Page 49 of Valentino

"A-a hand on my jaw when I tried to turn my face. Someone spit on me." The violation burns, deep and humiliating. My heart is pounding so hard it hurts, and suddenly I'm back there, trapped inside flashes of sensation instead of memories. The smell of alcohol. The weight of hands. The helpless certainty that something was wrong while my body refused to listen to me. I drag in a shaky breath and stare at nothing, trying to get control before the panic swallows me whole. "Then h-he—put his mouth on me."

Valentino doesn't move. Doesn't speak. His silence is somehow worse than if he raged.

"I gagged." I admit quietly. "I wanted to throw up. I couldn't."

"Amanda." His voice is rough now. "You can stop."

"He said it was a reminder." The words keep coming now, one after another. "For asking about the girls. The bruises. For looking at things I shouldn't look at." My fingers twist in the blanket. "He stroked my hair. I can't stop thinking about that part. How gentle he was. Like he was trying to comfort me while he said it. He told me loud girls need reminders they can feel in the morning."

For a second, the only thing I hear is Valentino's watch. I shouldn't be able to hear it. Not from where he's sitting. Not over my own breathing. But I do. Each tick sounds louder than the last.

"And then I don't know." I lower my hand and look at him. "I don't know what happened after that. I don't know how much I remember and how much is missing. There's a point where everything just... stops. I don't know if it stops because they stopped, or because I stopped remembering."

I swallow, but it doesn't help.

"I don't know what happened to me after that. I don't know what they did to me."

Valentino doesn't answer. He leans forward, elbows on his knees, his battered hands hanging between them, and for the first time since I've known him, he looks like a man without a solution.

My gaze catches on those hands. On the raw skin across his knuckles. On the dark stains dried there.

I nod toward his knuckles. "Whose blood is that?" I whisper. "On your hands. Whose is it?"

Valentino

"Mine, mostly." That's true. My knuckles look like I went three rounds with a brick wall, because I did, except the wall had a face. "Some of it isn't."

I sit so I'm level with her instead of looming. Her one stupid shoe is still sitting on the chair across from me. I stare at it for a second. She watches me like it matters, and maybe it does.

She's wearing my shirt. I don't say anything about it. Thinking about it is already more than I should be doing.

Hours ago, I peeled her out of that pink dress because every time I looked at it, all I could think about was what he'd done to her, and I couldn't stand the idea of her waking up still wrapped in it. I couldn't leave her in it. I found one of my own shirts in the closet here, left behind on some job months back, gray and worn soft, and dressed her in it without looking at anything I had no right to look at.

My eyes stayed on the ceiling. Every movement remained careful. Undressing unconscious women isn't new to me, but nothing had ever cost me what that did. No pride remains in admitting how hard the fight was against a thought that had no place in that room.

I kept my hands where they needed to be and nowhere else. That's all that matters.

"I need to tell you what happened," I say. "And after I do, there are going to be some things that change. You're probably not going to like them. But you deserve to know why."

"Then tell me.”

So I do.

I tell her how I came down the corridor and heard her screams. That there were three of them, and the door was locked. I tell her what I saw when I opened it.

The rest, I leave out.

I have killed men for the family, for orders, for money. I've done it often enough that I learned how to shut parts of myself off and just get through it.

That is not how I killed them.

"There were three?" she says.

"Aldo Basile. Two others."

"And they're⁠—"

"Dead. All three."