The way his gaze finds me before it finds anything else when he enters a room. Every single time. Like the room doesn't exist until he's located me in it. The way he angles his body toward mine even when he's talking to Valente, even when he's reading something on his phone. The way he doesn't push. Doesn't ask why I've been avoiding him or where I've been. Doesn't demand explanations or apologies or any of the things a man like him, aman who controls everything, who needs to control everything, would feel entitled to demand.
He just stays close. Lets me set the distance. Gives me room without giving me up.
And I hate him for it. Because it makes it so much harder.
It would be easier if he were cold. If he watched me with that flat, assessing gaze he turns on everyone else. If he treated me like another asset in his portfolio, something to manage and maintain. If he did any of those things, I could pack my bag tonight and walk out the front gate and feel nothing but righteous fury.
But he tilts toward me in a room full of his men, and my throat closes.
I am watching the man who killed Matt. The way his jaw tightens when he reads something on his phone. The careful way he rolls his sleeves, exposing forearms that have held me and hurt people—both of those things happened with identical muscles, identical tendons, identical skin. I am watching the man I love. They won't separate. I tried in the study, and I'm trying now. They won't. He is fused. I love him. I haven't forgiven him. I'm leaving him. All three of those things are going to be true forever.
I slip out of the kitchen when he's busy giving orders in low Italian. They've been discussing logistics I don't understand for the better part of the last twenty minutes so I take the opportunity to do what I have planned. No better time than the present.
My footsteps are silent on the marble as I cross the long corridor to his study. The heavy oak door is ajar, and I push it open just enough to slip inside and close it behind me with a soft click.
The painting dominates the far wall.La Morte di Paolo e Francesca.
Even in the dim light filtering through the half-drawn curtains, the canvas pulls me in. Two bodies tangled in a final, desperate embrace against a cold stone wall. A sword still buried deep in Paolo’s back, the blade connecting them even in death. Francesca’s head is thrown back, lips parted in a silent cry, one pale hand clutching at her chest as if she could somehow hold her heart inside her body.
It’s devastatingly beautiful. And cruelly, perfectly ironic.
I stare at it for a second too long, throat tight. The man who claims that love doesn't exist keeps his darkest secrets behind an image of lovers murdered for their passion. He killed Matt with the same cold finality Giovanni used on these two. Then he lied to my face about it.
My palm meets the smooth, cool surface of the heavy gilt frame. I push gently. The painting swings outward on silent, well-oiled hinges, revealing the recessed steel door of the safe.
He gave me the combination the day he offered to let me go when he first rescued me from the compound. “Six-two-eight-four. Everything in there is yours if you need it.”
Back then I shook my head at his offer. I was right where I wanted to be. With him.
Now?
Six. Two. Eight. Four.
The lock clicks open.
I scan past the shelves filled with documents, past cash in thick banded stacks, euros and dollars. Past a small velvet box. And finally, at the bottom, in a worn leather sleeve, I find my passport.
My fingers are shaking when I pick it up. Not trembling. Shaking. Full, visible, both-hands shaking, the kind of shaking that would give me away in an instant if anyone were watching.
I don’t understand it until I open the cover and my own face looks back at me.
A face from a lifetime ago.
Before the compound. Before the courtyard. Before Elio. Before any of it. A woman with auburn hair pulled back and a neutral expression and no idea, not one single goddamn clue, what was coming for her. She looks young. She looks like someone who thinks that the worst thing that can happen on a Sicilian restoration project is a funding cut, or a rain delay, or a crumbling transept that won't hold plaster.
She looks like someone else.
Elio's voice keeps going down the hall. Steady. Certain. The same voice that said you're safe, tesoro, in a slaughtered corridor. The same voice that said Matt left for Connecticut, looking me dead in the eyes.
My lungs won't expand. The study feels smaller than it is, the walls pressing inward as I hold my own face in my hands unable to breathe.
He's across the corridor, twenty feet away, unaware. He doesn't know I'm standing in his study looking at the woman I used to be. Grieving her because she's gone, and she's not coming back. The woman who replaced her is someone who loves a killer, carries his child, and is about to run.
I could scream.
I don't scream.
The shaking stops on its own. Passport back. Safe closed. Dial spun. Walk out. I don't take the cash. I don't take anything that isn't mine already.
