Page 76 of From Italy With Love

He was watching me with something that looked like pity. Like concern. Like understanding. Like he could see straight through the armor I’d meticulously built over these long, grinding months. Through the late nights and skipped meals, and the cold determination I wrapped around myself like a shield.

“Do you know what I’ve learned in my years?” he asked, moving slowly around the desk to stand beside me. His presence felt heavier than usual, weighted with meaning. “About power, about control, about revenge, about all the things we convince ourselves matter in the grand scheme of things?”

I didn’t answer. I didn’t move. I didn’t know what he wanted me to say or where this was going.

“I’ve learned that none of it means anything—not a single damn thing—if you lose the person who makes you human.” He placed a weathered hand on my shoulder, the gesture almost paternal, reminiscent of the father I never really had. “I’ve watched you these past months, Salvatore. Watched you transform yourself into something cold and efficient, and utterly ruthless. Watched you shut down everything that made you the man your wife fell in love with. Every emotion, every vulnerability, every piece of your humanity.”

The mention of Madigan sent a spike of pain through my chest, sharp and immediate, like a blade sliding between my ribs. I tried to pull away, but his grip tightened, his fingers pressing into my shoulder with unexpected strength. There was a firmness there I hadn’t felt from Sinclair in months, a resolve that caught me off guard.

“You’re destroying yourself,” he continued quietly, his voice barely above a whisper but somehow cutting through the silence of the study like thunder. “Burning yourself to ashes trying to bring her home. Consuming everything you are, everything you were, in this single-minded pursuit. And maybe you’ll succeed. Maybe you’ll dismantle the Society piece by piece and eliminate every obstacle between you. Maybe you’ll tear down their entire empire with your bare hands. But what will be left of you when you do? Will she even recognize the man who comes for her? Will there be anything of Salvatore left, or just... something else? Something hollow?”

The questions hung in the air between us, heavy and suffocating.

“I don’t have a choice,” I whispered, my voice rough, scraped raw from too many sleepless nights and too much whiskey. “This is the only way.”

“There’s always a choice.” He released my shoulder and moved toward the door, his movements deliberate and measured. The lamplight caught the silver in his hair, making him look older somehow, wearier. “There is always another way. Come with me.”

“Sinclair, we need to discuss⁠—”

“Now, Salvatore.” His hand paused on the doorknob as he glanced back at me over his shoulder. “Please.”

Something in his tone made me follow. Not the command, but the plea beneath it. We left his office and moved through the halls toward the grand staircase. The house was quiet at this hour, our footsteps muffled by Persian rugs and the thick silence that settled over old homes after dark. My confusion grew with each step, and a knot tightened in my chest as I tried to anticipate where he was leading me and why.

“Where are we going?”

He didn’t answer. Just climbed the stairs with purpose, his footsteps echoing in the silence, as he led me down a corridor I had never been in before. The guest wing, I thought. Rooms for visitors who stayed overnight. The walls here were painted a softer shade of cream than the rest of the house, and there were fewer photographs, fewer personal touches.

“Sinclair, what⁠—”

He stopped in front of a door, then turned to look at me with an expression I couldn’t read. It was something between hope and fear, anticipation and dread as his hand rested on the doorknob, but he didn’t turn it yet.

“Sometimes,” he softly muttered, his voice barely above a whisper, “the universe gives us a gift. A moment of grace we don’t deserve. A chance to remember why we’re fighting in the first place. Why any of this matters at all.”

He opened the door, and time stopped.

Actually stopped, like someone had pressed pause on the entire world. My heart froze mid-beat. My lungs forgot how to pull in air. Everything around me blurred into insignificance.

Because she was standing there.

Madigan.

My wife.

She was standing by the window, backlit by the moonlight streaming through the curtains, and for a moment I thought I was hallucinating. That this was some kind of cruel trick my mind was playing on me. But then she turned, and her eyes met mine, and I knew she was real.

In a simple black dress that hugged her body in all the ways I remembered, the fabric clung to curves that had haunted my dreams for months. Her hair was longer than I remembered, falling in soft, crimson waves past her waist, catching the light from the chandelier above. She was thinner than before—too thin, like she hadn’t been eating properly. Paler, too, her skin lacking the warm glow it used to have. But she was here. She was real. She was standing right in front of me, not a hallucination, not a dream I would wake from in a cold sweat.

I couldn’t breathe.

I couldn’t think.

I couldn’t process what I was seeing because it was impossible. She was supposed to be in Boston with her family, miles away from me, unreachable, untouchable.

Her eyes met mine across the room and everything inside me shattered into a million jagged pieces. Sinclair was saying something beside me. I could see his mouth moving out of the corner of my eye, could sense him taking a step back, giving us space, but I couldn’t hear his words. Couldn’t hear anything over the roaring in my ears, the thundering of my heart, the desperate, aching need that was suddenly consuming every cell in my body, setting my nerves on fire.

Then I was moving.

Crossing the room in three long strides, my hands reaching for her before I even realized I had made the decision, pulling her against me with a force that should have hurt but didn’t because she was reaching back just as desperately. Her fingers dug into my shoulders, clutching at my jacket like I might disappear if she let go. Her body pressed into mine like she was trying to crawl inside my skin, like she wanted to merge with me completely, and God, I wanted that too.