ELENA
The next time Matteo came to the bakery, he wasn't carrying coffee.
"Pack a bag," he said, his voice low, urgent. "Just the essentials. You can't stay here anymore."
Vincent knew. The men from the docks were dead. Retaliation wasn't a risk; it was a promise. My apartment, my bakery—they weren't sanctuaries. They were targets.
I didn't argue. The time for arguing was over. I packed a small duffel bag: a few changes of clothes, my toothbrush, Antonio's notebook, and the worn copy of The Count of Monte Cristo my father used to read to me. Things that felt like they were mine.
The safe house wasn't a house. It was a high-rise apartment on the other side of the city, overlooking a river I didn't recognize. It was aggressively anonymous, decorated in shades of gray and beige, with furniture that still had the tags on the cushions. It smelled like new paint and nothing else. It was the loneliest place I'd ever been.
"No one knows about this place but me," Matteo said, setting my bag down. "You'll be safe here."
Safe felt like a cage.
The first few days were a lesson in suffocating silence. He was there, always. He'd spend hours on his laptop at the small dining table, his face grim, taking calls in low, clipped tones on a burner phone. I would sit on the couch and read, the words blurring on the page. I'd stare out the floor-to-ceiling windows at a city that felt a million miles away.
There was only one bedroom. He took the couch without a word. The first night, I heard him get up three separate times to check the locks on the front door.
We moved around each other like ghosts in the small space. We'd bump into each other in the narrow kitchen, a jolt of contact that felt electric and wrong, followed by a muttered "sorry." He bought groceries—the kind of bread I liked, the expensive butter, fresh basil. He was trying. But the domesticity felt absurd, like playing house in the middle of a war.
The bakery felt like a dream. My hands felt empty, useless. I missed the weight of dough, the film of flour on my skin, the purpose of it. Here, I had no purpose but to stay alive. To wait.
On the third day, he came out of the bedroom after his shower, wearing only a pair of gray sweatpants, a towel slung around his neck. His chest was bare. I saw it for the first time—a long, puckered scar that curved along his ribs on the left side. An old knife wound. It was silver and angry against his skin.
He saw me looking. He didn't cover it. He just met my eyes for a second before grabbing a t-shirt from a duffel bag in the corner. That single glance felt more intimate than if he'd been naked. It was a map of the violence he carried, a part of the history written on his body.
He left to meet one of his men, leaving me alone for the first time. "Don't open the door for anyone," he said. "Not even if the building is on fire. Especially not then."
The silence he left behind was worse than the silence when he was there. I tidied up, needing something to do with my hands. I gathered the coffee cups from the table. I picked up his jacket, which he'd thrown over the back of a chair.
It was heavy. I felt the hard outline of his gun in the inside pocket. And as I went to hang it up, his wallet fell out.
It was black leather, worn at the edges. It hit the floor with a soft thud, spilling a few receipts and a business card. I knelt to pick them up, my heart hammering. This was his. Private. I shouldn't.
But I did.
I gathered the papers, my fingers brushing against the soft leather. I opened it, telling myself I was just putting things back in order. His driver's license was there, the photo of him looking even colder and angrier than he did in person. A few hundred-dollar bills.
And behind a flap, tucked away in its own plastic sleeve, was a photograph.
It wasn't a girlfriend. It wasn't his mother.
It was a girl. Maybe nineteen, twenty at the most. She had Matteo's dark eyes, but where his were guarded and old, hers were laughing. She had a wide, bright smile, a smattering of freckles across her nose, and she was leaning against a carousel horse, her hair caught in the wind. She looked vibrant, alive, and utterly, incandescently happy.
I knew, with a certainty that made my breath catch, that this was his sister. The one his mother had mentioned. The one he hadn't seen in ten years. The one who was dead.
I sank down onto the floor, the wallet in my hands, and stared at her smiling face. This was the ghost that haunted him. This was the loss he never spoke of. This was why he'd looked at me that day at the funeral, a sister grieving a brother, and hadn't given me the usual bullshit speech. He knew. He had stood where I was standing.
All his watchfulness, his fierce, almost suffocating protection of me… it wasn't just about the deal. It wasn't just about Vincent. It was about her. He was protecting me because he hadn't been able to protect her. I was a second chance. A ghost he was trying to save.
My anger at him, the resentment I felt at being a pawn in his game, it didn't disappear, but it shifted. It made room for something else, something softer and more painful. Pity. Empathy.
He wasn't just a monster who killed without flinching. He was a brother who had lost his sister. The two things didn't cancel each other out. They existed side-by-side, twisted together in the man who slept on the couch and checked the locks three times a night.
I carefully tucked the photograph back into its sleeve. I put the receipts and the card back where they belonged. I closed the wallet and slipped it back into the inside pocket of his jacket, right next to the cold, hard weight of his gun.
I hung the jacket in the closet.
When he came back an hour later, I was on the couch, reading my book. He looked at me, his eyes scanning my face, looking for any change.
"Everything okay?" he asked.
"Fine," I said. "Quiet."
He nodded, accepting it.
But something had changed. I had a secret now, too. I knew the name of his ghost. I had seen the face of his pain.
And as he moved past me to stare out the window at the city below, I didn't just see Matteo Moretti, the heir to a crime family.
I saw a boy standing in front of a carousel, watching his sister laugh, trying to memorize the sound.