Page 13 of Devil Among Men

“I know.”

“But I need you to come back tonight,” she says. “Whatever’s unresolved between us, I need you to come back so we can keep being unresolved about it. Together.”

Gratitude and guilt tighten my chest. “I’ll come back.”

“You’d better.” She steps closer, close enough I catch her scent beneath the salt air coming off the water, and for one suspended moment neither of us moves, caught between everything still broken and everything neither of us is ready to let go of completely.

“Rafael,” Maurizio says. “We need to move.”

I hold Portia’s gaze a second longer, memorizing it the way a man memorizes things he’s not entirely sure he’ll get to see again. Then I climb into the car without another word, watching her figure grow smaller in the side mirror as we pull away from the B&B and out onto the dark coastal road, toward whatever Thursday night has planned for all of us.

The port comes into view forty minutes later, exactly as Maurizio’s intel promised—floodlights, a scattering of armed men patrolling the dock, a cargo ship docked and waiting to unload whatever Vito’s rebuilding his war chest with.

“Positions,” Maurizio murmurs into the radio.

I check my weapon one final time, every old instinct sharpening into focus, and step out into the dark toward whatever’s waiting for us on that dock.

7

PORTIA

The knock at my door comes just after noon, sharp and familiar. I’m halfway across the room, already hoping.

Jayla stands in the hallway looking smaller than I remember, a thin white bandage still visible along her hairline, but upright, steady, very much alive in a way that makes my chest ache with relief the second I see her.

“You’re here.” I pull her into a careful hug, breathing in the familiar smell of her shampoo underneath the antiseptic hospital scent still clinging to her skin. “I thought they weren’t releasing you until this afternoon.”

“They ran a few extra scans. Overly cautious doctors.” She pulls back, managing a faint, worn-down version of her usual grin. “I’m fine, Portia. Stop looking at me like I might shatter.”

“I’ll look at you however I want. I almost lost you.”

“You didn’t, though.” She squeezes my hand, warm and grounding, and for one full breath everything feels almost normal again. Two sisters standing in a hallway, safe, together, the worst of it behind us. I take in the small details of her, the ones I’ve cataloged instinctively since we were kids, checking her over without meaning to. Her eyes track clearly, no lingering confusion from the concussion. Whatever fear I carried through yesterday’s phone call finally starts loosening its grip.

Then I notice Adagio.

He’s standing a few feet behind her, jaw clenched hard enough a muscle jumps along the side of it. His hands, usually loose and expressive even at rest, curl into fists against his sides, knuckles pale. Some instinct honed over years of reading rooms for a living picks up on the wrongness of it before he even opens his mouth.

“Adagio.” My eyes narrow. “What’s wrong?”

He doesn’t answer right away, and that silence tells me more than words could. Jayla’s smile falters too, catching whatever I’m reacting to a half-second behind me.

“Where’s Rafael?”

“He’s alive.” Adagio gets it out fast, like he knows exactly which words matter most and wants them ahead of whatever worse thing I might imagine in the silence. “But he’s hurt, Portia. Bad.”

The floor tilts slightly beneath me. “How bad?”

“Gunshot. Side of his stomach.” He runs a hand through his hair, some of his usual composure cracking around the edges. “Missed anything vital, from what we could tell on the ground, but he’s lost a lot of blood. Maurizio’s bringing him now. We couldn’t risk a hospital, not with what happened tonight.”

“What happened?” My hands start shaking, fear giving way to anger, my jaw tightening, fingers curling into fists at my sides. “He told me it was supposed to be a straightforward op.”

“It should’ve been. Vito had more men at the port than our intel accounted for. Way more. We walked in thinking eight, and it was closer to twenty. Had to fight our way out.”

“Fight your way out.” I press a hand against my mouth. “With guns.”

“With everything we had. We lost Enzo.”

The name shocks me to my core for someone I barely knew, a soldier I’d exchanged maybe a dozen words with total during our brief overlap at the villa. Grief doesn’t care about the size of a connection when it’s stacking on top of terror for someone I love. I press both hands against my face, trying to breathe through the tightness closing around my chest. Beside me, Jayla’s hand finds my shoulder, steady, silent, present the way she’s always been since we were kids clinging to each other through storms neither of us understood yet.