Page 95 of Ruthless Scar
My wrists ache. I shift them against the cold concrete and the pain flares fresh, grounding me.
He was scared. More scared than I’ve ever seen him. And Lorenzo doesn’t do scared. Lorenzo walks into violence like other people walk into their kitchens. But he was scared of losing me.
“That doesn’t make it okay,” I say to the dark. Testing the words. I sound foreign in this room. “You still locked me up. You still took away my choice.”
The fury is still here. Hot. Mine. He treated me like glass. After the files I’d cracked and the intel I’d gathered and the risks I’d taken.
“Bastard.” The word feels good in my mouth. Solid. “You absolute bastard.”
The anger burns. I let it.
Something drips in the corner. Steady. Rhythmic. I count the drops because my fingers need a task and there’s no keyboard in the black. Seven. Eight. Nine.
But.
I press my back harder against the wall. The cold bites through my shirt, into my spine. My teeth are chattering. When did that start?
“She asked for me. At the end.” In my memory. The kitchen. The rosary between his fingers. He couldn’t look at me when he said it. “I wasn’t there.”
Over a decade carrying that. The last time he let someone he loved face danger alone, she died without him. And then I showed up.
A sound outside. Footsteps, maybe, in the corridor above. I freeze. Listen. They pass. Just the building being a building.
My breathing is too fast. I slow it down. In through the nose. Out through the mouth.
“He panicked,” I say out loud. Sorting it. The way I sort data when the patterns won’t show themselves. “He didn’t calculate. Didn’t strategize. He broke.”
A desperate, terrified choice to keep me safe the only way his broken wiring knew how.
It’s still wrong. Fear isn’t an excuse for taking away my choices. But panic and calculation aren’t the same animal.
I pull my knees tighter to my chest. The concrete is stealing my heat. My hip throbs where I hit the road, and the scrape on my cheek stings every time I shift.
“Izzy, you hold grudges like they’re paying you rent.”
Sofia. She was twelve. I’d been ignoring our cousin for two weeks over a borrowed hoodie.
“You’re right, Sof.” I whisper it. “That was always your department.”
She forgave everyone. Even when they didn’t deserve it. Even when I wanted to fight her battles for her and she’d just shrug and say, “It’s fine, Iz. People are just messy.”
“People are just messy,” I repeat to the dark. Sofia’s words in my mouth.
Another voicemail surfaces. The last one she ever left me. Two days before she was taken. “Okay, Izzy, I know you’re in class or whatever, but I made these brownies and they’re terrible, like, impressively terrible, and I saved you one because you have to witness this disaster with me. Call me back. Love you. Oh wait, one more thing.” A pause. A giggle. “Never mind, I forgot what it was. Bye.”
I never called her back.
My eyes burn. I press the heels of my palms against them. Hard enough to see sparks.
“Focus, Vitale.” Rough. Commanding. “You can fall apart later.”
Lorenzo is messy. The man who locked me in a room is the same man who learned how I take my coffee before I told him, who told me about his mother, who kissed me like I was the first thing he’d wanted in years and it terrified him.
Not because what he did was okay. It wasn’t. We’re going to have words about this. Loud ones. But I can choose not to let this destroy us before we’ve even had a chance.
“We’re going to have a screaming match,” I tell the ceiling. “I’m going to throw something at his head. Something soft. Maybe a pillow.” A pause. “Maybe a book.”
In the cold, alone, shivering on a concrete floor in a trafficking compound, my lips pull. Not quite a smile. Near enough.
