Page 194

My pulse starts to pick up.

This is stupid.

It is just a phone, a slab of glass and metal full of things I do not want to see. But my body does not understand the difference.

I walk toward the suitcase, then stop.

But Dante’s voice presses against the back of my mind again.

They are not the ones who hurt you.

“Shut up,” I mutter to no one.

The room does not argue.

I cross to the suitcase before I can change my mind. The zipper sounds too loud as I pull it open. Inside, the past is folded neatly into layers: clothes I have not worn, chargers, old receipts, a jacket that still smells faintly like the city I left behind. I don’t touch any of it for a moment.

Then I reach into the smaller compartment.

My fingers brush the phone, and I pull it out slowly, standing with it against my palm, staring at the blank screen. I have held guns with steadier hands than this. I have walked into rooms ready to start wars with steadier hands than this.

It is humiliating that a phone can scare me.

I let out a long breath and begin pacing again, carrying it with me. One lap around the room, then another.

My thumb hovers over the power button.

What if there is nothing? What if there are no messages, no missed calls, no evidence that anyone noticed I disappeared? What if there are thousands?

What if Alex sent something I cannot answer? What if my father wrote something cold? What if Anton wrote something worse—something kind?

My throat tightens.

I stop in the middle of the room, then finally I press the power button.

For a second, nothing happens.

Then the screen glows.

❧

“Maksim?”

Dante’s voice drifts into the room, quiet and low, slicing straight through the dense fog in my skull.

I blink hard. The room snaps back into focus, and I suddenly realize I’ve been sitting motionless on the edge of the mattress, staring at the white wall across from me for who knows how long. The old phone is clutched in my lap, its screen dark now, but the heat of those messages still burns against my palms.

Warm, calloused fingers slide under my jaw.

Dante gently tilts my chin upward, forcing my gaze to meet his. He’s already dressed for our dinner—a crisp charcoal button-down fitted across his broad shoulders, silver watch catching the soft bedroom light, dark grey hair neatly pushed back. He looks devastatingly handsome. The kind of effortless, mature elegance that makes people turn their heads wherever we go. Anyone in their right mind would kill to have a man like him looking at them this way.

And here I am, barefoot and completely shirtless, drowning in the middle of a room full of clothes I couldn’t bear to put on.

“Are you all right?” he asks.

His Italian accent makes the question sound gentler than it has any right to. Like something you might say to a child after a nightmare. Like a lullaby.

I swallow against the thick ache lodged in my throat. I wish I could tell him the truth. I wish I could say that I am not alright, that I finally turned that goddamn phone on, expecting a firing squad of furious paragraphs and disgusted dismissals for running away. I prepared myself to be hated. I built three months of walls around the idea that they were glad I was gone.