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The line dies. Luca never wasted words. Tonight I'm grateful. I have nothing left to say. I’m grateful for it, because I don't have a single spare word in me that isn't already spoken for.

Elio's eyes find me in the rearview. Wide. Young. He shouldn't be doing this work and I knew it the second Bruno told me whose idea it was.

"What did they—" His voice cracks down the middle. "What did they do to her?"

"Drive."

"Valentino—"

"Shut your mouth and drive." I don't raise my voice. Quiet commands get better results than raising your voice, and Elio’s tightening shoulders prove it.

Amanda stirs in my arms. The movement is small. A slight turn of her head against my sternum, her cheek dragging on my lapel, and her lips part like she's surfacing from very deep water.

"Valentino." It's barely a sound. My name on her breath.

I look down. Her eyes are half open, glassy, pupils blown wide. Almost no blue-green left. Just… dark. She doesn't see me.

But she reached for me anyway.

"I'm here," I say, rough and raw as if I’ve swallowed gravel. "I've got you."

"Six minutes." Her mouth barely moves. "You said—six minutes."

I stood by the bar and counted the minutes like a fool instead of following her. And when six passes, I waited a little longer because I thought she was safe.

Sei un idiota. You did this. You and your fucking six minutes.

"You found me," she whispers. Her fingers grip the front of my shirt. Weak, but she holds on.

"I should have been there sooner."

"S'okay." Her eyes slide shut again, the drug pulling her back under. "You—came."

"Stay awake, bella." I shift her higher against me, pressing two fingers against her throat, feeling her heartbeat. It trips along under my fingertips, fast and thin, but there, furious with itself for being slow. "Stay awake. Be angry with me—at me, but stay awake."

A sound comes out of her. It might have been a laugh, if she had anything left in her. She's helpless in a way that kills something in me.

Elio's eyes are on the mirror again, shining with moisture. I don't tell him to look away this time. She goes limp against me before we hit the highway, and I let her be because fighting the drug is worse than letting it run its course. So I do what I'm good at. I go through the night, moment by moment, looking for where it went wrong.

Plenty went wrong. But one moment keeps coming back to me.

Aldo Basile, youngest son of the Don, sitting in the back room of a palazzo crawling with money, and he had no muscle with him. None. The four soldiers Luca spotted at the front came after.

Which means when I kicked that door in, Aldo Basile was running his little reminder with two men who weren't his father's people. They didn't move like soldati. They didn't reach for guns first. One of them tried to talk to me, for Christ's sake, hands up, mouth open, like a man who'd never once considered that a night could end with him bleeding out on a marble floor.

Civilians maybe. Or close enough to it. Fashion-world hangers-on, the kind of men who photograph girls and call it art.

That tells me something I don't like. Aldo wasn't on family business in that room. He was running his own play, the dirty kind Enzo would gut him for if he weren't so busy looking the other way. No guards because guards would see. No witnesses with a code. Just men who'd stay quiet for money and a thrill.

Which means I didn't walk in on a Basile operation tonight. I walked in on a secret.

That changes everything. And what’s worse, somehow she’s become involved.

Why her? Forty, fifty girls move through that agency a season. Half of them never return home. And yet, Aldo Basile picks the American to make an example of?

Vittoria Sartori's best friend, though he wouldn't know that name. At least I hope he doesn’t.

He picked her because she asked about a bruise. At least that’s what I’m assuming after considering what she told me about her conversation with Francesca Renauld