Page 109 of The Hitman's Secret Baby
We stay like that a little longer.
Then I draw back, just enough to ease out of her, just enough to feel the loss of her heat and the ache that follows it.
She turns slowly to face me. Her eyes are glossy in the faint moonlight, her mouth soft and swollen from the way I kissed her, and she looks at me like she has no idea what to say. I do not speak either. There is too much, and none of it fits the silence.
Instead, I reach for her hand and pull her toward the couch. We get our clothes back on, and for the first time in years, we sit. Just sit. After a long time, I speak. "I cannot kill you."
She sighs beside me. "Will you let me run?"
I angle my head at her, only slightly. "Do you want to?"
19
ARIA
The moment he asks it, everything in me stills.
"Do you want to run?"
His voice is quiet, hardly above a whisper, but it lands like a wave crashing over years of resistance.
We're still tangled in the half-light of the living room, the warmth of his body surrounding me, grounding me, but it's that question that undoes everything.
I don't answer right away, because I don't know how. Because I've spent so long surviving that I don't know what it means to stop.
"I did," I say finally, my voice fragile, like old silk stretched too thin. "Every single day. Every time Gabriel asked me a question I didn't have the strength to answer. Every time I looked over my shoulder. Every time I closed my eyes and saw blood, or silence, or your face."
He doesn't flinch. His arm is still around me, but looser now, like he's giving me space to speak, or to run if I choose to.
"But I'm tired, Enzo." I reach for the truth the way dancers reach for a final pirouette, controlled but trembling. "I can't keepholding my breath like this. I can't raise my son in the dark while pretending the sun never existed."
Enzo's hand finds mine. He doesn't squeeze it, just covers it, like an oath without words. "Then let's stop," he murmurs. "Let's stop running."
I know what that means.
He cannot leave the family.
He would never ask it of me, and I would never ask it of him.
This is the man who killed for them, bled for them, stood beside Luca Salvatore when half the underworld flinched.
Asking him to walk away would be like asking him to rip out part of his soul.
So, I do the only thing I can. I nod.
"I'll go back," I whisper, and the moment I say it, something heavy lifts from my chest. "But if we do this, it has to be on our terms. No hiding. No half-truths. No shadows."
He looks at me then, really looks at me, and I feel the pieces of us start to reassemble—clumsily, imperfectly, beautifully.
He brings my knuckles to his lips.
There is nothing seductive about it. Just reverence. And in that gesture, I feel the past and the present collapse into something new.
We don't sleep. We just lie in silence with our thoughts curling around us like smoke.
When dawn creeps in, pale and golden through the curtains, I hear the soft shuffle of Gabriel's steps down the hall. He's blinking, still half-asleep, clutching the little stuffed lion I stitched for him last winter.
Then his eyes land on Enzo.
