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A tablet has his attention as he stands about forty feet away, oblivious to the two people heading toward the exit.
My feet stop. Every muscle in my body locks into a taut string of pure tension, and the world goes silent.
Going by the way Lucia’s hand tightens on my arm, she’s clearly seen him too.
Her expression cycles through recognition, shock, and then a tightly controlled fury that could pass for calm. She’s seen his photo in Matteo’s files a hundred times. That face—the face of a man who destroyed someone she loved—is seared into her mind.
Her fingers dig into my forearm, and I can feel the tremor running through her. I can tell from her eyes that her instincts are screaming for her to rush over and demand answers.
“Don’t.” I barely mouth the word. “Not here.”
She offers the smallest dip of her chin.
Bruno glances up then, his gaze sweeping the corridor in a routine, absent manner. He scans the space without perceiving anything, and his eyes pass over us without stopping. We’re merely two people on our way out.
He doesn’t know who I am. Or if he does, he’s better at this game than I gave him credit for.
Bruno pivots left and disappears through another door. The corridor is empty again, the overhead lights buzzing. Just like that, the man who destroyed my career and murdered Lucia’s brother is gone.
We walk out into the sunlight. Neither of us speaks until we reach the car. Even then, it takes me thirty seconds to trust my voice.
As soon as we close the sedan doors, I call Nico and tell him about seeing Bruno. He hits me with news that the hack worked and that they managed to harvest most of the encrypted files.
He runs through his questions—what Bruno looked like, whether he clocked us, how many staff members were on the floor—then offers me a “Good work.” In the short pause that follows his praise, I can hear him typing. “The financial records we’ve looked into so far are cleaner than we expected. He’s been running two books for years. Billy’s still pulling threads, and we’ll hopefully find something more useful soon.” I hear more tapping on his end. “Rest. We’ll reconvene tomorrow.”
With that, the line goes dead.
The rest of our ride back to the seaside house is silent, and for a second, I wonder what’s going through Lucia’s mind and why she hasn’t said anything. I want to ask her, but I know in times like this, I usually prefer being left alone.
Seeing Bruno obviously threw her off just as much as it threw me.
I focus on driving, and when we get back to the house, she heads to the bedroom. I want so badly to follow her and wrap my arms around her warmth, but I have enough self-awareness left to understand that I’m not the one she needs right now. I shouldn’t crowd her while she processes the day’s trauma.
So I wander into the kitchen, ready to deal with my own emotions. I stand here with both hands flat on the table and nowhere to put twelve years of betrayal.
For a second, my palms press into the wood grain like I’m testing whether it will hold my weight. Outside, the sounds of waves crashing against the shore only heightens the stillness in the kitchen.
The image of Bruno Caruso’s face is etched vividly in my mind, triggering unwanted memories.
I open the fridge without thinking, and the sight of the leftover pasta from last night undoes my composure. Bruno used to hand me my lunches in containers like this one after grueling training sessions. For a moment, my mind winds back the years, and I can almost smell his sauce reheating in the gym’s microwave. He’d leave containers on the bench without comment, a silent offering for a hungry kid.
I struggle to separate the two faces of the man I once thought I knew. The one who stood across from me today in a white coat organizes horrific crimes for profit. But the Bruno I first met would bring pasta to the gym when I was starving after practice.
Bruno was the only adult in my life who seemed to care, so I learned what he taught me. Every instinct I have—to absorb pain, to present nothing, to control what a room sees—came from him. For years, I couldn’t tell where he ended and I began.
Now I’m nothing more than a passing stranger, close enough to strike but forced to walk away, and the idea that he didn’t even recognize the man whose life he destroyed stings worse than any hit he ever taught me to weather.
My fingers tighten and every muscle in my back fires as I pick up the nearest chair and drive it through the wall. The wooden chair splinters, and the plaster-covered wall gives way with a dull, satisfying crunch. My shoulder also flares with a sharp pain that breaks open the dam of anger I’ve been clinging to for years.
My fury takes over after that, burning with the need to smash things.
The lamp goes next. I sweep it off the counter, and it shatters across the tile, the bulb popping with a dry snap. The fruit bowl follows, exploding against the opposite wall in a spray of white shards. A framed map of Naples hangs above the sink, delicate glass over a thin wood backing. I rip it off the wall, rendering it to pieces.
I don’t shout, the wrath inside me too dense for sound. It can only leave my body through impact.
When my rage passes, I stand in the midst of the debris, my chest swelling and heaving with air that feels too cold in my lungs. My shoulder throbs with a dull, wet pulse. The bullet wound has reopened beneath the dressing, and blood trickles from my hands from fresh cuts where shards of ceramic slashed through my skin.
At this point, my knees give out. I collapse onto the tile, and for a while, I stay here, my palms resting on my thighs as I watch crimson droplets hit the floor.
