I wear his name like a scar.
Alessandro Rossi stole everything from me; my freedom, my future, the lie I told my father to keep him alive. He thinks I'm a tool to be used, a bride to be displayed, a Fraga to be broken. He thinks the ring on my finge...
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The garden was cold and dark and I had no business being out here at this hour, but the house felt like a cage and my skin was still buzzing from the car ride home.
Alessandro's bloodied fingers laced through mine as he led me out of the club. The things he'd said. The way he'd looked at me like I was the only fixed point in a world he'd happily set on fire. I couldn't sit still with all of that still humming under my skin, so I walked.
Fico was near the gate, posted up with the other guards. He looked too young to be standing out there in the dark with a gun on his hip and that dead-serious expression he'd probably practiced in the mirror a hundred times until it stuck. But there was something else about him tonight. Something in the way he held himself that I hadn't noticed before.
"Fico."
He turned. The soldier mask slipped on fast but not fast enough. I caught the flicker underneath, of something older than his young age. Something tired.
"Ma'am."
I stopped a few feet away and folded my arms against the chill. "I've been trying to reach you. Helena said you took time off. For your arm?"
He glanced down at the arm in question, the one that had taken a baseball bat meant for my skull. He flexed his fingers, a small demonstration. "Yes, ma'am. Hard to be useful with only one hand."
"How old are you, Fico?"
"Twenty."
I shook my head. "You should be in university. Chasing some dream. Something better than standing out here in the cold waiting for someone to try and shoot at us again."
Something darker surfaced on his expression and then disappeared just as fast. "University wasn't really in the cards for me."
"Because of Alessandro?" I asked. "Did he drag you into this?"
"No." The word came out sharp, almost offended. "Alessandro's the reason I'm still breathing." He paused, weighing something. "My father worked for him once. Fed information to the wrong people for a payout. Pocket change. He sold out the Rossis for pocket change, and when Alessandro found out, he had every right to put a bullet in my father's head and the rest of us along with him. That's how it works. You know that."
I did know that. It made my stomach turn, but I knew it.
"Instead he made sure we had food. Paid for my brother's school. My mother, my sisters, they're alive because he chose not to do what anyone else in his position would've done." Fico's voice stayed steady, but his eyes had gone somewhere else. Somewhere darker. "So no, ma'am. I'm not here because I have to be. I'm here because I owe him everything. And I'll stand at this gate until my legs give out if that's what he needs from me."
I didn't know what to say. I'd spent so long seeing Alessandro as the villain in every story that I'd never stopped to consider he might be the hero in someone else's.
