“No.”
It comes out flat. Strangled. Nothing like me.
No, no, no.
Paolo grabs my face in both hands, forcing my eyes to his. “Jesus Christ, Luca. You were supposed to check in. What the hell happened?” He gives me a rough shake. “Have you done it? Did you kill her?”
My ears are ringing. My pulse is everywhere at once.
I remember everything now.
I was sent here to kill Natalia Kozlov.
21
LUCA
Three words keep clangingthrough my skull.
Kill Natalia Kozlov.
Paolo’s hands are still locked around my face. He shakes me once, hard, and the yellow glow of the house behind him blurs and steadies and blurs again.
My stomach pitches so hard I taste acid.
“Luca.” He gives me another rough shake. “What the hell happened?”
I wrench free so fast I stumble back two steps, my heel catching in the soft sand. My wrist torques as I catch myself and pain bolts up to my elbow. Good. Pain I can work with. Pain is better than whatever the fuck is happening inside my head right now.
“Get your hands off me.”
“Answer the question.”
“No.” The word scrapes out of me like gravel. “No, I didn’t kill her.”
Paolo goes very still.
Then his eyes harden, and when he speaks again his voice has dropped into a register I haven’t heard aimed at me in a long time.
“Three weeks, Luca.” The voice he uses on people who owe the family money. “Three weeks with zero contact. No check-in. No confirmation. I thought you were dead, and when I finally track you down, I find you sitting barefoot on her deck like you’re on goddamn vacation.”
“It’s not what it looks like.”
“No? Because what it looks like is a catastrophic fuckup. What it looks like is the one job Lorenzo trusted you with going sideways because you couldn’t keep your head in the game.”
The words land exactly where they’re supposed to. Right in the soft center of every insecurity I’ve spent a decade trying to plaster over.
And the thing is, he’s right. He’s so right it makes me want to puke.
“Your father almost sent Dario.”
Fuck.
Lorenzo almost sent my brother.
Which means Lorenzo heard nothing from me for three weeks and his first instinct wasn’t worry. It was replacement. Send the real son. The reliable one. The one who doesn’t crash the car every time you hand him the keys.
Behind Paolo’s face, a memory surfaces, sharp and unwelcome. Me at sixteen, standing in my father’s office. The heavy silence.The way Lorenzo wouldn’t look at me, his disappointment a physical weight in the room. The break-in at Blanco’s house had confirmed what I already knew they all thought.
