Chapter 4

I reached for my bag while Dante wasn't looking. My fingers found a strip of paper — crumpled at the edges — and I folded it beneath the sheet. Quick, practiced. Dropped it into the jar still tucked inside my purse.

Ninety-eight.

"What are you doing?"

Sienna was already gone. Dante stood at the foot of the bed, watching me with that guarded look — the one where he was deciding if something needed managing.

I tugged the zipper closed. "Nothing. Fidgeting."

He moved closer. His fingers reached for my face — slow, his thumb tilting my chin the way he always did. But this time his gaze caught on my cheek. Swollen. Three thin scratches from Sienna's nails running from cheekbone to jaw, already crusting.

His thumb hovered just below the marks.

"She shouldn't have done that." His voice was low, almost careful. "When we get back to New York, I'll make her apologize. Properly."

"Then why did you grab my arm?"

I held his gaze. His eyes were dark — and for a fraction of a second, genuinely pained. The regret looked real. It always looked real with Dante. That was the cruelest part.

But nothing came out.

He couldn't answer. His body had moved before his brain caught up. Sienna was in the line of fire, so he'd stepped in. That was the hierarchy. Always had been.

He cleared his throat. Changed the subject the way Moretti men did — by steering straight into something bigger.

"When we get home," he said, thumb tracing the edge of my jaw, "I want to talk. About us." A pause. "Lola can carry the rings at the ceremony. My mother's already asking for a date."

Marriage. He was talking about marriage while Sienna's lipstick was still on his neck.

I made myself smile. "Sure. That sounds nice."

He exhaled like I'd handed him a gift. We spent the next twenty minutes in careful, hollow conversation — both stepping around the wreckage like guests pretending the chandelier hadn't just crashed.

……

The flight back was three hours of silence broken only by turbulence and Dante's phone buzzing. He held my hand the whole way. I let him. It cost less than pulling away and watching him not understand why.

We landed at Teterboro after nine. His driver was waiting — black Escalade, tinted windows, the Moretti plates that made every cop in the tri-state look the other way.

His phone rang crossing the bridge into Manhattan. He answered on speaker.

Sienna's voice filled the car — bright, casual, as if the hospital had never happened.

"Yo, Moretti. I'm at your place. Made dinner — consider it a white flag. I even set the table like a civilized person."

Dante fired back a few insults — their routine, rapid, easy — and hung up. He squeezed my knee.

"See? She's not bad, babe. Just rough around the edges. Consigliere's kid — no mother, raised around soldiers since she was six. She doesn't know how to be gentle."

I stared out the window. "How does she have keys to our apartment?"

"I gave her a copy months ago. For emergencies." He said it like it was nothing. Like it was obvious.

I didn't respond.

The apartment smelled like garlic and rosemary. Sienna stood in the open kitchen wearing an apron, moving around the space like she'd designed it herself. She knew where the plates were. Which drawer held the napkins. The oven's bad side.

She looked up and grinned. "There they are. Sit down, wash your hands — dinner's almost ready."

The ease of it made my chest ache. She spoke like the woman of this house. And the worst part was — she looked like one, too.

Dante pulled out my chair.

I sat. I looked at the table.

And the air left my body.

A platter sat in the center, steam still curling off the surface. Dark, glazed, unmistakable.

Rabbit.

My vision tunneled. The sound in the room compressed to a single, high-pitched frequency.

"Saw you guys had one in the bedroom," Sienna said, casual, wiping her hands on the apron. "Figured I'd put it to good use. The Szechuan glaze is my dad's recipe."

Lola.

The room fractured. The platter became a bowl of soup on a different table in a different lifetime — my parents laughing, my mother's hand on my shoulder, her voice sweet and coaxing: Eat up, baby. It's delicious, isn't it?

And then the laughter. That awful, rolling laughter when they told me what I'd swallowed.

I don't remember standing.

I remember porcelain shattering. Dante shouting something I couldn't hear over the roaring in my skull. My hands on Sienna's shoulders, slamming her backward. My palm connecting with her face — once, twice, three times — until Dante's arms locked around my waist and wrenched me off.

He held me at arm's length, his face white with shock.

"What the hell is wrong with you?" His grip dug into my arms. "It's a rabbit, Nora. I'll get you another one. Calm down."

A rabbit.

Just a rabbit.

He didn't know. He'd never understood what I'd told him — or maybe he'd understood and it simply hadn't mattered enough to hold.

Sienna shoved past him, red handprint blooming on her cheek. Dante caught her before she could reach me.

"Get out," he told her. "Go home. I'll handle this."

She wrenched free and stormed out, slamming the door hard enough to rattle the frames on the wall.

The apartment was wrecked. Broken plates, scattered food, wine pooling across hardwood. I was on the floor in the corner, knees to my chest, hands over my ears, shaking so hard my teeth clicked.

The memories kept layering — my parents' kitchen, the empty cage, the taste of that broth, the sound of my own screaming, the rain-soaked night I showed up at Dante's door and he held me without a single question.

That boy would have understood.

This man just stared at me like I was something inconvenient.

When the shaking finally stopped, I dragged myself to the window.

Down on the sidewalk, Dante had Sienna pressed against the Escalade. His hands gripped her shoulders. She was crying — or performing it. He pulled her in. She buried her face against his chest. Then he tipped her chin up with two fingers and kissed her.

Unhurried. Certain. Right beneath the window of the apartment we shared.

I turned away.

My hands were steady now.

I found the last strip of paper in my coat pocket. Folded it — crease by crease, the final time — and let it fall into the jar.

Ninety-nine.

I carried the jar to the coffee table and set it in the center, where he'd see it the second he walked in.

Then I packed. Passport, documents, charger — the few things that were actually mine. It didn't take long. It never would have. This apartment had never been my home.

I left through the service entrance and typed one message before I blocked his number:

The jar is full. We're done.