Chapter 9
She held the passports in her lap all the way to the airfield.
Two of them. Hers and Marco’s. New names, new photographs, clean paper. The folded slip was a bank transfer — enough money to live quietly somewhere for a very long time.
He was setting her free.
She had spent months imagining this. She had lain awake in a bed that cost more than her old apartment and imagined the door opening, imagined walking out of it and never looking back. She had told herself that the day he let her go would be the day she became a person again.
She had not imagined that he would be bleeding when he did it.
The airfield was private, a single strip of black asphalt with a small hangar and a jet waiting under the lights, engines already turning, heat shimmering off the nacelles into the cold.
Vinnie drove. Mrs. Petrova had been left at the house, and Bella had not been allowed to say goodbye to her either, which was, she realized, a strange thing to feel sad about.
They stopped at the foot of the jet stairs.
Aleandro got out first. His shoulder had been bound in the car with a field dressing that was already showing through, and he moved carefully, but he did not let it show on his face.
Marco climbed out after Bella, thin and pale and quiet, and stopped when he saw the plane.
“Bells.”
“It’s all right.”
“Are you—” He looked at her, then at the man standing a few feet away with blood on his shirt, and something in his expression said that he understood more than she wanted him to. “Are you coming?”
She didn’t answer.
She took his arm and walked him to the stairs. He climbed them slowly, holding the rail, and at the top he turned and looked down at her, and she smiled at him — the real smile, the one she had not used in a long time — and gestured for him to go inside.
The flight attendant closed the door behind him.
The engines changed pitch.
Bella stood at the bottom of the stairs with the two passports in her hand and the wind coming off the field and the lights of a city she had lived in her whole life glowing somewhere behind the trees.
She was free. Her brother was safe. The plane to a new life was fueled and waiting, and all she had to do was climb three steps.
She turned around.
Aleandro Moretti stood at the edge of the tarmac with his hands at his sides, watching her.
He did not move toward her. He did not say her name. He did not make the case for himself, because he never had — he had built a cage and filled it with silk and granite and called it a gift, and he had never once, in all the months, told her that he loved her, or that he was sorry, or that he needed her to stay.
He simply stood there and waited.
He had given her the choice.
It was, she understood with a sudden and devastating clarity, the only thing he had ever given her that he could not take back.
The wind moved across the tarmac. The jet hummed. Somewhere out past the fence, a siren was going somewhere else, on someone else’s worst night.
Bella looked at the stairs.
May you like
Then she looked at the man.
And she did not move.
