“I know it,” he said. “I’ll be there.”
He hung up.
Liam stared at me. “Mercy? Why the hospital?”
“Because if I faint, there are doctors,” I tried to joke, and then sobbed. “And because it’s where I’m supposed to be. If I’m going to tell him I want to be a nurse, that I’m going to be a mother, I want to be somewhere that feels true.”
Liam grabbed his keys. “Come on. We’re not letting you do this alone.”
The chapel smelled like old wood and lemon cleaner.
Late afternoon light fell through the high, narrow stained glass in amber and blue bars across the empty pews. The air was cool. Too quiet. Every breath I took echoed.
I sat in the front row with my hands knotted so tight my knuckles were white. Liam stood by the door, arms crossed, trying to look like a bodyguard and mostly looking like a worried older brother.
The door opened at 3:17.
Alessandro walked in and the whole room changed.
He wasn’t in a suit. Dark jeans, a black sweater pushed to his elbows, hair a little windblown like he’d walked fast. He saw me and stopped. His amber eyes softened in a way that made my chest hurt.
Then he saw Liam, and his expression shuttered, just for a second, into something careful and assessing.
“You came,” he said to me, exactly like he had in Room 1520.
I stood up. My legs felt like water.
“You kept calling,” I whispered.
“I told myself I wouldn’t,” he said. He took two steps closer and stopped, giving me space. His gaze dropped to my ketchup-stained uniform peeking out from under my coat, to my swollen eyes, and concern cut through everything else. “Emma, what’s happened?”
My mouth opened. No sound came out.
Liam pushed off the wall. “Her name isn’t Emma.”
Alessandro’s head turned sharply to him. The air went tight.
“What did you say?”
I flinched. “Liam—”
“No,” Liam said, but gently. “He deserves the first truth before the second one. Tell him, Elizabeth.”
Alessandro looked back at me. Slowly. The name landed between us like a stone dropped in still water.
“Elizabeth,” he repeated. Not a question. His voice was very quiet. “Is that true?”
Tears blurred my vision. I nodded once.
“Yes.”
He didn’t move for a long moment. His hands curled at his sides.
“Why did you lie to me?” he asked. No anger yet, just a low, wounded confusion that was worse.
“Because I was paid to,” I said, and the words tore out of me in a rush. “A man named Damien Cross hired me. He gave me the name Emma. He told me Emma was a girl who worked for you, that all I had to do was go to the gala, get close to your table, take a picture of your foundation’s donor ledger. Marla set it up. I needed the money. I was going to do it and leave and you were never supposed to talk to me—” My voice broke. “But you did. And then you sent the key, and I went upstairs, and I—” I pressed my hands to my mouth.
Alessandro’s face had gone pale. Stillness settled over him, the kind of stillness that powerful men get before something breaks.
