"She isn't dead," he says.
I go very still.
"She's in her room."
I pull my hand from the wall. I turn to look at him. I set his gun down on the bedside table and I look at my hands and I look at him and I say, very quietly, "I want to see her."
Renzo laughs. It is a dry, humorless sound that contains within it a great deal of commentary that he is choosing not to deliver in words. He picks up his gun and holsters it and steps aside.
She is curled on her side when I push open her door.
Her dark hair loose across the pillow, her knees drawn up. Even from the doorway I can see that she has been crying. The particular tension around her eyes, the dried tracks on her face.
I stand in the doorway and look at her.
Renzo steps up beside me and speaks quietly. "She stabbed you and then she lost it. She started crying, begging us to call a doctor, and wouldn't stop until they told her you were breathing." He pauses. "I had her brought back here."
I recall her face in the moment before she drove the knife in. The fury in it, the desperation, the way her hand had been shaking even as it moved. I remember deciding, in that split second, not to step back.
"She cried?" I ask.
Renzo looks at me with the expression of a man who has seen everything and is still occasionally surprised. "Yes, Luca. She cried."
I cross to the bed and I slide my arms beneath her and I lift her.
"You have a freshly stitched stab wound," Renzo says from the doorway.
The wound makes its opinion known immediately, a deep concentrated burn that radiates outward with every movement. I breathe through it.
"I can't leave her here alone," I reply.
"She stabbed you."
"Did she?" I ask sarcastically.
Renzo is quiet for a moment. When he speaks again his voice has dropped into a threat "Don. I have no problem putting a bullet in her if it means keeping you intact. Say the word."
"There will be no need for that." I adjust her weight against my chest and she stirs slightly but doesn't wake.
"Tomorrow I'll look into Phillip myself. Ask around, find out why the man hasn't noticed his daughter missing for nearly a week. This will be over soon."
Renzo says nothing but he steps aside as I leave the room.
I lay her down on my bed and she settles into the sheets without waking and I stand over her for a moment and then I sit at the edge.
Her eyes open. Just barely halfway, the eyes of someone surfacing from a very deep sleep. They find my face and stay there and a tear tracks sideways across the bridge of her nose and she says, her voice barely a thread of sound, "You're okay."
I reach out and stroke her chin with my thumb.
She is already gone again before my hand leaves her face. The dark hair spread across my pillow. The two moles beneath her eye. The way she breathes, the distress of the last several hours smoothed out of her features by sleep.
I lean forward to look at her face.
What is it about Keller's child that makes me feel this brute weight of protection? I should kill her for daring escape, or at the very least punish her to ruffle Keller.
So why did I feel like I would snap the neck of any man who so much as looked at her wrong?
My gaze moves down to her chest and I see her nipples poking out and I look away.
