Chapter 488
Elena swept her gaze across the courtyard, searching every shadow, every gap between the hedges. There was no one there. Just snow, and silence, and the two small figures she held in her palm.
Julian reached her a moment later, slightly out of breath. “Elena, what’s wrong?”
She turned the little snowman over carefully, studying the careful details , the twig candle, the tiny cake pressed into its hands. Her chest squeezed. “I thought Anna came back.”
“Your sister? The one who went missing?”
She nodded without looking up.
“It looks just like the ones she used to make,” she said softly. The memory hit her before she could brace for it , Anna’s small hands patting snow into shapes, her tongue between her teeth, completely serious about it. Always so serious about the little things.
Julian stepped around to face her, his expression gentle but weighted with the kind of honesty she hadn’t asked for. “Elena, it’s been years. If she were alive, she would’ve found a way back by now. She was so young when she disappeared.” He paused. “She’s probably gone.”
She knew he wasn’t being cruel. She knew he meant to help. But hearing it said out loud , hearing Anna reduced to a past tense, to a probably , cracked something open in her that she’d been holding shut for a very long time.
Tears spilled before she could stop them. “It was my fault,” she whispered. “I should never have taken her out that day. I should’ve held her hand. I should’ve held on tighter.”
“You were a child yourself. How could you have known?”
She looked up at him, her face wet and open in a way she rarely let anyone see. “I’d rather it had been me. She wasn’t even six years old, Julian. She was so small.”
He pulled her into his arms without another word, and she let him, pressing her face against his shoulder while the cold settled around them both.
Just on the other side of the stone wall, I stopped breathing.
Vito’s hand was still over my mouth, firm and immovable, his arm locked around my waist. I could feel his heartbeat against my back , steady, controlled, everything mine wasn’t. I had heard every word Elena said. Every single one. And the sound of her voice, raw and wrecked with guilt she’d been carrying for years, was doing something to me that I couldn’t hold back.
It was my fault. I should’ve held her hand tighter.
The tears came so fast I couldn’t blink them away. My whole body shook with the effort of staying silent. I wanted to tear free. I wanted to slam through that wall and grab her and tell her , Elena, stop. Please stop. None of this was you. I would have screamed it if I could. I would have said it a thousand times until she believed it.
But Vito held me, and he didn’t let go.
He wasn’t the boy I’d first met on the island anymore. That was clear in the way he moved, the way he held me without effort even as I fought him , not rough, but absolute. There was a steadiness to him now, something settled deep in his bones, like a man who had long since made peace with his own strength. My struggling barely registered. He simply absorbed it.
I knew, somewhere under the panic, that he was right to stop me. If I walked out there now , if the wrong people found out I was alive , everything would unravel. The plan, the safety, all of it. I wouldn’t survive what came next. I knew that. I’d known it before we even came here.
So slowly, breath by breath, I made myself go still.
Julian kept talking quietly to Elena. After a long moment, she wiped her face and let him guide her away. I watched her go from the shadows , her silver dress catching the light, her steps careful and composed again, the way she always pulled herself back together , and I said her name over and over inside my head like a prayer.
Elena. Elena. Elena.
She disappeared around the corner, and the courtyard went quiet.
Vito’s grip finally loosened.
The moment it did, I turned around and hit him. Both hands, square in the chest, as hard as I could. It didn’t matter that it hurt me too. “You absolute bastard,” I said, my voice cracking. “You bastard.” I hit him again. He didn’t move. He didn’t grab my wrists, didn’t step back, didn’t try to explain himself. He just stood there and took it, and somehow that made it worse , because it meant he knew I wasn’t wrong.
I kept going until my hands ached and the anger finally burned itself down to something quieter. Sadness, maybe. Or exhaustion. I wasn’t sure there was a difference.
I took a breath and dropped my gaze. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I lost control. I,”
“Don’t.”
I looked up. Something had shifted in his face , not quite pain, but close to it. Something that didn’t sit easily on his features, like it didn’t belong there and he wasn’t sure what to do with it.
He’d kept me on that island for years. I had every reason to be furious with him. And instead I was standing here apologizing. I knew, from the way he looked at me, that he understood exactly how little sense that made. Maybe that was what undid him.
He pulled me into his arms. Not gently, not slowly , he just closed the distance and held me, both arms tight around me, his chin dropping toward the top of my head. I felt the tension in him, all that controlled stillness, and underneath it something that felt almost like relief.
A single strip of light fell through a gap in the stonework above us, landing pale and quiet across my hand where it rested against his coat.
“Thank you, Anna,” he said. His voice was rough at the edges, like the words had cost him something.
I blinked. “For what? I just hit you. Hard.”
“It didn’t hurt.”
“Vito,”
“Let me see your hands.”
He didn’t move to look at them. He just held on tighter, pulling me closer instead, and I felt something in my chest go very quiet , not calm, exactly, but still. Like the moment just before a storm decides which way to go.
“Don’t move,” he said softly. “Just let me hold you for a while.”
So I didn’t.