HIS BELLISSIMA

TWENTY MINUTES

The knock came before the sun did, soft and unnecessary, because the door opened before Alondra had the chance to answer it.

She was already awake. She'd been awake for hours, lying there watching the dark start to thin at the edges of the curtains, waiting for the day to arrive the way she used to wait for exam results, dread pooling low and patient in her stomach. Clarise stepped in carrying a folded garment bag over one arm, her expression doing the careful, quiet thing it always did now, like she'd learned to soften every word before it reached Alondra's ears.

"Everything's packed," Clarise said. "The car leaves in an hour."

"Packed." Alondra sat up. "Funny, I don't remember packing anything."

Clarise set the garment bag down at the foot of the bed and didn't rise to the bait. "There's something else you should know before you go downstairs."

Something in her tone made Alondra go still. "What."

"The house," Clarise said. "Your parents' house. It's been sold."

For a moment the word didn't process. Alondra had grown up in that house. It was where her father had taught her to ride a bike in the driveway, where her mother had kept a garden of herbs in the backyard that never quite thrived but that she refused to give up on, where two caskets had once been mourned from a living room full of casseroles and hushed voices. It had sat empty since the funeral, locked and waiting, because Alondra hadn't been able to bring herself to decide what to do with it yet. She hadn't needed to decide. Someone had decided for her.

"Sold to who," she said, though she already knew the answer would lead back to the same place everything led back to now.

"I don't know," Clarise said. “ I believe Mr. Santoro's people made contact with the company you work for”.

She paused, searching for the words “All I can say is you don't have to worry,Mr. Santoro made sure……” she trailed off,unsure if she should continue the sentence.

She didn't need to. Alondra already knew what she was saying. They had probably let the company know she wasn't coming back. Even sold her parents' house. Practically ended her life in Philly.

Alondra sat with that for a long moment, feeling something crack open behind her ribs. Her father had worked eleven years to own that house free and clear, small payment by small payment, proud every time the balance dropped, the kind of pride that came from building something with your own hands instead of being handed it. And Matteo had unraveled all of it with a single phone call, the way you'd flick lint off a sleeve, because a house halfway across an ocean wasn't even a rounding error to a man like him. It wasn't just that he'd taken her. He'd reached back into the life she used to have and erased the last standing proof that it existed at all.

"He didn't need to do that," she said quietly, more to herself than to Clarise.

"I don't know the details," Clarise said again, and this time it sounded less like a kindness and more like a wall she didn't want to look past either.

Alondra thought of the garden her mother had never let die, the driveway, the bike, the hideous garden gnomes her father refused to throw away.

"Tell him I said thank you," she said, and the sarcasm was so thin it barely qualified as one.

Clarise only looked at her, something between pity and warning, and said nothing else.

*****************************************

The airport wasn't an airport. It was a stretch of private tarmac and a plane so sleek it looked like it had been carved rather than built, and Alondra was led toward it with a man's hand hovering near her elbow.

Matteo walked a step behind her. She hadn't wanted to look at him, but she did anyway, and she hated herself a little for it. He was dressed the way he always was, dark and precise, a charcoal suit that fit him like it had been sewn onto him that morning, sleeves pushed back just enough to show his forearms, hair combed back from a face that had no business looking that composed at this hour. He looked like he'd stepped out of an ad for something obscene and expensive. Infuriatingly good-looking, she thought, and immediately resented the thought for existing.

A man in a pilot's uniform met them at the base of the stairs. "Ready when you are, sir."

"We're ready," Matteo said, like it was nothing, like there wasn't a woman beside him who'd had her entire life folded up and shipped away overnight.

Dante was already aboard, sprawled across one of the leather seats near the back with the particular ease of a man who treated private jets the way other people treated the bus. He looked up when they boarded, gave Alondra a small, easy nod, and went back to whatever he'd been doing on his phone.

She took the window seat without being told to. It felt like the only choice left that was actually hers. Matteo sat across from her, not beside her, and for that she was grateful, though she'd never admit it. He didn't speak. He pulled out a tablet and started scrolling through something, forehead creased in mild concentration, as unbothered as a man catching up on email during a commute.

She watched him and felt something ugly twist in her chest. This was routine for him. A woman taken from her life, a house erased, a country changed, and he could sit there thumbing through a screen like none of it registered as anything more than logistics. She was a line item. She was arm candy, or a witness, or whatever he decided she was on a given day, and none of it seemed to cost him anything at all.

The plane taxied, then lifted, and Philadelphia fell away beneath them into gray morning light, and she watched it go and told herself she wasn't going to cry.

*******************************************

"Can I ask you something," she said, once they'd leveled out and the seatbelt light had gone dark, "and you actually answer it instead of whatever it is you usually do."

"Depends on the question."

"That's not a yes."

"It's not a no either." He didn't look up from the tablet. "Ask."

"You're the most powerful man I've ever met. You've probably got judges in your pocket, cops on payroll, half of Philadelphia scared to say your name too loud." She watched him carefully. "A man with that kind of reach doesn't need to fly a witness across an ocean to keep her quiet. He makes one phone call and it's like she never saw a thing. So why didn't you just do that."

He looked up then.

"Unless," she said, softer, testing the ground before she stepped on it, "it's got nothing to do with what I saw. Maybe it's because I look familiar to you. Like your friend said."

Something moved behind his eyes, quick and involuntary, gone almost before it arrived. She'd seen him locked down for days now, a door that never opened more than a crack, and she'd just watched the hinge catch.

The morning light through the little oval window had settled over her like it had chosen her on purpose, and it wasn't only the plain, ordinary want he'd feel for any beautiful woman. It was that plus something sharper, something he still didn't have a name for.

"You've been talking to Dante," he said.

From the back of the cabin, without looking up from his phone: "For the record, I said she looked familiar. I never said marry the theory."

"Nobody asked you," Matteo said, without turning around. Dante glanced up just long enough to give Alondra a small, conspiratorial smile before returning to his screen, entirely unbothered by the tension he'd just wandered into.

Alondra almost smiled back before she caught herself. "You didn't answer the question," she said to Matteo.

"I answered it by telling you where you got it."

She tilted her head, studying him the way she might study a locked door, looking for the seam. "Fine. Try an easier one. How many people have you killed?"

The cabin went very still. Even Dante's thumb paused over his phone.

Matteo didn't flinch. "I stopped counting a long time ago."

"That's not a number."

"It's the truth. Numbers stop mattering after enough of them." His voice stayed even, unbothered, the way another man might discuss the weather. "You want a body count so you can decide how afraid of me to be. I'd rather you find another way to decide that."

"How am I supposed to decide it, then."

"However you'd like."

She studied him, unsettled by how little it seemed to cost him to say it. "What about your family. Do they know what you do? Do they approve of it."

Something flickered across his face, quick and gone, there and buried before she could name it. "My family isn't a subject open for conversation."

"Careful, tesoro," Dante called out lightly, singsong, still not looking up. "That one's got teeth. He bites."

"Dante."

"Just saying. Ask him about his tailor instead. Much safer topic. The man has opinions about lapels that could start a small war."

Alondra let out a short laugh despite herself, and Matteo's jaw tightened in a way that told her the subject of his family was exactly as closed as it sounded. She filed it away anyway, the way she'd started filing away every small crack in him whether she meant to or not.

"Fine," she said. "Tell me something you will talk about, then. Anything. Just make it true."

He considered her for a moment, like he was deciding whether the request itself was a trap. "I hate flying," he said finally. "Have for years. First ten minutes of every flight, my stomach doesn't know what to do with itself."

"You." She stared at him. "The man who walks into rooms like he owns the air in them. Scared of turbulence."

"I didn't say I was scared."

"You basically said you were scared."

"He's scared," Dante confirmed, not even looking up this time. "I've watched him white-knuckle a coffee cup over a little chop more than once. It's the most human thing about him."

"I will have you removed from this flight."

"You'd have to fly it yourself, and we've established how well that goes." Dante finally grinned, unrepentant, and for a moment the whole cabin felt lighter than it had any right to, three people suspended over an ocean with nothing but banter standing between them and everything waiting on the other side of it.

Alondra caught herself almost enjoying it. That was the dangerous part, she thought, not the wall, not any of the moments that had scared her outright. It was this: the easy back and forth, the flashes of a man underneath the Don, Dante's teasing making the whole thing feel, for a few stolen minutes, closer to normal than to captivity. She didn't trust it. She let herself have it anyway, because the alternative was staring out the window until Sicily arrived to swallow her whole.

The intercom crackled to life above them, the pilot's voice smooth and unbothered. "We've started our descent. We'll be landing in Palermo in approximately twenty minutes."

The lightness drained out of the cabin as fast as it had arrived. Alondra turned to the window, watching the gray Atlantic give way, somewhere beneath the clouds. Twenty minutes. Twenty minutes and whatever ease she'd just let herself borrow would have nowhere left to hide.

She pressed her palm flat against the cool glass and said nothing at all, and beside her, she felt Matteo watching, and did not turn to find out what his face was doing.