Total pages in book: 73
Estimated words: 70097 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 350(@200wpm)___ 280(@250wpm)___ 234(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 70097 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 350(@200wpm)___ 280(@250wpm)___ 234(@300wpm)
I had been unconscious for most of it, but the body never truly forgot.
It kept a running tally.
It stored each memory within its flesh, carved each betrayal into its bones, and wore every scar like a confession no one else could read.
***
I heard the sound of his boots against the hardwood floors in the hallway before he knocked on my door. It was a short triple rap, then a pause, then two more.
“Enter,” I said.
The heavy oak door swung open without a sound. In the window’s reflection, his reflection materialized. First Rocco’s broad shoulders filled the frame, then I saw his lips tight with a grim line. He stepped inside my office, the weight of him settling into the silence.
“Evening,” he said, his voice a low gravel in the quiet room before he closed the door behind him.
I nodded, eyes still on the dark windows. Rocco carried a folder in one hand. “What have you found?”
He crossed the room in three large steps and set the folder on my desk. “The trail went cold after Casablanca.”
My hand tightened around the glass at his words. “Morocco?” I asked.
I turned around to face him as he opened the file with careful fingers. Inside were photos, a stack of printed emails, and some pages covered in his precise, all-capitals handwriting.
He laid out the photos in a grid, top to bottom.
And there she was.
My wife.
Ethereal as I remembered.
In one photo, Serafina was wearing a loose headscarf and sunglasses big enough to cover half her face. It looked like she was in a street market, and she was trying very hard to fit in.
Another photo—Serafina ducking into a taxi.
Serafina sitting at a small table outside a cafe, an iced coffee in her hand.
Every photo looked like a still from a surveillance film.
And in none of them did she look back.
So careless. Too naive and unguarded.
Rocco tapped one photo, then another. “First in Tangier. Two weeks ago. Next is Marrakesh, four days after. Nothing since.”
“My dear wife seems to be enjoying a nice world tour,” I drawled, eyes still on the photos.
I can’t take my fucking eyes off her.
Goddamn it, I was pathetic.
Rocco shrugged. “She’s smart.”
Indeed, she was.
“Not smarter than me.” I sipped my drink. “She’s too reckless in her escape, almost like she’s not trying hard enough.”
In some perverse subconscious, I wondered if she wanted to be found.
I wondered if she was enjoying knowing the fact that I was coming for her, chasing her until I would eventually bring her home.
I had not forgiven Serafina for shooting me. I had also not forgiven her for running. The two things were indistinguishable in my mind.
I was not a sentimental man. I didn’t believe in fate, or justice, or love the way poets wrote about it. But there was something in the ache in my chest, the shrapnel of Serafina’s bullet burrowed close to the bone, that made me almost zealous about finding her.
“Well,” Rocco rumbled, the low light catching the faint white scar that bisected his upper lip as it tugged into a half-smirk. “She did shoot you and—”
The glass in my hand paused halfway to my mouth. “Finish that sentence,” I said calmly, my eyes narrowing on him before taking another slow, deliberate sip of my whiskey. “I dare you.”
That stupid smirk was gone just as quickly. He raised his hands, a gesture both placating and theatrical—a mock surrender. The knuckles of his hand were freshly scabbed. Either from the pit fight or… he needed answers from someone who wasn’t too keen on talking. “I wouldn’t dare.”
“You were thinking it,” I accused, but only half-seriously.
Rocco met my gaze, his dark eyes holding mine for a beat too long. He was one of the few men who could do so… look me in the eyes and not cower. We had stood next to each other, slick with rain and blood, in alleyways and warehouses that smelled of rust, fear, and death, since the night I took the title of Capo. We had bled in the same gutters, extracted confessions from men who were less than rats, their pleas still echoing in my ears.
Rocco, the bastard son of my father’s Consigliere, was more than a soldier. He was the archive of my history, the one man who knew the weight of every soul I’d sent to hell.
Unknowingly, he was the anchor to my chaos. The keeper of every secret that mattered.
Well, most of them anyway.
“Do you want me to keep looking?” Rocco asked.
There was a slow pulse at the center of my chest, right where my scar was. “What do you think she’ll do next?”
He thought about it for a moment, his face moving with something almost like pity in the lines of his mouth. I didn’t know why I asked him that question.
He didn’t know Serafina, not in the ways that mattered.