Chapter 6
She understood it all now, laid out like a blueprint of everyone’s carefully maintained lies. Luca hadn’t needed Vanessa to be an assassin sent for revenge. He’d needed her to be exactly what she actually was — the daughter of the man both their fathers had erased — because her rage, once lit, would burn everything down indiscriminately, Moretti and Bellini both, and Luca would walk out of the fire holding whatever he wanted left standing.
He’d used her outrage the way a man lights a fire in someone else’s house to warm his own hands.
Vanessa had spent three years believing she’d chosen quiet, ordinary love with Damien Moretti as an escape from her old life.
Tonight she understood something worse and better at once.
She hadn’t married into the family that killed her father by accident.
Some sealed-off, unexamined part of her — the nine-year-old girl who’d memorized three pages of names before she understood what memorizing them would cost her — had chosen this exact man on purpose, long before she let herself call it love, because some wounds only heal from standing directly inside the room where they happened.
She hadn’t come to destroy Damien.
She’d come to find out, once and for all, whether the man wearing his father’s name had also inherited his father’s willingness to erase inconvenient people.
Three years of watching him had already answered that question.
Damien had never once, in three years, asked her to disappear a problem the way his father would have.
He’d asked her to stay out of rooms he thought would hurt her.
That wasn’t the same crime.
May you like
It had just felt like one, from the outside, for a long time.
Vanessa closed the case, put her father’s ledger inside her jacket instead of the storage box, and drove back into the city with both truths sitting side by side in her chest for the first time in her adult life instead of buried in separate places.
