearly and calculating and holding myself together but the truth is my heart was going so fast I could feel it in my teeth and the metal of the gun against my head was the only thing my brain could fully process.Luca was across the room.Two of Silvio's men had moved in front of him the second Silvio grabbed me. He hadn't tried to push through them yet. He was standing there looking at me. He stared at me like he was planning something. He looked sad, like he'd let me down, like he'd betrayed me and for the fi
The silence inside the vault was deafening. The stone door had sealed with a final, mechanical thud, cutting off the sounds of the sirens and the gunshots. I was alone in the belly of the earth. I didn't move for a long time. I just stood there in the dark, my hand still resting on the cold glass o
I didn't need an alarm clock the next morning. The sun had barely started to turn the sky a pale grey when I heard the heavy boots in the hallway. I stayed on the bed for a few minutes, staring at the ceiling. My encounter with Enzo in the garage had changed things. I realized that thing wasn’t the
I couldn't sleep. The bed was too soft, the room was too quiet, and the ring on my finger felt like it was glowing in the dark. Every time I closed my eyes, I thought about the bank, I thought about the scanner and the numbers my father had left behind.If my thumbprint didn't work tomorrow, what w
The morning light filtered through the grime- covered windows of the cabin illuminating the room brightly, it didn’t even make we want to stand up from the bed, it just reminded me where I was. I felt the air before I even opened my eyes. It was heavy, still, and impossibly cold.But I wasn't cold.







