I go very still. “You do hear yourself, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“And that doesn’t disgust you?”
For the first time, something in his face shifts. Not enough to soften him. Just enough to make him look tired. Hollowed out in places no one else would ever notice.
“I stopped caring what disgusted me,” he says quietly, “the day I realized what it costs to lose you.”
I refuse to let those words matter. So I lift my chin and say the cruelest thing I can think of.
“You already lost me.”
He absorbs that without blinking.
“Then I will settle for keeping you alive.”
He looks at me as if the matter is closed, as if Chicago is already decided, as if war is already being mapped in the back of his mind.
And maybe it is.
“Get some rest,” he says at last. “Tomorrow will be unpleasant.”
My laugh is bitter. “That might be the most honest thing you’ve said to me all day.”
I move to brush past him but pause at the doorway and turn back.
“For the record, you’re wrong about Dante,” I say, my voice raw, “and I can’t wait for the moment that you see it.”
His expression turns to stone again.
“And if I’m right,” he says, “then there won’t be a corner of the earth he can hide in.”
18
Lorenzo
Cesaro arrives just before midnight.
Elizabeth is asleep in our bed upstairs—if she’s truly sleeping and not simply lying there in the dark, hating me. Given the way I left things with her, it could be either. Normally, that would be enough to occupy every corner of my mind.
Tonight, I have no room for it.
I let Cesaro in myself. He steps inside carrying a briefcase, his expression alert and cautious. He knows me well enough to recognize the mood I’m in. He also knows better than to comment on it.
“How was the flight?” I ask.
“Good.” He shuts the door behind him. “Mrs. Conti was upset I was leaving.”
I start walking toward the dining room. “Did you tell her where you were going?”
“No, sir. But her father was there. He pressed for answers.” He pauses. “I wouldn’t be surprised if you get a call.”
A laugh almost escapes me, but there’s no humor in it. “Noted.”
In the dining room, I’ve already laid papers across the table—flight records, names, timelines, anything I had on hand before he arrived. It looks like the beginning of a war.
Cesaro sets his briefcase down and glances at the spread. “I see you’ve already started.”
