The Woman In His War

Chapter Nine: Nico

The silence stayed longer than it should have.

That was the thing about sitting across from Serena Savino. Silence with her never felt empty. It felt inhabited. Like something breathing quietly between them. Dante sat with it longer than he should have allowed himself to. He looked at her hands on the table. The phone between them. The closed fist she'd made of the hand that had trembled and hadn't opened since.

He stood abruptly. Then he walked out without saying anything. Serena’s eyes stayed on him, trying to decide what kind of man sat across from a woman while her world burned and offered silence instead of comfort. Dante held her gaze for one suspended second. Then he walked out without saying anything. Because there was nothing he could say that wouldn't sound insufficient beside what her father had just taken from her. The compound had settled into its midmorning rhythm. Quiet footsteps. Distant voices. The mechanical hum of operations running beneath stone walls older than the men commanding them. Dante moved through it without direction. Past the library. Past the kitchen. Past the east corridor with its locked doors and buried histories. His footsteps echoed softly against the stone until he reached the west wing. Then he stopped.

A plain door waited at the end of the corridor. There were no markings or guards. Nothing separated it from storage rooms or maintenance spaces. Yet, nobody in the compound touched that door or asked about it. He stood in front of it for a long moment without moving. And against his will, his mind returned to Serena again. The tremor in her fingers. The way she'd said please. It was the first thing she had asked of him that wasn't information, negotiation or resistance. And somehow it had unsettled him more than threats ever had.

Dante slid a hand into his pocket and wrapped his fingers around the key. He unlocked the door and for a moment, he couldn't step inside. Because every single time he entered this room, some part of him still expected to find his brother alive. But he went in anyway. The room was small. A bed against the wall. A desk. A shelf. A shuttered window. Nothing unnecessary.

Dante crossed the room slowly and picked up a photograph on the desk first. Nico at sixteen. Sitting on the hood of their father's car in summer sunlight, squinting toward the camera with his mouth half open because he had been speaking when the picture was taken. Nico was always speaking when pictures were taken. He never stayed still long enough for silence. Dante stared at his brother's face and for the first time that day, his own expression broke. Not visibly enough for anyone else to notice. But here, alone, he stopped holding the line so tightly. He let himself remember the sound of Nico's laugh.

"Nineteen," he said quietly into the empty room.

The word barely existed after it left his mouth. He set the photograph down exactly where it belonged and picked up a watch. The leather strap was worn thin near the buckle. Nico had saved three months for it by working weekends in a garage two towns over. He'd walked into the kitchen wearing it like he'd bought a kingdom instead of a secondhand watch. Their mother had laughed. Their father had called it impractical. Nico had worn it every day anyway. Dante ran his thumb over the cracked leather.

He moved forward and sat on the edge of the bed. The mattress barely sank beneath his weight. Fifteen years later, he still replaced it every few years, as if someone might eventually come back to sleep in it. After five minutes of staring at the mattress, he stood suddenly and crossed back to the desk. A book waited beside the photograph. Worn spine. Folded corners.

Nico used to dog-ear pages no matter how many times their mother complained about it. A novel cover worn soft at the edges, spine split in three places from being opened too wide too often. The kind of book people carried everywhere because the world inside it had become familiar enough to live in. Nico had taken it to school, to garages, to waiting rooms. Dante had once found it in the refrigerator because Nico had been reading while looking for milk and had forgotten he was holding it. He opened it at the dog-eared page automatically. Their mother used to complain about that. Bookmarks exist for a reason, Nicolas.

Nico's response had always been the same. And yet corners fold for free.

Dante stared at the page for a moment before the memory settled back down. The passage wasn't dramatic. That had been the thing about Nico's favorite books, he liked absurd people saying absurd things with complete sincerity. The scene was between two brothers arguing while dragging a broken sofa up four flights of stairs because neither of them could admit they should have hired movers.

"If this sofa kills me," the younger brother said, halfway up the stairs, "I want everyone at my funeral informed that I died because you were cheap."

"You're not dying," the older brother replied.

"That sounds exactly like something a murderer would say before the final staircase."

There was an aggressively underlined sentence halfway down the page: Dignity is temporary. The sofa is forever.

Dante let out a breath through his nose before he could stop it. Not quite a laugh. But close enough that, in this room, it felt almost shocking.

Nico had written in the margin beside it: Mother said this applies to life in general.

Below that, in different ink added later: I think she was talking about Father.

The silence afterward hit hard enough that Dante's chest tightened around it. He closed the book carefully. Not because Nico would have cared. Nico treated books like durable furniture. But because Dante did. He set it back on the desk beside the photograph and stood there looking at both of them for a long moment. And for one brutal second, the room stopped looking like a mausoleum. It looked lived in. Dante inhaled sharply, turned off the light and stepped outside. He locked the door carefully behind him and stood there with his hand resting against the handle.

All of a sudden, a voice cut through the corridor behind him.

"Dante."

He turned sharply. Ren stood halfway down the hall, breathing slightly harder than usual. That alone was enough to make Dante's pulse shift. Ren never ran.

"What happened?" Dante asked.

Ren looked once at the locked door behind him. Then back at Dante. And for the first time in eleven years, Dante saw something dangerously close to alarm in Ren's eyes.

"It's Serena. She's … ” Ren bent over, struggling for breath. “She's gone.”