Total pages in book: 78
Estimated words: 73233 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73233 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
They stood like that. Forehead to forehead in the sweet pea row. His hands on her face. Her fingers on his wrist, feeling his pulse, fast and strong and alive.
“Come back to me,” he said. Low. Against her mouth. “Come back.”
Her eyes closed. His pulse under her fingertips. The warm Rhode Island afternoon wrapping around them both.
“I’m here,” she whispered. “I’m here.”
Epilogue
THE PENTHOUSE WAS NOTHING like the one in Los Angeles.
Julian’s LA apartment was forty-three floors of glass and concrete and silence, a monument to a man who’d built an empire on top of a wound. Luciano’s penthouse was on the Upper West Side, twelve floors up, and it smelled like coffee and fresh bread and the particular warmth of a home where someone had been cooking all morning and had left the windows cracked to let in the September air.
Katy stood in the doorway and tried not to grip Julian’s hand hard enough to break his fingers.
“Hi.” Elsa appeared from the kitchen, and the first thing Katy noticed was that her hands were dusted with flour and she was wiping them on the front of a cotton dress that already had a sauce stain on the hem. No shoes. Brown hair pulled back with a clip that was losing its hold. She was small, younger than Katy had expected, and she was smiling, but her other hand was at her side, her index finger tracing a small circle against her thigh, and Katy recognized the gesture because she had her own version of it. The hair tuck, the downward glance, the body doing something small and repetitive because the brain was running too fast. “Come in. I made — there’s a lot of food. I might have overdone it.”
She had overdone it. The dining table was set for four with mismatched plates and cloth napkins that didn’t match either, and there were three different serving dishes on the counter and a pot still simmering on the stove and a vase of sunflowers in the center of the table that had been arranged with more love than skill, the stems uneven, one head drooping slightly left.
At Haven, Katy had served hundreds of meals to couples who spent more on a single bottle of wine than Amy made in a week. She knew what wealth performed like. She knew the particular attention to surface. The right watch, the right water, the right amount of boredom to signal that none of it impressed you because you’d always had it. Everything curated. Everything conscious.
This apartment had none of that. The bookshelves were overstuffed and disorganized. A pair of men’s shoes sat by the door, not hidden in a closet. The kitchen counter had a flour handprint on it. It was the home of two people who were living in it, not presenting it, and something in Katy’s chest unclenched.
“Elsa grew those,” Julian said behind her, nodding at the sunflowers. “She ships them from Nebraska.”
“He flies them,” Elsa corrected, and the circle on her thigh stopped. “He has a cargo company do it. He thinks I don’t know.”
“She found out in the first week,” said a voice from the hallway.
Luciano Salvatore came through the kitchen doorway carrying a bread basket, and Katy’s lungs forgot how to work.
He was taller than Julian. Not by much, an inch, maybe two, but his bearing made the difference feel larger. Dark hair. Dark suit. Dark eyes, not Julian’s blue, but the same depth behind them, the same gravity, as if both brothers had been forged in the same fire and the heat had left the same mark regardless of the color it burned. The resemblance was not in the features. It was in the men themselves: the carriage, the jawline, the way they both held stillness like a weapon and tenderness like a secret.
She was standing in a room with two men who had been born into darkness and had clawed their way out separately, and the women who loved them had found them on the other side.
“Katy.” He said her name simply, without ornament, as though the name itself was enough. He set down the bread basket and extended his hand. “It’s good to meet you.”
His handshake was firm and brief and nothing like Julian’s touch, which was all heat and current and barely-contained want. Luciano’s handshake was a door being opened. Welcome. Enter. You’re safe here.
“Thank you,” she said, and meant it for more than the handshake, and he knew, because his eyes moved to Julian and something passed between the brothers, not a glance, not a nod, just a current, and Katy understood that the full weight of what Luciano had done, the phone call and the search and the address in Rhode Island, was present in the room and would never be spoken of in front of her, because the Salvatore brothers conducted their love in silence and always had.