Even as I say it, I know it sounds hollow and unconvincing, like I’m trying to convince myself as much as Valentina.
My sister just looks at me with this expression that’s part pity, part amusement, and part concern.
“Keep telling yourself that, Leo,” she says softly. “Maybe eventually you’ll believe it.”
My hands clench into fists at my sides. “I don’t?—”
“You do,” Valentina interrupts, looking suddenly sad. “And that’s going to make this whole situation so much worse than it already is.”
She reaches up and touches my cheek, the gesture surprisingly gentle after the confrontation I just witnessed. “I love you, bro.But you’re heading for disaster and I don’t know how to stop you.”
“There’s no disaster to head for,” I insist, but it sounds weak even to my own ears. “I have everything under control.”
Valentina’s laugh is short and humorless. “No.” She shakes her head. “You really don’t. But I guess you’ll figure that out eventually.”
She gets in her car, and before driving away she rolls down the window and calls out, “By the way? Gabriel would have liked her. He would have liked that she fights back.” She gives me a knowing look from over her sunglasses. “Think about what that means.”
Then she’s gone, leaving me standing in the driveway with her words echoing in my head.
You have a crush on Emma Brennan.
Idon’t. This is about revenge and honoring Gabriel’s memory.
It’s not about the way Emma’s eyes light up when she’s winning an argument. It’s not about how her laugh makes me want to do it over and over again. It’s not about the way I caught her earlier and didn’t want to let go.
It’s not about any of that.
Except it is. And I know it is. And Valentina knows it too, which means soon everyone is going to know it, then I’m going to have to admit what I’ve been denying for weeks.
That somewhere between kidnapping Emma Brennan and now, I stopped seeing her as Connor’s daughter and started seeing her asEmma.
I have no idea what the fuck I’m supposed to do about that.
11
EMMA
It’s been three weeks since Leo Santoro kidnapped me on my wedding day, and I’ve stopped trying to escape.
I’m not sure when exactly it happened, but at some point I stopped testing the locks and memorizing guard rotations and hiding maps under the loose bathroom tile. Maybe it was gradual, a slow erosion of my determination. Or maybe it was sudden, a single moment where I realized that I can’t leave until Leo decides to let me go, and that doesn’t look like it’s happening anytime soon.
So I might as well make peace with my situation.
That’s what I tell myself, anyway. It’s easier than admitting the truth, which is that some part of me has stopped wanting to leave. Some traitorous, stupid part of me has started to feelcomfortablehere. Safe, even, which is batshit considering I’m being held here against my will.
But three weeks is a long time to spend with someone. Long enough to start understanding them, even when you don’t want to.
Leo Santoro is brutal and ruthless. I’ve seen evidence of that in the way his men jump when he speaks, in the coldness in his eyes when he’s discussing business, in the scars on his knuckles that tell stories I probably don’t want to know. But he’s not cruel. Not to me, at least. He’s never made me feel unsafe in that way, beyond the first encounter.
I’ve come to understand over these three weeks of dinners and conversations that Leo is grieving. He is a man consumed by grief for his brother, by rage at my father, and this need for revenge that he doesn’t know how to let go of. Underneath all of that, I think he’s lonely. Desperately, achingly lonely in a way that he’d never admit out loud.
And somehow—impossibly, inexplicably—I find myself wanting to fix him.
Which is stupid. Iknowit’s stupid. You can’t fix people, and even if you could, I shouldn’t want to fix my kidnapper.
But I do. And that’s the problem.
This morning starts the same way the last week of mornings have started: with coffee in the garden.