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She stops three meters away, close enough that I can see her hands shaking around the strap of her bag, and behind me Amanda says, soft, where my heartbeat used to be:

"Valentino. Breathe."

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

Valentino

Chiara crosses the last three meters and wraps her arms around me, and every piece of training in my body goes useless.

For a second, I do nothing.

My hands stay open at my sides. Twenty-two years of clearing rooms, counting exits, reading hands, faces, windows, reflections. Twenty-two years of knowing where danger will come from before anyone else knows there is danger at all.

And the woman from the alley behind the church is pressed against my chest, crying into my jacket, and I cannot make myself touch her.

Amanda clears her throat behind me.

When I glance at her, she lifts her arms slowly, deliberately, the way you would show a man how to surrender, and folds them around an invisible person. Then she points at me with her chin.

I get the message.

My arms come up and close around Chiara’s shoulders.

The moment they do, she makes a sound into my jacket that I have not heard since we were children. Small. Broken. Familiar.

It takes me straight back to stone under my knees, blood in my mouth, and her name tearing out of me while grown men held me down.

I tighten my hold because letting go would be worse.

“What are you doing here?”

My voice comes out rougher than the cigarettes ever made it.

Chiara pulls back and holds me at arm’s length. Her face is older, lined around the eyes, beautiful in the way our village makes women beautiful, by surviving it.

Then she turns to Amanda, who stands there with her hands shoved in her jacket pockets, looking extremely pleased with herself and pretending not to.

"I’m so glad I finally meet you," Chiara says to her in English, the accent thick and warm. "In person, I mean."

'Likewise,' Amanda says.

I look between them like a man watching two trains arrive on the same track.

"She found me," Chiara says, turning back to me. Her hands are still shaking, but her voice has steadied. 'On Instagram. A message, very polite, very... how do you say... careful. She asked if I would want to see you."

She studies my face, and what she finds there makes her soften. "I think she loves you so much she knows exactly what it costs you that we don’t speak.'

I do not have words.

The most dangerous men in two countries have sat across tables from me, and I have always known what to say. Threats. Promises. Lies. Prices. Terms.

Now Chiara is standing in front of me, alive and older and real, and all I can do is breathe through my nose and keep myself upright.

Amanda raises one hand and waves at us both like she is flagging down a waiter.

"Okay, I’m going to go sit on the steps over there," she says, already backing away, 'and you two are going to talk for a while, and then we’re all going to eat somewhere, because I’m starving and Rome owes me carbohydrates. Take your time. Not too much time. I’m serious about the starving."

She walks off through the crowd of tourists and lovers and pickpockets, finds a spot on the worn stone steps, and sits down with her elbows on her knees like she does this every day.