11
AMARA
Dawn comes upgray over the compound, and I wake alone in a bed that still smells like him.
The sheets on his side are cold. I don’t need three guesses to know where he is. There’s only one room in this house that matters now: the sub-level holding room where Turi sits behind reinforced glass, carrying the ruin of Alessio’s childhood with him.
I pull on his sweater—not mine, his, because mine are folded in his drawer now and that still feels too large to look at directly—and I go find my man.
He’s exactly where I knew he’d be. Rico stands at the end of the corridor, one hand near his weapon, while Alessio watches Turi through the reinforced glass the way you’d watch a fire you can’t put out. He hasn’t slept. The Costa silver at his temples looks almost white under the fluorescent strip, and exhaustion has carved hollows beneath his eyes.
Turi is awake too. Sitting on the narrow cot, hands folded, calm as Sunday mass. The two of them are having an entire conversation without a single word, twenty years of love and betrayal pressed up against a pane of glass.
“You should be in bed,” Alessio says without turning around. Of course he heard me. He always hears me.
“So should you.” I stop beside him, close enough that our arms touch. “Watching him won’t change what he did.”
“No.” His jaw works. “But if I stop watching, I have to start deciding.”
Behind the glass, Turi rises. He moves slowly, an old man’s economy, and crosses to the intercom panel on his side. When his voice comes through, it’s thin and metallic, but it’s still the voice that welcomed me into this family before I understood what that welcome cost.
“The switch has seven routing nodes,” he says. “Four primary relays keep it alive in Chicago.” “Vane built redundancies, but the fourth relay is keyed to a dead-hand protocol. The Gold Coast bridge only gave you the shell. The relay behind it loops through Cicero. Tell the accountant the traffic loops through a shell registered to a funeral home in Cicero.”
I blink. “You’re helping us.”
“I’ve been helping you for fifteen years, child.” His eyes find mine through the glass, and there’s something in them that makes my chest hurt. “It’s the only prayer I have left.”
Alessio reaches past me and kills the intercom. His hand is steady. His breathing isn’t.
“Don’t talk to him,” he says to me, quiet and rough. “Don’t let him be kind to you. That’s how he does it. He’s kind until you’d swear on your life for him, and then you find out what your life was worth to him.”
He walks away down the corridor, and I look back once at the old man behind the glass. Turi lifts one hand—not a wave, something older and sadder—and I hate that some part of me still wants to answer.
That’s the poison of it. That’s what Alessio has been drinking alone all night.
At eight in the morning, the kitchen is pretending the house did not break in half overnight.
Sienna stands at the massive butcher-block island, trimming the stems off a mountain of white roses with a paring knife she handles like she was born to it. Natalia leans against the counter with a tablet in one hand and an espresso in the other, reading something that’s making her mouth curve in a way I’ve learned means a Bellanti attorney somewhere is having a very bad morning.
Clara and Reese are arguing over the espresso machine. Somebody’s playlist is on. It smells like coffee and sugar and roses, and for a second I stand in the doorway like a stray cat that wandered into somebody else’s family.
“The disappearing woman returns,” Natalia says without looking up, her voice silk over a razor. “We were starting to wonder if Alessio had locked you in his wing.”
“Sit down, Amara,” Sienna says, and her smile is warm in a way that’s somehow more intimidating than Natalia’s coldness. “You look like you haven’t slept in three years.”
“Feels longer,” I say, and sit.
A plate appears in front of me. I didn’t ask for it. Nobody announces it. Fresh bread, butter, two eggs, done the way I made them for myself one morning when I thought no one was watching. Someone in this kitchen noticed and remembered, and the fact of that undoes me more than gunfire would.
“So,” Natalia says, sliding her tablet away and giving me the full weight of her attention. “You’ve been in this house for days, and somehow we’ve barely seen your face. You’re quiet. You’re observant. You map the exits of every room you walk into.”
“It’s a good habit.”
“It’s how you stay alive,” she agrees. “But you’re not a guest anymore, Amara. You’re staying in Alessio’s wing. You’re wearing his clothes.” Her eyes flick to the sweater, and oneeyebrow does something eloquent. “In this family, that’s not a rumor. That’s a filing.”
“A filing,” I repeat.
“Permanent record,” Sienna says, snapping a rose stem. “No appeals process. I tried.”
