Page 83 of The Savage

I don’t tell her about the lilies my mother brought to Father Calogero, her childhood priest visiting from the Old Country. He’d been the reason she was visiting the church that day she was killed.

‘Sometimes a… a noise,’ she continues. ‘Metal. Cold.’ She flinches. ‘Tonight it was the shout. “Run.” A woman. I think she loved me.’

Maddelena, I think. Or Sofiya. Or someone else I haven’t learned yet in this scavenger hunt of her life. ‘She does,’ I say, not bothering to dance around the verb tense. ‘You have sisters. You’re loved.’

She blinks. Tears well and don’t fall. ‘Am I?’ It’s plaintive and it guts me.

‘By too many people.’ The truth surprises a laugh out of me, soft and ragged. ‘It’s a liability.’

She studies my face as if the answer to all of it might be written where the bruises are fading. Her eyes ask the question her lips refuse to utter.

And you?

The night presses close, waiting. I could lie. I could pivot. I could hand her a neat sentence about protection and duty and the honour of care. I don’t.

‘You hold the key to that door, ragazza.’

The admission slips into the room and sits down with the patience of a saint waiting for a sinner to finish. She inhales like I’ve given her a third choice between yes and no. Which, to be fair, I have with my cryptic as fuck answer.

But… whatever. ‘Go back to sleep.’

The pulse at her throat calms under my palm but she shakes her head.

‘Stay,’ she whispers, so faint I might have dreamed it. ‘Just for a minute. Until I⁠—’

‘Till you sleep,’ I finish, relieved and undone. ‘Yeah.’

I shift carefully, sliding onto the edge of the mattress, my bad arm tucked close to my body and my hand still banding her wrist like a promise that doubles as a shackle. She wraps the rosary around her free hand, but she doesn’t make the sign of the cross.

Instead she curls in, very small, like a woman who remembers how to do this from when she was a girl and slept through storms between people she trusted.

She trusts me. God help us both.

‘Renzo?’ she says, drifting.

‘Mm?’

‘If I remember… if it’s bad… will you—’ She gropes for the word, finds a different one. ‘Will you stay angry?’

It’s my turn to stare at the ceiling. ‘At who?’

‘Everyone.’

I think of my mother on the church floor; of her soft hand that had wrapped around mine a hundred times and would never again. Then I think of the gun that was in Giada’s hand.

I think of Nightowl’s text and the million unanswered questions.

I think of Orazio’s voice, reaching across miles to tug on the leash I’ve slipped. I think of the madness that grew in my chest the first time she smiled in this house like the sun had remembered it owed us something.

‘I’ll aim it where it belongs,’ I say. ‘And do my best to keep it off you.’

Her breath loosens. ‘All right.’

In the silence that follows, I hear my phone on the console in the other room. It buzzes once, twice, three times. I let it. The sea keeps whispering at the windows. The palazzo settles, shifting its old bones.

I sit in the dark and watch the knot in her brow ease, watch sleep come back and take her carefully and gently this time.

When her breathing evens, I look down at our hands – her rosary twined in one, my fingers around the other – and admit the thing no Salvatore is supposed to admit when the game is still on.