Page 10 of Devil Among Men

“Girl, I’m fine. Mild concussion. They’re keeping me one more night for observation. Releasing me tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow.” I exhale, the last of last night’s fear loosening its grip on my throat. “Jayla, I am so sorry. If I hadn’t dragged all of us into this⁠—“

“Don’t. Portia James, don’t start that with me right now.”

“You almost died.”

“I almost got hit by a piece of wood. Not shot execution-style in a back alley. There’s a difference.” A pause, softer now. “And for the record? If you asked me right now whether I’d get on that plane to Sicily with you again, knowing everything I do, yeah. I would. Every time.”

My throat tightens. “You don’t mean that.”

“I absolutely mean that. You’re my sister. Not because some judge signed a piece of paper when we were kids. Because you’re the one who used to sneak into my room during thunderstorms and swear nothing bad could touch us as long as we stayed together. I believed you then. I believe you now, even with a house burned down behind us.”

I press the heels of my hands against my eyes, refusing to cry into an espresso cup in a stranger’s breakfast room. “I love you. You know that?”

“I know. Speaking of family—Mom and Dad emailed me last night. There’s something on the news back home about a fire at a villa in Sicily, and somehow they connected the dots thinking we might be here.”

My stomach drops. “What did you tell them?”

“Nothing yet. I wanted to ask you first. What am I even supposed to say, Portia? Don’t worry, we’re fine, we’re only running from a mafia don who wants Rafael dead?”

“You can’t say anything. I know it’s hard, but we can’t respond. Not right now. If there’s any chance Vito’s people are watching their inboxes, watching the house⁠—”

“I know.” She sighs, and I picture her exactly, chewing the inside of her cheek the way she does when she’s holding back a worry she doesn’t want to hand off to someone already carrying too much. “I hate leaving them hanging. They’ve got to be terrified.”

“I hate it too.” I look out the window again, at the olive trees swaying in that same indifferent breeze. Some part of me wants to tell her everything I’ve been sitting with this morning—the guilt, the grief, the strange new fear that our parents exist somewhere on the edges of a world I never knew touched ours. I don’t. Not yet. Not until I understand it myself. “We’ll make it up to them. Once this is over.”

“Once this is over.” She repeats it slowly, testing whether she believes it. “Okay. I trust you.”

We talk a few more minutes about nothing important—the hospital food, the ugly gown they’ve got her in, whether Adagio’s been sleeping in the chair beside her bed or actually going back to a hotel at night (he hasn’t, obviously), the small ordinary things sisters say to remind each other they’re still breathing. A nurse interrupts on her end eventually, and Jayla has to go. I set the phone down, staring at the now-lukewarm espresso, my throat still tight with everything I didn’t say out loud.

I sense him before I hear him, a shift in the air beside me I’ve never been able to explain, not even to myself. Some instinct that’s been tuned to his presence since long before I understood what it meant, back when I still thought of it as nothing more than attraction instead of whatever complicated, tangled thing it’s grown into since.

He sets a bowl down without a word—handmade pasta, still steaming, tossed simply in olive oil and herbs I don’t recognize, clearly Concetta’s work rather than anything from a box. Rafael slides into the seat across from me, watching my reaction more closely than the gesture probably warrants.

“You never ate. Jayla called before you finished breakfast. I noticed.”

I stare down at the bowl, my chest tightening at the plainness of it—that he noticed at all, that he fixed it without turning it into anything bigger than what it is. I spent half of last night furious with this man and the other half terrified of losing him in a fire that wasn’t even his fault. Both feelings are still sitting inside me right now, uneasy roommates refusing to fully make peace with each other.

“Thank you,” I say quietly.

“You don’t have to thank me for food, Portia.”

“I know.” I pick up the fork, twirling a small bite around the tines without lifting it yet. “It’s not really about the pasta.”

He doesn’t answer that directly. He just watches me, careful and unguarded at once, a man relearning how to sit across from someone he hurt without flinching away from what he did.

“Jayla’s being released tomorrow,” I say.

“Good. Adagio will be relieved.”

“Yeah.” I take the bite finally, the pasta simple enough that it makes my eyes sting for reasons that have nothing to do with the food itself. “Our parents emailed her. Panicking about the news.”

His jaw tightens. “What did you tell her?”

“To say nothing. For now.”

He nods slowly, a familiar calculation working behind his eyes, the same look he wears when he’s mapping out a threat before it’s fully formed. “That’s the right call. The fewer people who know where you are, the safer you stay.”