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Human.

She looked down at her lap. Her fingers twisted together once before she stopped them.

The chapel held us in its cold little mouth. I should have moved away from her, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

“Tomorrow or the day after, I have to face my family,” I reflected. “You don’t know what that means.”

“No, I don’t. But I know I would give anything to have my family back. Even if they asked the difficult questions I couldn’t answer. Even if standing in front of them broke me open.”

“Adriana—”

“No.” She looked at me then, and there was grief in her eyes, but no softness in the way she held it. “You still have people who can look at you and remember who you were before you decided you were beyond saving. That is not nothing, Demitri.”

I looked away. “They may not forgive me.”

“They may not,” she agreed. “But they are still here. That means there is still a door.”

“And if they close it?”

“Then at least you’ll know you knocked.”

The words settled hard in my chest.

For ten years, I had built a life around absence. Discipline. Sacrifice. I had told myself my family was safer without the man I had become.

Adriana sat beside me with no family left to return to, no safe house with old voices waiting inside it, and she was looking at me as if I were the one standing in front of a gift and not knowing its value.

“I don’t know who I am anymore.”

Adriana looked at the crucifix, then back at me.

“Maybe you are what you do next.”

The words were simple. There was no grand comfort. Only the next act. The next choice. The next door.

I looked at her then. At the new color of her hair. The bruises that refused to vanish. The mouth that spoke harsh truths I needed to hear.

A door closed somewhere in the villa. Low voices moved beyond the passage. Life continuing around the edges of us.

Adriana rose first.

She stepped into the aisle and turned back to me. For a moment, I thought she would say something. Instead, she turned and walked toward the chapel door.

I didn’t kneel. I didn’t pray. But after a while, I crossed myself.

After I left the chapel, I found Zeno in the courtyard. He drank his coffee and watched me approach him over the rim.

I knew that look. He had not come out here for the view.

“What aren’t you telling me?” he asked, even before I had a chance to pull out a chair.

“What do you mean?”

“What are you holding back from me, Demi?”

“I’ve told you everything.”

“No.” He set the cup down. He leaned back in the chair. “How much does Adriana know about the Coccico cartel?”