The woman who hacked her way into a crime family’s network from a studio apartment with a fire escape that was actively rusting off the building is being led by the hand to a rose garden. By an enforcer. For what is clearly about to be a feelings conversation.
“Lorenzo.”
“Don’t talk yet.”
“I’m going to talk.”
“I know. Just not yet.”
The back door opens onto the garden path, and the scent hits me first. Jasmine from the bushes along the path, thick and sweet, alive in a way that makes the humid air feel textured. The evening light has gone amber, painting the compound walls in tones of honey and old gold. Mrs. Santoro’s trellis is heavy with roses, dark red blooms so deep they’ll turn black once the light goes.
Lorenzo stops near the trellis. Releases my hand. I miss the contact. My palm is still warm from his.
He stands with his back to the trellis. His fingers brush his pocket once, brief, a passing touch over the rosary’s outline. Then they drop to his side.
I wait.
His shoulders shift. A rolling motion, subtle, like a man loosening for a fight. His throat works. His gaze finds mine and holds.
“Isabella.” Low. Rough. “I need to say something.”
My chest tightens. “Okay,” I say. Not filling the space. Giving it to him.
“I don’t know how to do this.” Rough. “I never learned. Or I did, and I buried it, and now I’m trying to dig it up and it’s coming out wrong.”
“It’s not coming out wrong.”
“You don’t know what I’m going to say.”
“Then say it.”
His throat works once before the words come.
“I was dead before you. Empty.” His voice cracks on it, then steadies. “A weapon and nothing else. I turned everything inside me off because keeping it on meant remembering. Meant feeling. And feeling meant knowing what I did. Who I wasn’t there for.”
His mother. The woman who asked for him while she was dying, who said his name to an empty room. Nonna Rosa told me that story in the kitchen one morning, her accent thick with grief even after all these years.He was gentle, cher. Quiet, sure, but gentle.Mrs. Santoro said he had a soft heart wrapped in silence.
I want to reach for him. Every instinct says close the distance, touch his face, pull him out of whatever dark water he’s wading through. But I know Lorenzo. If I touch him now, he’ll stop. He’ll let the contact replace the words, because contact is easier.
He needs to finish. I need to let him.
“For years, that was fine.” A fact. Recited. “The nothingness was useful. You can walk through blood when you don’t careabout anything. You can become what your family needs and never wonder what you need, because the answer is nothing.”
A pause. He swallows.
“Then you showed up with your cold coffee and your suicide mission and your mouth that never stops, and you?—”
He stops. Not because the words are gone. They’re crowding behind his teeth.
“You made me feel again.”
“I don’t know if I should thank you or hate you for it.”
“Which is it?” The sentence lands steady. I’m proud of that.
“Both.”
Then he’s kissing me. His hand finds my jaw, thumb tracing the bone beneath my ear, and his mouth meets mine with precision that has nothing to do with urgency and everything to do with intent. Slow. Deliberate. He tastes like the espresso Nonna Rosa makes. Dark, bitter, grounding. He slides to my nape, fingers spreading into my hair, and I grip the front of his shirt because my knees have stopped being reliable.
