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“Fine.” He’s irritated when he speaks again. “You threw your arms around a stranger’s sick kid, and it broke your whole life open. That’s the most you thing I’ve ever heard.”
I snicker.
“It’s not funny, Vee.”
“It’s a little funny.”
“Yeah, well, I’m still furious, and I’m still coming. Send me the location.”
I send him the location, then hear a grunt.
Nick stands behind me, and I didn’t sense him whatsoever. I feel so safe in the safe house that I let my guard down. Or maybe I’m just running on fumes.
He reads the coordinates over my shoulder and approves them with a nod and a look I can’t decode—resignation that the brother is coming, or something closer to relief that his don’s fake wife will finally have someone in her corner who isn’t a criminal.
“No disapproving warning, like in the office?”
He closes his eyes, shaking his head. “The more people we have on our side, the better. And I think you could use someone here who you trust completely.”
“You’re not wrong.”
He drifts back to Lupo’s bedside, and after I notify his men of Mark’s arrival, I sit back down in the plastic chair to wait for the one person on earth who I trust above all others. Behind me, a man I haven’t decided about breathes evenly under sedation.
All the while, a story spreads globally, telling something close to the truth.
Ninety minutes later, a car comes up the impossible-to-find road. My brother gets out—tech-casual, jaw set, eyes sweeping even now. I’m across the gravel and into him before I’ve decided to move, and he holds me hard enough to say everything. For the length of it I get to stop being a doctor and a hostage and a wife and a headline. I just get to be somebody’s sister.
He pulls back just far enough to look at me, and checks my face like a readout, top to bottom, noting the damage. “You look terrible. You look like you’ve been up for two days doing surgery in a barn.”
“Pretty accurate.”
“Then you look exactly right.” He pulls me back in. “I’ve got you. Whatever this is, I’ve got you.”
30
LUPO
It’s only been a week since I was shot, but it feels like a lifetime.
I’m standing on a hill above the Brancati estate. A hole healing in my side. A doctor who hasn’t decided about me on my left. And on my right, her brother, making it clear with his shoulders alone that he’d prefer I fall down the heavily treed hill.
Binoculars. Morning light. The Brancati gate below us, and past it stands the villa where Matteo has spent the past week believing he won.
My side pulls when I lift the glasses. Veda’s sutures, complaining. She notices. She notices everything, still, even while she remains undecided about me. Her eyes flick down and away, the doctor overriding the woman for half a second before the woman shuts the door again.
“Don’t reach above your shoulder,” she says, clipped. “You’ll tear them, and I won’t fix it.”
“You keep saying that. When will you believe it?”
“I won’t. I swear, Lupo.”
“Noted.”
“Stop saying noted.”
“You’re sure this is where we watch it from,” Mark says, irritated. He hasn’t stopped watching me since he got here. “Because if this goes the way you say, fine. If it doesn’t, I want you to understand I’m not a spectator.”
“Mark,” Veda says.
