"I just told her. Everything. The marriage. Calix. Tyra." He pauses. "She's still here."
The silence on the line stretches. When Lucia speaks, her voice is thick.
"Then she's stronger than either of us."
The call goes quiet again. Not an awkward silence—a Costa silence. The kind that says everything in the spaces between words. Two people sharing the same blood and the same silence, breathing across a thousand miles.
"Keep breathing, Dom," Lucia says softly.
"You too,sorellina."
He hangs up.
The silence in the bedroom is deafening. Dominic sets the burner phone on the nightstand and lies back, pulling me tighter against his side. His arm wraps around my shoulders, crushing me against his chest. I feel the violent, rapid thud of his heart beneath my palm, the last tremors of whatever earthquake that phone call opened inside him.
He turns his head, pressing his mouth against my temple.
"That is the first time I've heard her voice in a year," he says into my hair, his lips moving against my skin. "I texted her four words the night she ran.It was always you.Then I got on a plane and spent twelve months learning how to kill the men who killed our parents. Four words in a year. That's my version of love."
I lift my head, looking up at him. His dark eyes are glassy, stripped of every defense.
"She called youfratello," I say softly. "She asked if you were eating. She told you about her daughters." I press my hand harder against his chest, right over the bruising rhythm of his heart. "That's her version of love, too."
Something cracks behind his eyes. A fissure in the bedrock. He doesn't cry—I don't think Dominic Costa has cried sincethe night he was twenty-five and watched his parents' caskets lowered into the ground—but the pressure behind his gaze is immense, a dam holding back an ocean.
He takes my hand from his chest. He turns my palm upward and places the small black burner phone into my grasp. He closes my fingers around it, his large hand wrapping entirely around my fist.
"This is for the day you need to understand the price of being a Costa," he rumbles, his voice thick and rough. "This is my sister's line. Only this number is safe. If the walls of this compound ever feel too small, you call her. She'll answer."
I look down at the device in my hand, understanding exactly what he is giving me. He isn't just giving me a lifeline to the outside world. He is giving me the only direct line to the sister he caged, the mother of the niece he couldn't hold, the woman who stole his empire and forgave him anyway. He is giving me a piece of his soul.
I nod, slipping the phone beneath my pillow. I curl my body against his, resting my hand flat against the center of his chest, right over his heart.
The first pale light of dawn filters through the reinforced glass, casting long gray shadows across the room. The Chicago skyline glows cold and distant beyond the ballistic polymer panes—beautiful and unreachable, a world that exists on the other side of architecture he built to keep me in. In here, the only horizon that matters is the one pressed against my palm, steady and bruising and entirely his.
"I'm not going anywhere, Dominic," I whisper into the dark.
He wraps his arms around me, crushing me against his massive frame, burying his face in my copper curls as the city outside burns quietly on without us.
10
Dominic
Sunlight bleedsthrough the ballistic glass of the bedroom window, cutting a harsh, bright line across the rumpled sheets. The heavy blackout curtains are pulled back just enough to let the morning in. For twenty years, I have hated the dawn. Morning meant a new day of war, twenty-four more hours of tracking Bellanti movements, laundering ghost funds, and dragging my family's survival one more mile on my back.
But today, the light catches the tangled copper curls spread across my chest, and for the first time in two decades, my lungs expand without fighting the air.
Sienna is a warm, heavy weight against my side. Her head rests over my heart, rising and falling with my pulse. One of her pale, slender legs is thrown over my thighs, trapping me beneath the heavy duvet. I don't move. I barely breathe. I just watch her sleep.
Her skin is marked with the faint, fading bruises of her abduction and the darker, fresher marks of my mouth. The sight of them sends a dark, territorial satisfaction deep into my bones. Last night, I stripped myself bare. I handed her the ugliest, mostunforgivable part of my soul—the truth about Lucia, about the trap I built and never told her about, about Calix bleeding out in the street while my sister vanished into the mountains with the men who actually protected her. I told her about Tyra. Tiny shoes by the kitchen door. A four-year-old niece I refused to hold because holding her meant admitting I wasn't God. I waited for the disgust. I waited for her to look at me the way I look at myself in the mirror.
Instead, she touched my face. She told me I was human.
And then I called Lucia. I heard my sister's voice for the first time in a year, and she asked me if I was eating.
My large, calloused hand moves slowly over the curve of Sienna's waist, tracing the dip of her spine. The contrast between us is entirely absurd. I am silvered and scarred, a man built from the violence of the gutter. She is soft, twenty-eight years of life smelling of peonies and expensive cream. I am violence. She is life.
She stirs, a soft sigh escaping her parted lips. Her eyelashes, pale and thick, flutter against her cheeks before her eyes open. The amber depths are entirely clear, stripped of the terror that lived in them when I first dragged her out of the blood-soaked kitchen of L'Ombra.
