By the time I reach my own house, my legs are shaking with exhaustion and my chest is tight with something that feels suspiciously like grief. I fumble with the keycode lock, hands trembling as I let myself into my own home for the first time in weeks.
Everything is exactly as I left it. Mail piled on the hall table, bananas turning black on the kitchen counter, the faint smell of expensive cologne and leather that I associate with my old life.
It feels like walking into a museum. Like visiting the preserved home of someone who died a long time ago.
I sink down onto my sofa, still wearing Ginni’s perfectly chosen clothes, and try to process what just happened. I escaped. I’m home. I’m safe.
I saved both our lives.
So why do I feel like I’ve just destroyed something beautiful and irreplaceable?
Ginni will be waking up soon, if he hasn’t already. He’ll find my note and hopefully, hopefully it will be enough to keep him from doing anything desperate.
His parents will be arriving any minute now. They’ll go check on the son they are ashamed of. Find him either asleep or distraught. Whichever they find, they’ll conclude nothing has changed. Their child is still crazy. Still an embarrassment.
And here I am, safe in my own house, wearing clothes chosen by a boy who loved me enough to plan for a future that could never exist.
I should feel relieved. I should feel vindicated in my choice to leave.
Instead, I feel like I’ve just abandoned the only person who ever truly understood me. And despite everything he put me through, despite the drugs and the chains and the completeinsanity of our situation, I find myself wondering if I made the right choice.
Because sitting here in my own home, surrounded by the trappings of my old life, I realize something that makes my chest tight with panic.
I miss him already.
I miss my beautiful, broken, dangerous menace. And I have no idea how I’m going to live without him.
Chapter thirty-two
Ginni
The voice cuts through my consciousness like a blade through silk, sharp and disapproving and utterly unwelcome.
“Giovanni!”
I surface slowly from what feels like the deepest sleep of my life, my head pounding with each syllable of my name. Everything feels heavy and wrong, like I’m swimming up through honey. My mouth tastes like metal and bitter almonds, and there’s something scratching at the edges of my memory that I can’t quite grasp.
“Giovanni Torrini, wake up this instant!”
Mama’s voice. Oh God, Mama is here, and she’s using that tone that means I’m in trouble. Deep, terrible trouble that will require groveling and apologies and promises to be better that we both know I’ll break.
I force my eyes open, immediately regretting it as the artificial light from the projector stabs into my brain. The ceiling above me shows a perfect tropical afternoon, all azure skies andswaying palms, but the beauty feels mocking now. Fraudulent. Like everything else in my carefully constructed paradise.
“There you are,” Mama says, her voice dripping with disapproval. “Sleeping in the middle of the day like some common layabout. What time did you go to bed last night? And why are you still in your pajamas?”
I try to sit up and immediately regret it. The world spins violently around me, nausea rising in my throat like a tide.
“I don’t feel very well, Mama,” I manage, my voice coming out as a croak.
“Of course you don’t feel well. Look at the state of you.” She’s standing beside the bed now, immaculate in her Chanel suit, every hair in place despite the long flight from Italy. Her dark eyes take in my appearance with the kind of clinical disgust usually reserved for something unpleasant she’s found on her shoe. “When did you last shower? Eat a proper meal? This place smells like...” She pauses, nostrils flaring delicately. “Like candles and wine and God knows what else.”
The candles. The romantic dinner I prepared. The drugged wine that was supposed to solve everything but somehow solved nothing at all. The memories start trickling back, each one more painful than the last.
I look around the room desperately, searching for any sign of Carlo, but there’s nothing. No warmth beside me in the bed, no indication that anyone else has been here at all. Just me, alone and sick and facing my mother’s disappointment like every other morning of my adult life.
Where is he? Where is my handsome husband? Did our plan work after all? Are we together somewhere else, somewhere better, while this is all just some terrible nightmare my dying brain is conjuring?
“What are these?” Mama’s voice goes up an octave, sharp with shock.
