Page 47 of The Hitman's Secret Baby
I walk quickly, tailing her until she's close enough to the back gate. "Well, well," I chuckle despite myself. She stops in her tracks.
"Escaping, are we?" I say, my voice dry with amusement.
My arms cross slowly, a silent signal that I am not here to raise the alarm.
She stares at me like I'm a puzzle she does not have time to solve. "Aria," she says, her voice edged in suspicion.
"You don't have much time," I reply. "You're heading straight into a trap. There are three guards at the east gate, and Luca's personal driver has not left his post in hours. If you step outside, you'll be caught within minutes."
"Then why are you stopping me?" she asks, breathless, wild-eyed.
I take a step closer, deliberate, controlled.
"Because I understand what it means to want out."
She doesn't respond.
Just watches me with a mix of caution and disbelief.
"Follow me," I say at last. "If you're serious about leaving him, you'll need a way out that doesn't end with a bullet to the spine."
She hesitates for the span of a heartbeat, then nods.
We move fast, ducking through the narrowest halls, the ones built for invisible staff and quiet exits.
My heels click too loudly, but there is no time to change.
We slip through the undercroft and out a side gate only my family knows about, one that used to be used by vineyard workers long before this city belonged to monsters.
The night outside is cold and damp, salt clinging to the wind.
A car is waiting.
She falters when she sees it. "Where are we going?"
"To my family's estate," I say. "It will buy you time. And it will buy me a way out of a disaster of my own making."
She doesn't ask questions after that.
The driver does not speak as we glide through the sleeping city.
Valentina sits beside me, hands folded tightly in her lap, her wedding ring conspicuously absent.
Her skin is pale beneath the streetlamps, her eyes glittering with something that looks too much like fear.
By the time we pull through the gates of the Lombardi estate, the mood has changed.
The guards greet me as they always do.
I lead her inside without explanation, through the side entrance and into one of the older wings of the house, far from the ballroom and my parents' surveillance.
The house looms like a judge, stern and waiting.
But to the woman beside me, it must look like salvation.
She glances once toward the balconies overhead, where carved balustrades catch the light like teeth, and I watch something shift in her posture.
She is holding herself together with borrowed strength.
