Dario stares at me. “You expect us to believe you had movie-of-the-week amnesia?”
“I don’t give a shit what it sounds like. It happened.”
He takes a step forward. “Then the minute you remembered, you should’ve called.”
“I know.”
The words land hard because I mean them. Dario hears it. So does my father. The room stills a little.
Lorenzo’s gaze narrows. “But you didn’t.”
“No.” I drag in a breath. My hands want to do something stupid, like fidget or clench or broadcast every nerve in my body to the room. I force them still. “Because by the time I remembered enough to understand what was going on, there was something else you needed to hear first.”
His brows lift just a fraction. “Go on.”
“Natalia Kozlov saved my life,” I say. “She found me on the beach. She took me in. Stitched me up. Fed me. Housed me. Protected me before she had any idea who I was. Before I had any idea who I was.”
Dario’s jaw tightens. Paolo looks down once, then back at me.
“And when you remembered?” Lorenzo asks.
“I didn’t kill her.”
The room gets very, very still.
“Because I’m not going to. And no one else is either.” It takes everything I have not to look away. My father doesn’t blink first.Never has. “She’s not what we thought. She’s not a player in this. She’s a woman her father uses as a bargaining chip, and she saved my life when she had no reason to.”
Lorenzo drops his feet and stands slowly. The chair doesn’t make a sound. Everything about my father is controlled, measured, a man who has been running a machine for thirty years and knows exactly how much pressure to apply.
“You had one job.”
“I know.”
“One.” He steps around the table. Not toward me, exactly. Just into the open space between us, where the overhead light catches the silver at his temples and the muffled noise of the casino hums somewhere outside, steady as a pulse. “I trusted you with it because you asked me to. You came to me and said you could handle it. You wanted to prove yourself.” His mouth flattens. “Do you remember that?”
Every word is a blade, and every blade finds the old wound.
“I remember.”
“Instead, you disappeared, played house with the enemy, and came back telling me the daughter of Anton Kozlov should be under Andretti protection.”
“Yes.” My throat is dry. I clench my back teeth to keep from clearing it.
“So what am I looking at right now? A man who proved himself, or a man the Kozlov girl turned inside out in three weeks?”
That one hits. I feel it in my sternum, a dull, sick thud that spreads outward like a bruise forming in real time. Part of mewants to make a joke, deflect, buy myself time with sarcasm because that’s the move I know, the one that always works until it doesn’t.
I breathe through it.
“You’re looking at the only person in this room who’s been inside the Kozlov world in the last month,” I fire back. “And I brought something back.”
“Luca.” Dario takes a step away from the window, his voice hard. “You’re standing in front of Dad, telling him you caught feelings for the target, and you think he wants to hear anything else from you?”
I look at my brother. Hold the stare long enough that he knows I’m not dodging it.
“I do.”
Dario’s mouth thins. He wants to say more. I can see it loaded up behind his teeth. But he steps back, and that’s close enough to permission.
