Maya’s eyes burned. “You were dead.”
“I had to be.”
“You left me.”
“I saved you.”
Another shot cracked through the restaurant.
Luca shoved them both through the kitchen doors. “You can continue this reunion when we are not being hunted.”
The kitchen was chaos. Cooks crouched under counters. A server sobbed beside the freezer. The smell of garlic, steam, and fear filled the air.
Luca moved like a man who knew every inch of the building. He pressed his palm against a steel panel behind the wine shelves. A hidden door clicked open.
Maya stared at it. “What is this place?”
“A restaurant,” Luca said. “When the world behaves.”
Elena pushed her inside first.
Beyond the door was a narrow stairwell descending into darkness.
Maya stopped. “No. I’m not going anywhere until someone tells me the truth.”
Luca’s face turned cold. “The truth is outside with weapons.”
Elena’s hand tightened around Maya’s. “Please.”
That one word did what Luca’s command could not.
Maya went down.
The stairwell smelled of dust and old stone. Their footsteps echoed as the door sealed behind them. Above, the muffled panic of Giardino faded until there was only the hum of hidden electricity and Maya’s uneven breathing.
At the bottom waited a black car inside an underground garage.
A man in a gray suit stood beside it. Broad shoulders. Silver hair. A scar across one eyebrow.
“Elena,” he said, as if seeing a ghost no longer surprised him.
“Enzo,” Elena replied.
Luca opened the back door. “Get in.”
Maya did not move.
Seventeen years of grief had cracked open inside her, and underneath it was something hotter.
“You knew she was alive,” she said to Luca.
“Yes.”
Her voice shook. “All this time?”
“Yes.”
“And you let me think she was dead?”
His gaze did not soften. “I let you live.”
Maya slapped him.
The sound echoed through the garage.
Enzo’s eyebrows rose slightly. Elena went still.
Luca turned his face back slowly. A faint red mark appeared along his cheekbone.
Maya expected anger. A threat. That dangerous little smile.
Instead, he looked almost tired.
“You can hate me in the car,” he said.
Elena touched Maya’s shoulder. “Please, Maya.”
Maya flinched from her.
The pain that crossed Elena’s face was worse than any apology.
But Maya got into the car.
Rain hammered the roof as Enzo drove them out through a tunnel beneath the city. No one spoke for the first several minutes. Maya sat between the two ghosts of her life: the mother who had died and the man who had apparently buried the truth.
Finally, she looked at Elena.
“Start talking.”
Elena stared down at her hands. They were elegant hands, but not the hands Maya remembered. These had scars. A burn mark crossed one knuckle. Her mother had once smelled of lavender soap and flour. Now she smelled of rain, metal, and gunpowder.