Page 55
His lips twitch, the faintest hint of a smile. “Wouldn’t expect us to be.”
I huff a laugh, despite myself. Despite everything. Then I reach back, my hand finding his, lacing our fingers together. “Next time, we’re doing this in a bed.”
His chuckle is dark, low. “Yeah?”
I nod, my eyes closing for a second. “Yeah. So I can tie you down.”
His cock twitches inside me, already half-hard again, and I smile. Some things, it seems, are inevitable.
Giovanni’s bastard son and Emiliano’s hidden daughter. Chess pieces their dead fathers positioned on a board before either of us could read. And we are here — in the wreckage, in the architecture, in the backseat of a car on a side street with the city moving past the fogged windows and neither of us pretending this is something clean.
It is not clean. It is not resolved. The fury sits in my chest beside the ache and neither one wins.
His forehead against mine. Both of us breathing hard. His hands still open on my skin. Now holding without gripping. Still giving me the exit he knows I will not take.
“This changes nothing,” I say.
His thumb traces my collarbone. The gesture that started on a dark street and has become the only language between us that does not lie.
“This changes everything,” he says.
He is right. I know he is right. And I hate him for being right the way I hate him for being honest — with the specific, devastating fury of a woman who has spent her entire life waiting for someone to stop hiding. And the man who stopped is the one man on earth she should be running from.
The Wall She Is About to Bring Down
The car is quiet. The city has moved on without us — traffic resuming, pedestrians crossing, the ordinary world running its ordinary engine while two people sit in the wreckage of every wall their fathers built.
I dress in silence. He does not watch me. Gives me the privacy of not being observed — the small, specific courtesy of a man who understands that a woman reassembling herself after detonation needs the space to choose which pieces she picks up and which she leaves on the ground.
I pick up all of them. Every piece. The fury. The wanting. The trust fund and the node and the name Rivas sitting in my chest like a second skeleton I did not know I had been growing since I was nine years old.
The map is not complete. I know this the way I know every incomplete architecture — by the weight of what is still missing, the doors that remain closed even after the biggest one blew open. But I have enough. Enough to know that the locked doors of my life were not built by one man. They were built by two — my father on one side, Giovanni Rivas on the other, constructing walls from opposite directions that met in the middle with me sealed inside them.
Two kings. One cage.
And the daughter they both positioned is done sitting in the center of a board she did not know she was on.
I open the car door. Step out. The September air hits my skin, and the cold is clarifying — sharp, clean, the temperature of a woman whose frequency has recalibrated around data that changes everything she thought she understood about her own life.
I turn back. He is still in the car. His dark eyes—Zina’s eyes, and that knowledge is a blade I grip but have not decided where to aim—watch me through the open door with the look I have come to recognize as his only honest expression. Not calm. Not patient. The raw, held-breath stillness of a man who knows what is coming and cannot stop it because stopping it would make him the thing he refuses to become.
Another man who loves a woman by locking her inside.
“I need to talk to my father.”
The words are quiet. Final. Five words carrying the weight of twenty years of locked doors and erased territories and 7:15 phone calls that started with are you safe and ended without a single answer to the questions I spent my life learning not to ask.
I am done not asking.
His jaw tightens. One degree. The fracture visible to someone tuned to his frequency — and I am tuned, despite everything, despite the fury that is still burning in the space between my ribs where his mouth was ten minutes ago.
He does not tell me to stop. Does not ask me to wait. Does not offer me soon.
“Be careful,” he says. And the crack in his voice on the second word sounds exactly like my father’s crack on baby — the involuntary fracture of a man who loves a woman he cannot protect from the thing she is walking toward.
I close the door.
The city takes me. The sidewalk under my feet. The buildings rising around me. The phone in my pocket with my father’s number at the top of the call list where it has lived since the day he bought me my first phone and programmed himself in as the only contact that mattered.
