Raffaele’s already moving back toward the SUV.
“Get the men ready. We leave in ten.”
“On it.” Lorenzo’s back on the bike before he’s finished speaking.
I watch the two of them. I observe the urgency. The way the other men respond to it without being told. The third SUV’s engine starts, the man with the tablet folds it and jogs back, the perimeter stops being a perimeter and starts being a convoy. Raffaele hasn’t looked at me again. He’s checking the magazine in a gun he pulled out of nowhere. His phone’s back at his ear.
I’ve stopped existing for him.
The realization arrives quietly.
I’m not going to let him drive away.
“Raffaele.”
He doesn’t stop.
“Stay inside. Don’t open the door for anyone. There will be at least four men on the property at all times?—”
“You promised.”
He stops.
He turns.
“Promised what, exactly?”
It’s not gentle. It’s the question of a man making me say it.
What did he promise?He didn’t promise, in a sentence, that we’d be together. He didn’t promise we’d walk into our new house through the front door and look at the kitchen. He didn’t promise me one concrete thing that he’s currently failing to do.
He promised it without saying it. I heard it last night on the cabinet. I heard it in the brochure. I heard it inwe have a house.
I heard it.
I have to say it out loud anyway, and it sounds stupid the second it leaves my lips.
“That we’d—that we’d buy a house. And just—be in it. Just for a—” My voice is failing. “Just one day, Raffaele. Just walk inside it. With me. Once.”
His face changes.
“My father,” he says, “was murdered yesterday. Shot in a basement like a dog by his own son. And you want to walk around our new house?”
“That’s not?—”
“I bought this house to keep you alive. I didn’t buy it for a honeymoon. I didn’t buy it so you could pick out drapes for the sunroom while Nico Conti plops into the throne I’ve spent twenty years protecting. I don’t get to sit in this driveway and look at the ocean while his men crack a vault that has my future inside it.”
“Raffaele—”
He steps closer. Not in a kind way.
“He killed Vincenzo, Bea. Do you understand that? The man who took me off the street when I was fifteen and gave me everything I have. The closest thing I’ve ever had to a father. Shot in a chair. And his killer’s in his office right now, with his boots on the rug, and you want me to come inside.”
“That’s not what I?—”
“I’m going to put him in the ground. That’s the only thing I’m doing today. It’s the only thing I’m doing tomorrow. It’s the only thing I’m doing until it’s done. Are we clear?”
I stare at him.
