At least Claudio was there to save me.
Save me.Like I’m some helpless fucking puppy.
I haven't told anyone what I saw. Not Leone, who seems like the reasonable one. Not Alexandra, who has sharp eyes and asks too many questions. And not Claudio, who showed up at my door at the dead of the night and crouched in front of me and told me I was lying with the calm certainty of a man who has never been wrong about anything in his life.
He's not wrong.
Iamlying. I'm holding the one piece of information that might actually matter, and I'm holding it because I've been doing this long enough to know that the moment you give someone everything, you become disposable. A woman with secrets is a woman with value. A woman who's told everything she knows is a loose end.
I've been a loose end before. I didn't like how it felt.
The coffee is gone. I set the mug on the windowsill and tap the unlit cigarette against my palm. The guards have rotated. New faces, same posture. The courtyard is filling with weak sunlight that makes the concrete look almost warm.
My fingers find the back of my neck again. Spine. Vertebrae. Still there.
You're Charlotte Richardson. You're twenty-seven. You work in legal support. You like your coffee black with one sugar. You smoke Parliament Lights because they were on sale the first week you got to the city and you never switched. You are not the woman you used to be.
I mouth the words like a prayer. I've been saying some version of this every morning for three years, and some mornings it works and some mornings it doesn't and today it lands somewhere in the middle, which is about as good as it gets when you're trapped in a concrete box by the Italian mafia.
At least the sheets are nice.
I almost laugh at that. Almost. The sound catches in my chest and dies, because laughing alone in a locked room is one step from crying alone in a locked room, and Charlotte Richardson does not cry. She folds newspapers. She counts ceiling tiles. She catalogues guard rotations and drinks bad coffee and keeps her secrets locked behind her teeth where they can't be used against her.
She survives. That's what she does. It's the only thing she's ever been good at.
The door opens at nine.
Not the food slot. The actual door, swinging inward, and Claudio DiAngelo fills the frame like a threat someone forgot to defuse.
He's bigger than I remember from this morning. Not just tall, but wide. Shoulders that strain the seams of his black henley, forearms roped with muscle and scattered with scars I didn't notice before. His sleeves are pushed to his elbows. Tattoo on theinside of his left forearm, script I can't read from here. His hair is dark, cropped short on the sides, longer on top in a way that would look styled on anyone else but on him just looks like he ran his hand through it once and called it done.
His eyes are the wrong color for a warm-blooded human being. Pale green, almost grey, the color of ice over still water. They sweep the room in a single pass. Bed, window, me. They land on me and stop.
"You look like shit," he says.
"Good morning to you too."
He walks in without being invited. He moves quietly for a man his size, weight on the balls of his feet, and I memorize that automatically because I've been watching the way dangerous men move since I was twenty-two years old.
He's carrying a paper cup. He sets it on the bedside table without ceremony. The smell hits me. Coffee. Real coffee. Not the motor oil from the kitchen. Something dark and rich and freshly brewed.
"Black. One sugar," he says. "There's a spoon."
I stare at the cup. Then at him.
"You remembered."
"I remember everything." He leans against the wall across from me, arms folded, ankles crossed. Taking up space like he pays rent on it. "It's not a gift, principessa. It's a transaction. I brought you coffee. You give me something in return."
"And what's that?"
"The truth."
"I told you the truth."
"You told me part of it. I want the rest."
I pick up the coffee. It's hot. The cup is from somewhere outside the compound, a little cafe logo printed on the side. He went out and got this. At nine in the morning. For me.
