“For your father,” I say.
His eyes meet mine then, dark and exhausted and full of everything that should’ve made me stay away from him from the beginning.
“I chose my family.”
I stare at him and feel something in me split with perfect, silent precision. “All of this, and you still have the nerve to call that a choice.”
His face then changes, breaking—not cleanly. Salvatore never breaks cleanly, but this is enough. “My father was going to give Lucia to Giacomo Moretti. I had to give him your bloodline or lose my sister.”
The yard goes silent except for water slapping dully against the pilings. And because I’m still enough of a fool to love him, I understand—not forgive, never that. But I understand enough to make the devastation even more complete.
Of course, there’s another hostage. Of course, his father puts a girl on the scales and tells his son to choose which blood lives. Fathers like ours don’t force loyalty cleanly. They braid it into the people we can’t bear to lose and call it duty.
I almost wish he’d said legacy alone. It would’ve been easier to hate him. Instead, I get the truth, and it’s filthier.
“She was thirteen.”
For a brief, impossible moment, I feel confused. Then, the meaning of the sentence sinks in—she was. My entire body stiffens.
“Salvat—”
“Moretti didn’t wait. While I was with you, he decided he didn’t need the contract signed to take what my father had already promised.”
Salvatore’s eyes close briefly. When he opens them again, there’s nothing in them but wreckage.
“She threw herself from the north balcony. My father didn’t even have the decency to tell me when I went to see him that night in Kolomna. I did it all for nothing, and he knew it.”
I look at him standing there in the wind—my traitor, my love—and know that if the story ended there, I might’ve still hated him in a simpler way. Might’ve gone into exile with rage clean enough to keep me warm.
He chooses bloodline over me, yes.
But the bloodline eats his sister, anyway.
“You should have told me,” I say, and the devastation in my voice sounds almost childish to my own ears.
Tears well in his eyes, but he doesn’t let them fall. “I know,” he whispers.
My chest caves in around the words. “I could have gotten her out.”
He nods once, and that somehow hurts more than anything. “I know.”
“I would have.” My own voice sounds wrong to me now, rough and unsteady and too fucking late. “I would have taken her anywhere. I would have—”
“I know,” he says again, and each repetition slices deeper than the last because there’s no defense in it, no excuse, no lie big enough to hide behind. Just that ruined, useless truth.
He knows. He knows exactly what I’m saying. He knows I would have done it. He knows I would have torn up cities, names, and bloodlines to get her away from his own father. He knows, and it changes absolutely nothing.
“That’s our whole fucking legacy, isn’t it?” I say, and now there’s nothing in my voice but bitterness and blood. “Dress the knife up as duty. Call the loss necessary. Tell ourselves it meant something when all it ever does is leave bodies behind.”
He looks shattered. He looks like every choice he makes has cut him open, too, and that doesn’t save him. It just makes the knife harder to bear.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
A laugh tears out of me, sharp and ugly and half a wound all by itself. “Don’t,” I say, stepping closer until there’s almost no space left between us, and every instinct in my body is screaming to either touch him or kill him, and I don’t know which one would hurt less. “You don’t get to stand there after all this and give me sorry, Salvatore.”
He lifts his gaze to mine. There are no defenses left in it. No polish or Vieri discipline. Just grief and guilt and the raw, impossible shape of a man who knows exactly what he’s become.
“What do you want me to say?”
