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"Who taught you that?" I ask, genuinely impressed.
Her smile is knowing. Dangerous. "Everyone underestimates a girl with a book."
"Stefano!" My father's voice breaks the moment. "Come inside!"
But I can't look away from her. Can't stop seeing how different she is. How she doesn't fit. How she looks like she's already planning her escape.
“You are very good,” she says to me, glancing at me coyly, and then throwing the knife at the target, hitting the bullseye dead center. “But I’m better.”
Even then, I knew.
She would change everything.
I just didn't know how.
The memory dissolves like smoke, pulling me back to the brutal reality of the warehouse. Ava stands before me, a stranger wearing the face of the girl I once knew.
My broken body trembles, from pain, from cold, from something deeper and more devastating than physical suffering.
She moves closer. Each step calculated. Precise. The way she used to plan her philosophical arguments as a child now transformed into something more dangerous.
"Stefano," she says, and for a moment, just a fraction of a second, I hear something underneath the coldness. A tremor. A hint of the woman I love.
The Fiori brothers watch, hungry for blood. For destruction.
I tune them out and look at Ava. There is something in her gaze that isn’t the hate she professed to earlier. My heart beats faster in my chest.
She tilts her chin down slightly. A tell. A signal.
"You're going to die," Carlo says, almost conversationally. "And she's going to be the one to do it."
I can't look away from her. Can't stop searching her face for some trace of the girl who promised to follow me to the ends of the earth. The woman who carries our child.
Her hand reaches out. Touches my face again.
So gentle. So familiar.
And yet completely, terrifyingly foreign.
My mind struggles with the dissonance. Did I imagine the softness I saw in her gaze, the way she dropped her chin?
"I'm sorry," she whispers so softly I'm not sure the Fiori brothers even hear it.
But I do.
Her lips move close to my ear, barely a whisper. "Trust me."
Those two simple, magical words. Something in her tone, a vibration, a depth beneath the cold surface, makes something inside me pause.
Her hand connects with my already bruised face again.
The slap cracks through the warehouse like a gunshot. Pain explodes across my already battered cheek, my head snapping to the side from the force.
I blink. Slowly. Painfully.
Not understanding.
Trust her?