1
ALLEGRA
PRESENT DAY
The newspaper slidesunder my door around six in the morning, the same way it has every day for years.
Anonymously. Silently. As if I am a ghost still permitted to read about the living.
My hands tremble as I unfold it—not from weakness, though I have plenty of that—but because some days I still expect to see my own obituary printed there.
Instead, I seehis.
Not quite. Not yet.
“Mafia-Linked Shooting at Underground Fight Leaves Two Dead, One Critically Injured.”
Rocco Agosti’s photograph glares up in glossy ink, his smirk embalmed like something sacred. Flashes of his harsh words—my ex-father-in-law’s sermons of ownership and contempt—make my head tilt. I’d always imagined myself doling out his punishment. Now that he’s dead, I regret only that it wasn’t my hand that did it.
Then my eyes drop to the line beneath.
“Enzo Agosti among the injured. Condition unknown.”
The world narrows to a pulse. A slow, hard throb behind my sternum.
Enzo. My husband...
I sit back against the metal headboard. The cold bites my spine.
The paper crinkles in my hands.
Is he still my husband? Can that word hold when he tormented me, when he left me for dead and then moved on as if nothing had happened? When he has another woman by his side that he callswife?
I take a deep breath, a tight, measured thing—because I will not drown in those memories today. Not when there is something to rejoice about.
Rocco is dead.
A smile crawls across my face. Relief tastes coppery on my tongue. Justice. At last. One name gone. The beginning of the end.
But Enzo?—
For a fraction of a second, something twists inside me.
Not love. Not longing.
Something uglier: the ghost of his hands at my waist, his eyes darkening as if I were a sacred possession. The warmth of him at night—the kind of warmth a starving girl mistakes for love.
That girl died the night they took my life from me. She continued to die each year after, while my husband pretended the story moved on—thathemoved on.
I fold the paper carefully, smoothing the crease with my palm.
“If he dies,” I whisper, low enough for only the room to hear, “let it not be merciful.”
If he dies, I want to see it. I want to know it was real. I want him to suffer the way I did.
If he lives—he lives to answer to me.
My eyes drop to the notebook on the bedside table. Five names. Five graves waiting for their owners.
