Page 10

“It’s surveillance.” Cian’s voice carried from inside the office, stripped of its usual steadiness and sharpened by disbelief.

“Jesus Christ, Sal. There are years of it.”

My heart seemed to stop before my mind understood what he meant.

Three years. Three years of silence. Three years of swallowing Salvatore’s name like a stone and keeping him locked inside my chest where no one could find him. Three years of pretending he had never existed, that I had never loved him, that Henry had not been born from that love. Three years of grief so private it had become another kind of death.

And now⁠—

A folder landed on the dining-room table with a weight paper should never have possessed. The sound cracked through the room like a gunshot, like a door being kicked open, like the first warning that everything I had built in silence was beginning to collapse. SALVATORE VALENTINETTI had been typed across the tab. The letters seemed to scream at me. His name. His full name. Written, catalogued, and filed like evidence of a crime. Like proof that he had existed. Like proof that I had loved him.

Beneath it, in Nolan’s handwriting, was MADIGAN, underlined twice.

My body recognized the danger before my mind could catch up. My chest tightened. My throat closed. The air thickened until breathing felt impossible. My heart battered my ribs as if it knew what was coming and was trying to escape before the rest of me had to face it. This was it. The moment silence stopped protecting me. The moment I would have to say his name aloud.

Mom turned toward me first.

Everyone else followed her gaze.

Tyran’s attention moved from the file to my face. He stepped closer to Uncle Sal without taking his eyes off me, ready to contain whatever the truth pulled from the man beside him. The terrible thing about being loved by a family like mine was how quickly concern could curdle into suspicion when a truth surfaced without permission.

“Maddie?” Cian moved toward me carefully, as if one wrong step might send me over the edge of something none of them could see. I didn’t want to look. I didn’t want to see what Nolan had stolen from the life Salvatore and I had hidden so carefully. But the photograph on top of the file had already found me.

Salvatore stood outside Piccola Cucina with one hand braced against the door. His head was bent toward me, and a small, unguarded smile softened the hard lines of his face as I stepped past him.

The photograph had been taken from across the street, close enough to capture the intimacy between us, and far enough away to make the intrusion feel deliberate.

I appeared in profile, younger and frightened, while Salvatore looked at me as if the city had emptied around us and left only one person worth seeing.

Piccola Cucina smelled of garlic, basil, fresh bread, and the quiet promise of an evening that belonged only to us. Candlelight warmed the exposed brick walls while opera drifted beneath the low murmur of conversation. Salvatore guided me to the table farthest from the windows with his hand resting against the small of my back.

“You planned this,” I accused after learning the restaurant belonged to him. We had talked until the other diners left and the candles burned low, yet he still watched me as if the night had only just begun.

“I wanted you to feel safe. I wanted us to have time without worrying about who might see us or what might happen. So yes, I planned it.” He lifted my hand and pressed his mouth to my knuckles, holding my gaze with a tenderness I had never learned how to receive without mistrusting it. “I wanted tonight to be perfect for you.”

“That’s—” I shook her head. “That’s incredibly thoughtful. And slightly terrifying.” The confession humiliated me until his fingers tightened around mine and made honesty feel less like weakness.

“Why terrifying?”

“Because it means you were thinking about this. About me. Before you even asked me to dinner.”

“I’ve been thinking about you since the moment I saw you,” he admitted, his voice rough with need. “I haven’t been able to stop. I haven’t been able to think about anything else. You’ve consumed me, Madigan. Completely.”

The scrape of photographs across polished wood dragged me out of the memory.

Uncle Sal spread the images across the table with increasing force, turning the private shape of my life with Salvatore into evidence beneath his hands. Each photograph landed like a violation—a stranger’s lens preserving what had been sacred, what had been ours. There were photographs of us leaving Piccola Cucina near midnight, walking to the old Manhattan hotel where Salvatore stayed, and slipping through a lobby built from marble, crystal, and expensive discretion. Others showed different nights, different clothes, and different lies I had told so I could escape the brownstone long enough to belong to him.

I watched my own face appear again and again in those stolen images—a woman I barely recognized. A woman who had been happy. A woman who had belonged to someone and, for a little while, had believed she was allowed to.

Every image had been taken by a stranger following us without my knowledge. Every moment I had believed belonged only to us had been documented, filed, and catalogued like proof of a crime.

My chest tightened. The air thinned until each breath felt borrowed. One photograph showed me leaving the hotel in the early morning, my hair hidden beneath a scarf and my body curved inward, as if I could fold myself small enough to disappear. I could see the exact moment I realized I was leaving him behind. It was there in the slope of my shoulders.

Another showed Salvatore at the window after I had gone, one hand braced against the glass as he watched the street swallow me. His profile was turned from the camera, but I knew that expression. I knew the weight of it. He was waiting for me to come back. He was always waiting for me to come back.

I reached for that photograph before I could stop myself, my body moving on instinct to reclaim the part of him someone had stolen.

Mac caught it first.