I stand. Square my stance. Raise my hands.
"Again," I say.
We train for another hour. By the end, my arms are shaking and my shoulders are screaming and I've sweated through my shirt twice. But my punches are cleaner. My footwork is steadier. I can feel myself getting stronger, not in any dramatic way, but incrementally. Day by day.
I shower in the women's locker room, which is really just a repurposed storage closet with a drain and a showerhead. The water is lukewarm at best, but I don't care. I stand under the spray and let it wash away the sweat and the tension and everything Emilio told me.
Sofia. Nine or ten years old. Taken. Killed. And her brother, twelve and already broken, tracking down her killer and doing what needed to be done.
That's the man I love. Not despite that history, but in full knowledge of it. The violence and the trauma and the parts of him that will never heal.
I towel off and dress in clean clothes. Head for our quarters.
Leone is at the desk when I arrive, reading something on his laptop. He looks up when I enter, and his eyes track over me, taking in the damp hair, the flushed skin, the slight stiffness in my movements.
"How was training?" he asks.
"Brutal. Emilio is a sadist."
"He's thorough. There's a difference."
I cross to him, lean down, and press a kiss to his forehead. He catches my hand, brings it to his mouth, brushes his lips across my knuckles. A small gesture. Intimate. The kind of thing that still surprises me, every time.
"Can we talk?" I ask.
His expression shifts. Cautious. "About what?"
"About Sofia."
The name lands like a stone in still water. I watch the ripples spread across his face. The tightening around his eyes. The way his jaw locks.
"Emilio told you," he says. Not a question.
"He told me some of it. I want to hear the rest from you."
I think he's going to refuse. Push back, change the subject, deploy one of the dozen deflection tactics I've learned to recognize over the past month. But then something in him shifts. A decision made. A wall coming down.
"Sit," he says.
I sit on the edge of the bed, facing him. He stays in the chair, hands flat on his thighs, like he needs the physical anchor to tell this story.
"I was twelve," he begins. "Sofia was nine. Our father worked for a Bonaccorso crew on the east side. Low level. Muscle for hire. He wasn't important, not after marrying my mother, but he was loyal, and loyalty made him useful."
"What happened?"
"Rival outfit wanted to send a message. My father had been part of an operation that went wrong, killed one of their men. Accident, supposedly. But they didn't care about accidents. They wanted blood." He pauses. "They took Sofia from the park three blocks from our apartment. Broad daylight. She was playing on the swings when they grabbed her."
I don't speak. Don't move. let him talk.
"The ransom was fifty thousand dollars. My father didn't have it. He tried to scrape together what he could, borrowed from everyone he knew, but it wasn't enough. He went to his bosses,begged them for help, and they..." Leone's voice goes flat. Empty. "They told him she was just a girl. Not worth the money."
"Jesus."
"My mother tried to go to the police. My father stopped her. Said it would only make things worse. So they negotiated. Stalled. Tried to buy time while they figured out how to get the money."
"How long?"
"Three weeks." He looks at me, and his eyes are dead. Not angry, not sad, ... absent. Like the part of him that feels things has checked out entirely. "They found her in a drainage ditch outside the city. She'd been dead for at least a week."
