Page 71 of Ruthless Scar
When he comes back, I’m lying on my side. He wipes me clean. Careful. Sets the cloth aside.
I sit up. Swing my legs off the bed. Reaching for the shirt on the floor.
“Don’t go.”
Two words. I freeze with my hand on the fabric. I look at him. Standing by the bed with the water glass and the request hanging in the air like it cost him a year of silence.
This man. Asking me not to leave.
I let go of the shirt. Lie back down.
He sets the water on the nightstand. Gets in beside me. The mattress holds us both. His body stiff against mine. It’s in the way he’s holding himself still. Like he doesn’t trust his own body not to ruin this.
I reach for the blindfold on the pillow. Hold it up. The silk pooling between us.
“Next time, I’m putting this on you.”
His throat bobs. He doesn’t say no.
I set the blindfold on the nightstand. Lie back. His bed. His sheets. My eyelids get heavy. The world narrows to the sound of his heartbeat and the press of him along my side.
“Lorenzo.”
A sound low in his chest. An acknowledgment.
My eyes fall shut. He reaches for me under the sheet. Our palms press together.
I fall asleep first. I know this because the last thing I hear is his heartbeat. Still awake. Still here.
He stays.
20
LORENZO
I slept through the night. That hasn’t happened since the phone call at nineteen. But her warmth along my side. Her breathing. The weight of her hand still holding mine under the sheet where she reached for it in the dark.
I woke at dawn with her hair across my chest and my arm around her back and the first thought in my head wasn’t a threat check.
It wasshe’s here.
She stirred a few minutes later. Reached past me without opening her eyes, fingers finding my shirt on the chair. Pulled it over her head. The fabric swallowed her, falling past her thighs. She didn’t ask. Just took it like it belonged to her now.
She kissed my jaw on her way out. Padded barefoot toward her room. I listened to the floorboards. Third one creaked. She knows to avoid it now.
I lay there for a full minute after she left. Staring at the ceiling. The pillow still warm. Then I got up. Made her coffee. Covered it.
The name surfaces in a ledger. Nico brings it to the garage.
A printout from Marchetti’s books. The bookie who runs the card game off Magazine Street. Isabella flagged the gambling side channel weeks ago, traced it through the Benedetti network, identified the financial signature, and hit the wall where digital ends and paper begins. She’s the reason Nico went in for the physical ledgers. Her trail. Her work. And now the ledgers are talking.
One entry. One name. One debt cleared six weeks before Sofia Vitale vanished.
Paolo Ferraro.
“Forty-two thousand.” Nico sets the paper on the workbench. His expression gives away nothing. Nico never hints at just how bad the information is. “Owed to a Benedetti-connected operation. Settled in full. No payment plan. No collateral listed. One transaction. The intermediary signed it off as ‘resolved, special arrangement.’”
I pick up the paper. Read the numbers. Clean print. Black on white.
