"Lorenzo?" My voice cracked on the name, and the sound of it on my own tongue dragged nine years up from where I had buried them. "How... how are you?"
"I'm fine, Adriana." A pause stretched down the line, patient, measured, the way I remembered him being even as a boy who carried too much. "Are you all right? You sound like something's broken."
My breath snagged in my throat. After everything, after all the silence I had thrown between us, he could still read me the way other men read account books. "I'm..." The lie withered before I could shape it. "No. No, I'm not all right."
"What happened?"
I gripped the phone until the edge of it bit into my palm, and watched the city smear past the window of the cab, headlights bleeding into long ribbons of gold against the dark. This was Rossi territory I was driving through, though I hadn't understood that then. I only knew the streets felt colder the further I got from that table and the man who had struck me in front of all those people. "Life here... it isn't what I thought it would be. I told myself I could build something clean, something mine, away from all of it. But..." A tear slid hot down my cheek and dropped onto the back of my hand. "I want to come back, Lorenzo."
"Come home." No hesitation. No questions, no demand for the story I wasn't ready to tell. Just two words, and they wrapped around me like a coat thrown over my shoulders in the cold. "I'll send you an address. Stay there. Don't open the door for anyone but my man. We'll figure out the rest when you're safe."
Safe. The word landed strangely. I didn't understand yet how much weight my brother put into it.
Two hours later I sat on the edge of a hotel bed so pristine it felt staged, my eyes fixed on the door. The room smelled faintly of cut lilies and expensive nothing, the kind of place that costs a great deal precisely so it can feel like no one has ever lived in it. My hands knotted together in my lap. Out in the corridor, footsteps approached, unhurried, even, and my thumb found the bare groove on my finger where the ring used to sit and pressed there, that phantom shape I kept reaching for whenever my chest went tight.
The knock made me flinch. My heart slammed against my ribs as I crossed to the door, and some animal part of me braced for it to be Damiano standing on the other side, that slow half-second smile of his arriving too late to mean anything.
But the man I found was a stranger. Tall, with dark hair pushed back in a careless way, and green eyes that didn't so much look at me as look through everything I was trying to hold together. A leather jacket sat over shoulders built like a doorway. Stubble shadowed his jaw, and there was a stillness to him, the kind I would later learn belonged to men who had done violence and felt no need to advertise it.
"Adriana?" His voice came low, roughened at the edges. "I'm Matteo. Don Falcone sent me to see that you're all right."
I stayed in the doorway, weighing him the way you weigh anything in a world that has just finished teaching you not to trust the surface of things. There was something in how he held himself, certainty without menace, presence without the lean of a threat. His eyes were intense, but underneath the intensity there was something that read almost as kindness, and I didn't know what to do with that.
"May I come in?"
I stepped aside. He passed into the room, and the space seemed to shrink around the breadth of him, though he moved with an easy, contained grace that never once tipped into looming. He didn't fill the room to intimidate. He filled it the way a closed door does. Quietly. Completely.
"How are you holding up?" His gaze moved across the room, unhurried, professional, and stopped on the bag I'd thrown together in too much of a hurry to fold anything.
"I'm okay." I crossed my arms over myself and fought the urge to fidget, fought the thumb that wanted to find that empty groove again. "Just... taking it all in."
"That's understandable." He leaned a shoulder against the wall, hands tucked into the pockets of his jacket, settling in like a man who had stood guard over more frightened people than he cared to count.
"So..." I searched his face for some thread to hold. "How long have you known my brother?"
