Page 8 of Devil Among Men

“We need somewhere smaller,” Maurizio says.

“Somewhere Vito wouldn’t expect us to hide,” I agree.

Portia’s quiet while the plans get made, her arms wrapped around herself, watching the flames finally start to die down into smoke and ash.

What’s left of the villa resembles a charred skeleton. Nothing like the luxury place we’d started sleeping in only weeks ago.

“I need to grab what’s left of my things,” she says eventually, her tone flat and exhausted. “If there’s anything left.”

“I’ll go with you.”

She doesn’t argue, which tells me more about how rattled she still is than anything she could say out loud.

We pick through the scorched remains of her room together in silence, salvaging what little survived—a jacket, a few photographs with singed edges, a necklace I remember buying her weeks ago that somehow made it through unscathed.

“I keep thinking about what you said yesterday morning,” she says finally, turning the necklace over in her fingers. “About wanting to protect me. I think I understand it a little better now. Watching that beam come down on Jayla. Not knowing if she’d get up.”

“Portia—”

“I’m not saying I’ve forgiven you.” She glances up at me, eyes red-rimmed and misty. “I haven’t. I don’t know when I will. But I understand the impulse a little more than I did twelve hours ago.”

An urge to reach for her strikes me.

Every instinct in me demands I pull her against my chest the way I did on the stairs, when nothing mattered but keeping her safe, but the memory of yesterday morning’s conversation lingers between us.

…which means I don’t trust myself to read this moment right.

“I love you,” I say instead. “That hasn’t changed. Not for one second, not even with everything unresolved between us. If anything, tonight only made it worse. Watching you run through that fire and knowing exactly how much I stand to lose.”

Her jaw works as if she’s fighting emotion back. “I know.”

It isn’t I love you too. It isn’t forgiveness. But it isn’t nothing either, and for tonight, I’ll take it.

“We should go,” she says, tucking the necklace into her pocket. “Before it gets light.”

We decide to keep things simple, heading to a B&B thirty minutes south.

The drive stretches on in near silence, the three of us packed into a car meant for two, exhaustion and the crash after adrenaline weighing down on everyone differently.

Maurizio keeps both hands locked on the wheel, eyes flicking to the rearview every few seconds, checking for headlights that trail too long behind us. Portia’s forehead rests against the window, her breath fogging small circles in the glass.

Nobody talks.

We’re in our heads, mulling over the events of the past twenty-four hours.

The B&B sits at the end of a narrow gravel lane, tucked between olive trees that have clearly gone untended for years, branches overgrown and scraping against the building’s faded blue shutters.

A crooked wooden sign reads Locanda del Faro in chipped gold script, half the letters worn away by weather. The opposite of the villa in every way.

An older woman answers the door before Maurizio even finishes knocking, wrapped in a robe, gray hair pinned back loosely, sharp eyes taking in the three of us—soot-streaked, exhausted, clearly running from trouble—without a flicker of surprise.

“Quattro camere?” she asks, turning to grab a set of keys off a hook by the door.

“Due,” Maurizio answers. “E niente domande.”

“Non faccio mai domande.” She holds out her palm, and Maurizio counts out cash, more than double what the rooms are probably worth. Tucking the money into the pocket of her robe, she hands over three brass keys.

“Terza porta a sinistra,” she says, gesturing down a narrow hallway lit by a single flickering bulb. “Colazione alle otto, se volete.”