Page 77 of The Hitman's Secret Baby
Like five years of absence did not leave a wound I still cannot cauterize.
When she left, I told myself I would not beg, not when I was the one who let her walk out of my life with her head high and her voice shaking, with that look in her eyes like she could not tell if she hated me or still wanted me to reach for her.
Maybe both.
She thought this life would eat her alive.
She never understood that it had already consumed me, long before I knew her name.
I was born into this world the way some men are born into winter, shaped by cold truths and quiet war.
She saw what we did to survive and called it a betrayal.
I called it duty.
I stop by the second-floor gallery, where one of Luca's old portraits hangs in a gold-trimmed frame.
He was my father's friend once, before the world turned and men like mine started dying faster than they could pass down lessons.
I was young when I learned that respect is not inherited.
It is carved, earned, bled for.
The Salvatores did not make me.
They tempered me.
And I owe them everything.
Still, I cannot pretend she did not take something with her when she vanished.
It was not just her touch or her voice or the way she could say my name like it meant something sacred.
It was the idea that I could be more than this, that maybe I was allowed to want something outside these walls.
She wanted me to leave it behind, all of it, and build what?
A life that would never stop chasing me down?
A clean house on a quiet street where I could forget what my hands were trained to do?
The question never needed an answer because she already gave herself one.
She ran.
I reach the end of the corridor before I realize I have no idea where I was walking to in the first place.
The weight in my chest has grown sharper, and I know it is not anger.
It is worse.
It is hope, the kind I try to drown in red wine and smoke.
The kind I don't admit I still feel when I pass a woman with dark hair or hear a voice in the crowd that sounds too familiar.
She is not supposed to be alive, and yet I have never stopped listening.
The soft patter of footsteps interfere with the direction of my thoughts.
