I found her. I promised I would, and I did.
His arms tighten around me.
When we move, it’s together, toward the warm light spilling from the compound’s windows. He keeps my hand. I keep his.
Behind us, the garden goes dark.
37
LORENZO
I can’t sleep. Not like I used to. This is different. The opposite.
Isabella is asleep beside me. Her breathing is even, her body warm against my side, curled against my chest like she’s holding on and isn’t letting go. The purple tips of her hair fan across the pillow. She smells like jasmine from the garden and a scent that is just her own.
I’m awake because I’m full. I don’t have a name for it.
So I do what I’ve always done when the stillness fails. I slip out from under her arm, pull on a shirt, and walk.
The compound at night used to be my domain. Two, three in the morning, hallways lit low by sconces that turned the mahogany walls warm and amber. I’d move through them the way I move through everything. Checking angles. Counting exits. Clocking who’s behind which door.
Tonight I walk the same route. Same floorboards creaking under the same places. Same portraits of dead Santoros watching from the walls. But the inventory is different.
I’m not scanning for threats. I’m seeing my family.
The guest wing comes first. Second floor, central section between the family corridors. Two rooms occupied. Sofia in one,close to the medical wing. Mila in the other, first floor, the room Gia chose for its garden-facing windows and wide sightlines. The other girls from the Benedetti compound were moved to Casa Lucia three days after the raid. Better facilities. Staff trained for this. Sofia and Mila stayed because their situations are more acute.
A light under Sofia’s door. Someone awake. I stand in the hallway and listen, and what I hear is nothing. Not peace. Not sleep. The silence of someone who learned to be quiet the hard way.
Gia briefed me this morning. A trauma counselor she trusts is coming in twice a week, someone with the clearance to work within our world without asking questions that endanger the girls or us. Each of them is being given choices. Contact family, don’t contact family. Talk to law enforcement, don’t talk. Stay here, or leave when they’re ready.
All I can do is stand here in the dead of night and listen to a silence that sounds like damage. Gia does the rest. Isabella does the rest.
Light spills from the medical wing at the end of the ground-floor east corridor. I push inside and find my sister.
Gia is bent over a patient’s forearm, suturing. Steady under the surgical lamp. The patient is sitting on the stainless steel table with his sleeve rolled to the elbow. Luca Valentino. Dark-eyed. Angular face. Head of the Valentino family, our ally who sent twelve men for the raid and caught a blade for the trouble. The wound is along his outer forearm. Not deep enough for concern but enough for stitches.
Gia is closing it with the precise, efficient movements I’ve watched her make on me a hundred times.
Her hands are shaking.
I stop in the doorway. Lean against the frame. Watch.
Giada Santoro’s hands do not shake. I have sat in this room while she’s dug shrapnel out of my shoulder blade, stitched a knife wound along my ribs, cleaned and dressed burns that would make most surgeons wince. She didn’t tremble once.
Right now they are trembling against Luca Valentino’s skin.Hell.
She looks worse than tired. Hollowed. The circles under her eyes have gone from shadows to bruises. Her scrubs hang looser than they did a week ago. Her hair is pulled back but strands have escaped, and she hasn’t fixed them, which is unlike Gia. She fixes everything. She keeps every surface clean and every instrument sterilized and every person in her care attended to.
Luca notices me first. Tips his chin. “Santoro.”
Gia’s head snaps up. Something crosses her face. Quick. Controlled. “Renzo. Can’t sleep?”
“No.”
“Join the club.” She turns back to the suturing. Her voice is clipped. “Almost done here.”
I watch her finish. Tie off the last suture. Bandage. Her instructions to Luca are precise, delivered without looking at his face. Keep it dry. Change the dressing in two days. No heavy use for a week.
