Page 83 of The Scars We Keep
The breath I just found leaves me entirely.
Matteo.
My father always believed this man was the key to everything the Serrano’s had ever wanted.That Matteo was the kind of cruel that built empires.He used to say it to Luca behind doors he thought were closed, that Matteo was the way to get to the top.The things he whispered to Luca about what this man had done.The bodies, the families left with nothing, the particular brand of violence that didn’t just end people but erased them completely.I had told myself they were exaggerations.The kind of mythology that grows around powerful men in this world until the man and the legend become impossible to separate.
But then there is what Lorenzo told me.How Matteo took a ten-year-old boy under his wing when the rest of this world had already written him off.How he was the only one who was never cruel, judgmental, or anything but straight with him at an age when the truth was the only thing standing between Lorenzo and a world that would have swallowed him whole.How he taught him everything.How to move in this life, how to read a room, how to survive the kind of men who don’t leave survivors.
I am no longer sure which version of this man is standing in my kitchen.
“Matteo,” I say.“How did you get in here?”
I need to know because the guards at the gate and the men at the doors are men Lorenzo trusts, which means either something went very wrong or someone is loyal to Matteo and not Lorenzo.
Matteo looks at me with dark eyes.The same dark eyes as Lorenzo.He says nothing for long enough that the silence becomes its own kind of pressure.
“Where is Lorenzo?”
I hold his gaze.
“He’s in the sitting room.”
His eyes move across my face with the slow attention of a man who has been lied to by professionals and has learnt exactly what to look for.
“Is he alone?”
I think about what a lie buys me here and what it costs me, and I think about Lorenzo bleeding in the next room and what happens in the next thirty seconds if I lie.
“No.”
Matteo holds my gaze for a moment.Something shifts behind those eyes as he quietly rearranges his thoughts and finds the result workable.Then his free hand comes out and closes around me, pulling my back flush against his chest in one smooth movement.The gun relocates to my temple with a steadiness that makes it clear this is not his first time arranging a room this way.
“Walk,” he says.
I obey because I’m neither stupid or suicidal.We move together down the hallway, his chest at my back, his arm wrapped around my throat, the gun pressed to my temple.I have never, in my life, felt the length of this corridor the way I feel it now.Each step stretches out beneath me like the floor itself is reluctant to deliver me to what is waiting at the end of it.
My heartbeat fills my ears, and it is impossible to reason with.I focus on my breathing instead, because it’s the one thing in this situation that still belongs entirely to me.In through the nose.Out slow.
And then we reach the doorway and the voices in the room die.What replaces them is not silence.It’s the threat in real time, as each of them makes the same decision in the same fraction of a second, without a word exchanged between any of them.The room’s temperature drops, and weapons come out.All of them.Rafe and the two men by the window and the one near the far wall, every hand moving with the fluid swiftness of bodies that have already committed before minds have finished processing what they are seeing.
Seven guns find Matteo, so seven guns are aimed at me.
Lorenzo is on the sofa, his shirt open at the side.He looks up the moment we appear in the doorway, and he is on his feet before I have drawn my next breath.
The look on his face is something I have never seen before and hope never to see again.Raw panic.Stripped of every layer of control he carries like a second skin, dismantled in a single second by the sight of me in this doorway, another man’s arm locked around my throat and a gun held to my head.
He takes one step forward.
Rafe catches his arm and holds him back with the firm grip of a man who knows the worst thing Lorenzo can do right now is move, and I watch Lorenzo absorb that.Watch him choose stillness even as every part of him screams against it.I know what it costs him.I can see it in the rigid set of his shoulders and the line of his jaw.
The room holds its breath.
Every man still waits, locked in the suspended tension of soldiers who have their orders and are holding them right at the very edge.
Lorenzo’s eyes move from Matteo to me and back to Matteo.His jaw is tight enough that I can see the muscle working at the corner of his jaw—that small, involuntary tell I have learned to read the way you learn to read the weather.
“Matteo,” he says, softly.
“If anyone moves,” Matteo says from behind me, his arm tightening around my throat, the pressure deliberate and rising, making breathing a conscious effort.The gun presses harder against my temple with the kind of calm that belongs to a man who has nothing left to lose and knows it.“She gets a fucking bullet.”
The room doesn’t move.Not a breath.Not a single shift of weight.Nothing.
Lorenzo raises one hand.A single, contained gesture, aimed at no one and everyone at once.One by one, slowly, the guns come down.
“Let her go, Matteo.”Lorenzo steps forward.“Whatever this is, it has nothing to do with her.Let her go, and I’ll give you whatever you came for.”
The gun presses harder against my temple, and I breathe, keeping my eyes on Lorenzo because he is the only fixed point in this room, and if I am about to die, I want him to be the last thing I see in this world.
Matteo’s mouth comes close to my ear.
“Tell me now, Lorenzo,” he says, voice dropping to a tone that leaves no room for negotiation or anything but the weight of what he is asking and the price attached to the answer.“Where the fuck is Emery?”
