Neve Trimboli.
The girl I had spared.The girl who should have died a decade ago had just cut a grown man open with perfect precision.
“Atlas,” Marcello snapped.“Are you listening?”
My jaw tightened.
“I’m coming.”
I hung up and stepped back into the alley, staring at the dark crimson spreading across the concrete.It was already creeping toward the drain, thin and steady, like the city was trying to drink it away.It wouldn’t be long before someone found him.A body like that didn’t stay hidden for long.
Before I could talk myself out of it, I moved closer.
I walked fast but careful, stepping around the blood so it wouldn’t touch my shoes.The air still smelled heavy and metallic.My phone was in my hand, warm from the call.I didn’t stop to think.I just opened the camera and lifted it.
I took a photo.
The man’s face.His open eyes.The blood soaking into his clothes and the pavement beneath him.Proof, frozen in time.I didn’t know why I needed it yet.I only knew I did.In my world, nothing stayed unimportant for long.
I lowered the phone and looked down the alley, toward the direction Neve had run.Toward her house.Toward whatever fragile idea of safety she still believed in.
Then I turned the other way and walked.
I’d thought she was a loose end.A mistake I’d made years ago and never finished dealing with.
I’d been wrong.
And now I had to decide whether I was going back to Genoa because duty called… or because I needed distance from the one person who had just proven she was more dangerous alive than dead.
14
Neve
By the time I reached my street, my lungs were burning.My legs ached.My hands wouldn’t stop shaking.I didn’t stop to breathe or think or look around.I just got to my front door, shoved the key in the lock, and pushed my way inside.
I locked the door.I bolted it and slid the chain across.Then I checked the door twice to make sure I hadn’t missed anything.
Only then did I look at myself.There was blood on my wrists.On my shirt.Under my nails.It was everywhere, and it wasn’t my own.
My throat tightened.My chest felt too small for the air I was trying to pull in.I stripped off my clothes even before I got to the bathroom, putting them straight into the washer, and I stepped into the shower before the water even heated.
The cold hit me like a slap.I stayed under the spray anyway, letting it hammer down on my shoulders, my face, my scalp until the water finally warmed and the blood started streaking down my legs in thin pink lines.
I pressed my hands against the tiles and breathed.In.Out.Steady.Controlled.
It took a minute for my mind to settle enough that the memories started pushing through and I began to remember.
The convent.The gardens.The overwhelming quiet.
I used to walk the garden paths for hours.Sometimes to avoid the other nuns.Sometimes because I didn’t know what else to do with myself.I had been the youngest resident of the convent and the only child they had ever taken in.I had no family left.I was traumatized.Some would have even argued that I was beyond saving.
And I had been mute.They had tried to coax conversation out of me.All of them.Kind words.Soft tones.Gentle questions.None of it had worked.I didn’t speak for months.I didn’t laugh, and I didn’t eaten unless Sister Ana had literally forced me to.And what was worse, I didn’t slept unless exhaustion knocked me out.
I had wandered the grounds like a shadow.A small, silent ghost no one quite knew what to do with.
Except Giuseppe.
He had been the first person who didn’t treat me like I was made of glass.He never asked me why I didn’t talk.He didn’t push or hover.He just kept showing up, standing there in the background, waiting for the moment I would finally break so he could catch my fall.