The wall doesn’t respond. Appropriate.
He’s done this before. The leaving. I don’t have details but I know the gist. Anonymous women he doesn’t face. A pattern he runs like an operation. Arrive. Execute. Depart. No names. No attachments. No second visits.
I’m in the same rotation now. The one who happens to sleep three doors away. Convenience with proximity. Right?
Except the coffee. The covered mug. The fact that he remembers how I take it when he can’t even find matching socks. Exceptuntil you. In the office with his scars bared and his voice scraped raw like each word cost him a year of silence. Exceptstay here. Looking down at me on the desk with his control held by a thread and my name in his mouth like a word he’d been trying to unlearn.
I lie back. Pull the covers up. Press my face into the pillow that doesn’t smell like him because Rosa washed the sheets.
I close my eyes. And against every rational thought in my head, I replay the way he said “Isabella.” Just my name. In the dark. Like it was the only word he wanted to say and the hardest one to get out.
It shouldn’t be enough.
It is.
18
LORENZO
She called me Mr. Santoro this morning. Once. Quick. In the middle of a data brief about the Benedetti payments. Then she corrected herself. Said Lorenzo and kept going.
The sarcasm has changed. The jokes still land. But they land like closed doors now. Same words. Different edge. She pours her own coffee. Leaves mine untouched. Three days since I left her room. Three days since I pulled the sheet over her shoulders and walked into the hallway and sat on the floor in the dark.
I keep leaving.
“Marchetti’s books.” Her voice is flat. Professional. “I’ve mapped every digital trace of his gambling operation. Bank deposits. Wire transfers. The intermediary payments I flagged weeks ago. All of it leads to the same wall.”
“The paper.”
“The paper.” She doesn’t look up. “His debt settlements are recorded in physical ledgers. Not scanned. Not backed up. Handwritten in a book he keeps at the card game off Magazine Street.”
“You need the ledgers.”
“I need someone togetme the ledgers. I can’t hack a notebook.“ She pulls up a map on her screen. The Magazine Street location marked in red. ”If Marchetti’s recording who owes the Benedettis and how debts get cleared, that’s the missing piece. The money I can track. The names on the other side of those payments, I can’t.“
“Nico.”
“That’s what I was going to say.” She stops typing. Looks at me. The expression is controlled. The eyes are not. “But if Marchetti reports back to the Benedettis that someone pulled his books, they’ll know we’re looking at the gambling side. They’ll burn everything.”
“Nico knows how to pull records without leaving a trace.”
“From a server. This is a bookie’s desk in a back room. Physical access. Human risk.”
I hold her gaze. “I’ll talk to Nico.”
She holds the look a beat too long. Then goes back to the screen.
Midday I open the window behind her desk. The one that sticks. She runs cold in this office and used to steal my jacket off the back of the chair without asking. Today she doesn’t reach for it. Doesn’t look up when I set her coffee beside the keyboard. Pours her own and leaves mine where it sits. The laptop screen angles away from me when she reads anything that isn’t work. New angle. Three degrees, maybe four.
“You’re staring at that report again.”
“I’m reading it.”
“You’ve been on page six for twenty minutes.”
“Thorough.”
“Avoidant.”
