Page 146 of Valentino

I don't have a word big enough for that.

"Good," I say.

Dante nods like he understands everything the word fails to cover.

"There's more," he says. "We're working on how they knew."

I open my eyes.

"The route," he says. "The timing. That truck was waiting exactly where it needed to be. Maybe six people had enough information to make that happen."

"Elio's in federal custody."

"He's one of the six. Not the only one."

Amanda goes still beside me.

Dante slides his hands into his pockets. "Enzo is with the FBI. Sealed off for now. Whatever he knows about who gave him the route, we can't get to it yet."

"So we don't know."

"Not yet."

Amanda doesn't speak.

She doesn't have to.

Someone sold the information.

Someone is still out there.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

TWO WEEKS LATER

Amanda

The seatbelt sign dings on somewhere over Lake Michigan, and Valentino ignores it.

He sits sideways in the leather seat across from me, one shoulder against the cabin wall, his back a careful six inches from the cushion. He has held some version of that position since we left the hospital. In the car. At the dinner table in the house outside Rome. Now here.

A man measuring every surface before he lets it touch him.

Forty stitches did that. Forty stitches and a surgeon who kept saying incredible under his breath like Valentino was supposed to find that comforting.

"You're staring," he says without opening his eyes.

"You're sitting like the seat might betray you. I'm allowed to stare."

One corner of his mouth lifts.

He doesn't argue, because we both know if he leans back, he'll feel Basile's rope all over again, and he'd rather chew glass than let me see it happen.

Outside the window, Chicago comes up through the haze. Gray water. Gray sky. The skyline at the edge of both, familiar enough to make something twist unexpectedly in my chest.

Home.

I look back at Valentino because he's easier than the city. A week in the hospital and another in the farmhouse outside Rome left him leaner. The bruising under his eye has faded to yellow. I told him yesterday it somehow made him look even more annoyed with the world than usual. He asked what that was supposed to mean. I told him I had no idea, and he called me impossible. He made one of those almost-laugh sounds through his nose, and I have been living on it ever since.