Page 72 of Psychotic Faith
Marco nods slowly. "You really do love her."
"Yes." The admission doesn't hurt anymore. "And that's why I'm waiting. Because she needs to decide who she becomes. I won't take that choice from her."
Even if waiting might kill me.
27 - Faith
The seventh step down to the basement makes me taste blood. My throat feels like crushed glass, each breath scraping raw tissue that Neumann’s hands destroyed just hours ago. But he’s down there now, chained, waiting, and all my patience ends today.
My bare feet find the eighth step. Cold concrete, nothing like the warmth of Luca's tears. The Rosetti psycho cried. For me. Marco's words still echo: "He was sobbing when you stopped breathing. Kept saying 'Please, Faith, come back.' Never seen him like that." The description haunts each heartbeat as I descend toward the man who killed my mother.
Marco hadn't asked if I wanted to go. Just disconnected the morphine drip when I demanded it, watched me struggle to stand with legs that shook like a newborn colt's, and said simply: "Your choice. Whatever happens down there."
The ninth step. My hand grips the railing so tight my knuckles ache, but it's nothing compared to the agony in my throat. The medical room upstairs still smells like antiseptic and expensive leather in my memory, that IV drip that fed fluids into my arm because I couldn't swallow properly. I'd woken to afternoon light, disoriented, fingers immediately finding the wounds on my neck. Purple impressions of Neumann's hands, the same pattern my mother wore to her grave.
But I'm not in a grave. I'm alive because Luca broke down doors to get to me, because he breathed life back into my lungs while sobbing. The man who smiles while discussingdismemberment, who handles violence like other people handle paperwork, completely shattered while holding my not-breathing body.
Tenth step. Voices drift up from below. Neumann trying to bargain, offering money, connections, anything. Luca's responses are cold, empty of feeling, like he's reading from a medical textbook. The contrast to the desperate tears Marco described makes my chest tight.
The basement smell hits me as I reach the bottom. Bleach, the sharp tang of fear-sweat, and underneath it all, that dark cologne that's uniquely Luca. The fluorescent lights buzz overhead, making everything stark and shadowless. The concrete is ice under my feet, each step a small shock that keeps me present, keeps me from floating away into memory or morphine haze. This is real. This is happening.
Neumann is chained to a metal chair, looking smaller than the asshole from my nightmares. His expensive suit is wrinkled, sweat staining the collar, making the fabric cling in unflattering ways. The temperature down here makes our breath visible in small puffs. He looks pathetic. Human. Not the godlike destroyer of my childhood memories but just a man who chose evil and dressed it in Armani.
But it's Luca who stops me cold.
He looks worse than Neumann. Beyond exhausted, past the point where stimulants could help. His shoulder hangs wrong, clearly damaged from breaking down those doors to reach me. The memory of him hitting that frame again and again, the wood splintering under his desperate assault, makes my eyes burn with tears I won't shed. Not yet.
Dried tear tracks still mark his face, and he hasn't bothered to wipe them away. His white shirt clings to his chest with sweat, torn in places, blood staining the expensive fabric. The top buttons are undone, showing the hollow of his throat wherehis pulse beats too fast. Even destroyed like this, he's beautiful in that dangerous way that makes my body respond despite everything.
He saved me. Broke himself to save me.
"You shouldn't be up," he says without looking at me, organizing tools on his table with movements that try for precision but betray his trembling hands.
"I needed…" I start, then have to stop, pressing my hand to my throat. The words feel like swallowing glass shards. I point at Neumann, then at myself, then at the tools, hoping he understands what I can't voice.
He finally looks at me then, and those eyes are empty of their usual calculation. Just exhaustion and something raw I've never seen before. Vulnerability. Like all his walls came down when I stopped breathing and he doesn't know how to rebuild them. Or doesn't want to.
"I know," he says softly, and his voice cracks on the words. "I know you need this."
"The daughter joins us," Neumann says, trying for his boardroom authority but achieving only false bravado that makes him seem smaller. "Come to watch your attack dog work? See how the sausage gets made?"
I approach slowly, studying this man who haunts my dreams. He looks old, gray threading through his hair, lines around his eyes. Just a man. The chains rattle as he shifts, trying to maintain his executive posture even while bound to Luca's chair.
"He cried for you," Neumann continues, lips twisting in mockery that makes my hands clench. "The famous Rosetti psycho, sobbing like a child. 'Please come back,'" he imitates what he must have heard from the guards or through surveillance.
I see it. The tiny flinch in Luca's shoulders, the way his hands shake harder, the vulnerability he can't hide anymore. Not fromme. Not after I died in his arms. Not after he let himself break apart completely.
"Stop," Luca tells him, but there's no threat in it. Just bone-deep exhaustion that makes him look ancient despite being only twenty-eight.
I move to Luca, needing to touch him, to ground us both in something real. My hand finds his arm, feeling the tremors running through him. Not from violence or anticipation. From trauma. From nearly losing me. His shirt is damp with sweat under my palm, his muscles tense like he's holding himself together by will alone.
"Tell me," I whisper, though the words scrape like sandpaper against my ruined throat. I have to stop, swallow blood-tinged saliva that makes me want to gag.
His eyes close, and suddenly he looks younger. Not the Rosetti enforcer but remembering when he was a traumatized teenager who never processed his loss. When he speaks, his voice cracks like that boy's would have.
"Found Dad in the dining room," he says, voice hollow as an empty church. "Still alive but bleeding out. Moretti bullets everywhere. I held pressure on the wounds but blood kept coming through my fingers like water. Warm at first, then cold. He tried to speak but just…" He has to stop, his whole body shuddering under my hand. "Just gurgled. Blood in his throat. I couldn't save him. Couldn't protect anyone. Dante lost his voice protecting us. Sofia still has nightmares. I couldn't…"
His voice breaks completely, and I see it clearly now. The parallel between us. Luca at seventeen, holding his dying father, helpless to stop the blood. Twelve-year-old me watching my mother's face turn purple, helpless to stop her murder. Both of us broken by that helplessness, shaped into what we are by the failure to save someone we loved.
