Page 23 of The Cost of Silence

The call ends.

The apartment folds back into quiet.

Soft.

Careful.

Too careful.

I walk to her door one more time, stopping just shy of touching it. There’s nothing but the faint rustle of sheets inside. Nothing but the small, steady sounds of someone who survived something they shouldn’t have had to face alone.

Good.

Back in my office, I sink into the chair with a glass of bourbon, rigid, alert, listening to the silence hum. Thinking of the presence down the hall that shouldn’t matter but it already does, in ways I don’t want to examine.

I tell myself it’s vigilance. Not something else. Not something worse. Not something dangerous.

And eventually, when the night feels deep enough to hide it, I start to believe myself.

8.Isabella

I waketo pain before I wake to light. A tight, mean ache wraps around my ribs, blooming deeper when I inhale too sharply. My cheek throbs in a slow pulse, like a warning drum under my skin. For a second, I forget where I am; the ceiling isn’t mine, the bedding smells faintly of cedar and something clean and expensive, and everything is too still, too quiet.

Then memory rushes back in; the shove, the floor, the fist, the kick, the warning. Nico breaking down my door like the world offended him personally.

I blink and turn my head. Two pills and a glass of water sit on the bedside table. Not the kind the doctor gave me last night, these are different, placed neatly, like someone knew exactly when I’d wake up hurting.

Like someone had already been here.

My stomach knots. Not with fear. With… something else.

I push the blanket away and sit up slowly, wincing as my side protests. My hand drifts to the pills again. They feel oddly intimate in a way I’m not prepared to unpack.

Nico Mancini may be gruff and bossy and infuriating, but he’s not careless. He does nothing halfway. If he left these here, it’s because he checked on me. Probably more than once.

And why that sends an embarrassing warmth through my chest, I have no idea. Maybe it’s the pain meds still lingering in my system. Maybe it’s shock and trauma doing weird things.

Or maybe it’s the way he looked at me last night—furious and gentle all at once, like he wanted to strangle the man who hurt me and maybe strangle me a little too for getting hurt in the first place.

I take the pills, quietly, hoping the ache in my ribs loosens before I have to face him.

Because I need to go home.

This… whatever this is, his penthouse, his watchful silence, his hot-cold annoyance laced with reluctant kindness, it’s messing with my head. I need distance to think straight. I need my own things around me. My happy place with Christmas lights and joy. This room is nice, but it lacks heart, and I need that.

The floor is warm beneath my feet as I stand. Heated flooring, that I do enjoy. Moving slowly, the stiffness sharp but manageable, I try and stretch a little. My phone sits on the dresser where I dropped it last night. Screen cracked, but still working, thank goodness. I unlock it and swipe through missed notifications and see there’s nothing urgent.

It rings in my hand.

My heart jumps into my throat at the suddenness of it. I answer quickly when I see the caller ID.

“Mrs. Patel? Are you okay?”

Her voice is tight, breathless. “Isabella, dear, the building…your apartment… It’s the top floors. I don’t know how it started, but the alarms wouldn’t stop, and…”

Ice spills through me. “What happened?”

“There’s a fire. Half the hallway on your level is gone. The firefighters won’t let anyone in yet, and they said several units have smoke damage and… and I don’t know which ones. But Iwas so worried you were inside. I made the firefighters check twice.”