“Delete that,” Edoardo says a second after I double-tap the back of my phone, taking a silent screenshot. “Now.”
I flutter my lashes, feigning daftness. “Delete what?”
“The screenshot you just took.”
My hair slaps my face when I shake my head. “I didn’t take a screenshot.”
“Now!” He brings his face to within an inch of the screen. “Or you’llneversee him again.”
I want to call him out as a liar, to scream that he doesn’t have theguts to cut off the money I pay each month. But the moment he grabs Gabriele’s arm, jolting him awake, my fight surrenders.
Submissively, I delete the only photo I have of my son and beg for mercy instead.
“Please let him go, Edoardo. He’s only a child. He didn’t do anything wrong.” Tears spring into my eyes, matching the wetness falling from Gabriele’s blue eyes. “Please…”
My chest burns through a desperate breath when he releases Gabriele from his clutch.
“This month’s fee is forty thousand,” he demands, marching out of our son’s room, uncaring that he’s crying.
“I don’t have?—”
“Forty thousand,” he repeats before disconnecting our call.
I stare at my phone screen, incredulous. There’s no way I can bring home forty thousand in a little over two weeks. Not morally, anyway. Thirty was already a struggle. Forty will require major changes.
My apartment will be the first thing to go. It’s a luxury I can no longer afford, but its loss will still bring me only two hundred dollars closer to my target.
Needing to find a job before my grief swallows me whole, I tiptoe into my room to collect my backpack. The little girl is sleeping on top of the bedding, the fluffy pink coat covering her too insulated to need blankets.
Like her shoes resting at the side of the bed, her winter coat is familiar. No doubt another gift from Camille.
Knowing I’ll never move forward to right my wrongs with a major one dangling above my head, I snatch one of my most valued possessions out of my backpack, walk to the freshly painted wall between mine and my neighbor’s apartment, and knock.
The sheet I hung between our apartments earlier today sways in the draft of my brief knocks. It smells like Dante, me, and everything I’m trying not to think about.
I acted like a brat earlier. No, worse. A feral cat in an animal shelter,hissing at the only person offering it a hand. When I’m angry, I don’t use cruel words. I use actions that are just as nasty.
Dante’s quiet the past few hours proves this without doubt.
If I know him as well as I want to believe, silence means he’s thinking… and that perhaps he’s disappointed in me.
That maims more than anything.
A few seconds later, a clipped reply whistles through the sheet. “Come in.”
My lungs take stock of their oxygen levels before I pull aside the curtain and enter Dante’s recently acquired apartment. In an instant, the homeliness of the apartment swirls around me. The lighting is soft, and the aroma of a yummy dinner lingers in the air.
It feels like home.
Dante is in the kitchen, clearing away two smeared plates from the built-in granite table. His hair is damp from a recent shower, and his beard shows the effects of a humid room. He doesn’t look angry. Just… tired.
When I join him in the kitchen, the pulse fluttering in his neck quickens. A third untouched plate of food sits to his left, the steam from the aromatic dish long gone. He wraps it in plastic film without looking at me. His movements show no emotions at all. Not anger or disappointment. Nothing.
That also hurts. Greatly.
“I was wondering if I could see Camille?” My voice is weak and pathetic, beaten down by the fight I recently lost. “Please.”
Dante hesitates, his eyes brimming with conflict. Then, slowly, he nods. “She’s asleep, but if you promise?—”
