I slapped the phone out of her hand. I couldn't take another word. My fingers closed around her throat.
The bottle slipped from her grip, and the sharp reek of gasoline hit me instantly. It splashed across the guest room's hardwood floor in a dark, spreading tongue, soaking into the shredded remains of my clothing. The smell was immediate, chemical, suffocating, nothing like the clean violence of gunpowder that permeated every other room in this compound. This was something cruder, something Nina had brought for a purpose I would never fully understand, whether to destroy my belongings or to stage something worse.
In the struggle, Nina, panicking, somehow ignited the fuel on the floor. A spark from the antique lamp she knocked from the side table, or perhaps from the lighter she carried in the robe's pocket. It did not matter. The flames leapt across the gasoline with a sound like fabric tearing, and in two heartbeats the guest room was an inferno.
Smoke billowed. Flames roared to the ceiling, peeling the century-old wallpaper from the plaster in long, curling strips. The portraits in the hallway outside caught the light through the open door, and for one disoriented moment every dead Vittori man seemed to be watching.
I'd barely been out of the clinic. The smoke drained what little strength I had, filling my lungs with heat and tar, turning my legs to water. I collapsed against the foot of the bed, my passport still clutched against my chest, my vision narrowing to a bright, wavering slit.
Then I heard Dante's voice.
"Lucia!"
Right behind it, the servants shouting him back: "Sir, it's too dangerous, you can't go in yet! Wait until the crew brings the extinguisher…"
"Get out of my way! Lucia's still in there!"
He charged in anyway. I heard his footsteps cross the threshold, felt the displacement of air as the door swung wider and fed the flames. Through the smoke I could see his silhouette, broad-shouldered and commanding even against the hellish backlight, and for one breath I believed what I had stopped believing years ago.
He just hadn't expected Nina to be inside too.
"Dante, save…"
She didn't need to finish. Without a second's hesitation, he scooped her up, one arm beneath her knees, the other cradling her against his chest with the tenderness of a man protecting something irreplaceable. He never once looked at me. He turned his back on the smoke and the fire and the woman he had married nine years ago and walked out, his soldiers parting for him in the corridor like water around stone.
I lay on the floor and watched them go. The flames crept closer. The ceiling groaned. My thumb found the bare place on my ring finger one final time, pressing hard against the skin as if searching for a pulse that had already stopped.
I don't remember how I got out. Perhaps the crew arrived in time. Perhaps the fire burned a path to the garden window and I crawled through it on instinct. What I remember is standing on the wet grass behind the compound, barefoot, my hospital discharge papers singed at the edges, my passport smudged with soot but whole, and the compound's upper windows glowing warm and golden where Dante sat at Nina's bedside.
Half an hour later, after settling Nina down and summoning a Family physician to check her lungs, Dante searched the entire estate. The guest room was gutted. The garden gate was unlocked. I was nowhere to be found.
Late night. The airport.
The terminal was bright and anonymous, a world scrubbed clean of Family crests and hierarchy and the heavy silence of men who carried guns beneath tailored wool. I dropped a package at the courier desk, a manila envelope addressed to the Vittori compound, containing the dissolution petition I had signed three weeks ago and kept hidden inside my passport case. The clerk took it without looking at my face, and I was grateful for the indifference.
I coughed as I boarded the flight to DeLuca-controlled London territory. My throat was raw, my clothes smelled of smoke and gasoline, and the woman in the seat beside me shifted slightly away. I did not blame her. I must have looked like exactly what I was: someone escaping a fire that had been burning for nine years.
Just before takeoff, a text from Dante lit up my screen:
Not in the mood for hide-and-seek.
I read it once. My thumb hovered over the bare skin of my ring finger, rubbing the smooth, empty place where his name had once been branded into my life. Then I powered the phone off, slid it into the seat pocket in front of me, and left it there as the plane pushed back from the gate and the city that belonged to the Vittori Family shrank to a scatter of lights below the wing.
Gail has a prenatal checkup tomorrow at ten. Come with her and get your lungs examined.
I didn't reply. I pulled the SIM card from the phone, held it between my fingers for a single breath, then set it on the nightstand beside the powered-down device.
Dante Vittori, from this day forward, you and I will never see each other again.
