God help me, I’d gone.
I hadn’t known his name meant dragon, hadn’t known his world was soaked in blood or that the man who held the café door open for me with old-fashioned courtesy would one day bind my wrists with silk and tell me my life was not my own anymore.
But I’d known one thing.
From the very first second his eyes locked onto mine.
I’d known Giovanni Dragoni was going to ruin me in the worst and possibly the best way. And I was going to let him.
The skyline blurs and my chest aches.
I close my eyes briefly, breathing through the memory, through the grief of everything we were before truth poisoned us both.
When I open them again, Giovanni is still watching me.
His gaze unreadable.
Unflinching.
Unbreakable.
And I know with sick, aching certainty that he remembers that day exactly as clearly as I do.
My time on the run is over.
And I don’t know what comes next. Whether I’ll be dead this time next year. And if by some stroke of luck I’m not…
What my life will look like at all.
Giovanni
I knowexactly what she’s thinking.
Lucia has that look on her face, distant, tight, almost reverent with grief and longing, the same one she gets whenever Queens rises up to meet her through a window or a windscreen.
Her gaze is locked on the skyline as though she’s trying to stitch herself back into a version of her life that no longer exists.
She doesn’trealiseher breathing has changed, that her fingers are clenched tight in her lap. And after all this time, she doesn’trealisethat I can read her body better than I can read a balance sheet or a threat assessment.
She’s remembering the day we met.
Of course she is.
The timing is too perfect. The silence too loaded. The ache in her eyes too naked.
And God help me, I want to go there too.
If only to drag her back onto my side with the memory. If only to remind her of who she was to me before she tried to destroy what was always inevitable between us.
Before she ran and made me hunt her like something feral and broken. Before she taught me what punishment feels like when it’s not inflicted, but endured.
My jaw tightens as I watch her reflection in the window.
She thinks that memory belongs to both of us equally.
It doesn’t.
Queens. Steinway Street. Late afternoon sun cutting between buildings like blades.
