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IMOGEN'S POV

I could hear Silas from the bedroom, his voice moving between English and Italian the way he did when the conversation was serious and he did not want anyone nearby to follow it completely. 

I lay still for a moment and listened to the rhythm of it without trying to catch the words.

Then I got up quietly, washed my face, pulled on jeans and a loose shirt, picked up my bag and my keys from the side table and slipped out of the penthouse without making a sound.

The villa was twenty minutes away.

I took a cab and sat in the back with my bag on my lap and watched Rome move past the windows. 

I had not been back to the villa since the night I left.

The cab pulled up outside and I paid the driver and stood on the pavement for a moment looking at the building. It looked the same as it always had. 

I went in.

I unlocked the suite and pushed the door open and stood in the doorway for a second before I went inside.

Perry was not there.

I did not know whether that was his choice or whether someone had made it for him but either way the rooms were empty and still and the only sign that anyone had been living here recently was a jacket thrown over the back of a chair and a half empty bottle of whiskey on the coffee table.

I moved through the sitting room without touching anything and went straight to the bedroom.

My side of the room was exactly as I had left it. I pulled out the small suitcase from the wardrobe and started going through the drawers, moving quickly, taking only what I actually needed and leaving the rest. 

The expensive things Perry had bought me, the jewelry and the silk scarves and the shoes that had cost more than most people's monthly rent, I left all of it exactly where it was.

None of it was mine in any way that mattered.

I was almost done when I opened the last drawer, the deep one at the very bottom of the bedside cabinet, the one I had not opened since I had arrived.

And there it was.

A small notebook; dark blue cover, worn at the corners, the pages slightly swollen from age. I had forgotten exactly where I had hidden it. 

Part of me had half convinced myself over the years that I had thrown it away at some point or that it had gotten lost in one of our many moves.

I picked it up and sat on the edge of the bed and opened it. I had started this notebook the year after my father died.

I had been angry in the particular bottomless way that teenagers were when something genuinely terrible had happened and nobody around them was treating it as the terrible thing it was. My father had been found dead and the official verdict was drug overdose and the whole town had accepted that verdict and moved on and I had been the only one who could not move on because I had known my father and drug overdose was not something I could make fit with the man I knew.

So I had started writing things down.

Small things at first. Inconsistencies in the timeline. Details that the official report glossed over or did not address. People who had been in certain places at certain times. Connections between Savannah's father and the people who had handled my father's case.

I turned the pages slowly and read through what my seventeen year old self had gathered and the anger that came back was old and deep and had not lost a single degree of its heat in all the years since.

Savannah's father.

The mayor who had stepped into the position my father had held. The man whose daughter had tormented me for years. The man whose connection to my father's death I had been quietly certain of since I was old enough to understand what I was looking at.

I had put this down when Perry happened. When the weight of what I had done to Savannah and the control Perry held over me had taken up all the space in my head and left no room for anything else. I had told myself I would come back to it when things settled.

Things had never settled until now.

I sat on the edge of that bed in the quiet villa with my father's case laid out in my own teenage handwriting and I made a decision. I was going to finish this. Not for Perry or for Silas. 

This one was mine.

I put the notebook in my bag, zipped it shut, picked up my suitcase and left.

I did not look back at the room.

The cab ride back to the penthouse was quiet and I sat with my hand resting on my bag and my eyes on the city outside and thought about my father and what I owed him and what it was going to take to finally pay it.

The elevator opened onto the penthouse floor and I stepped out with my suitcase and pushed the door open and walked in.

Silas was standing in the middle of the room.

His arms were folded across his chest and his phone was in his hand and his gray eyes went from my face to the suitcase to my bag and back to my face again and the look he was wearing was not the warm look or the dark look or any of the looks I had gotten used to seeing from him.

This was something else.

"Where were you?" he asked.

A statement with a question mark attached to it as a formality.

"I went to get my things," I replied, setting the suitcase down near the door.

"You left without telling me."

"You were on a call."

"You could have waited," he said. His voice was still level but there was something underneath the level that was not calm at all.

I looked at him. "I did not need to wait. I went to my own villa to collect my own belongings. I was gone for less than two hours."

"I did not know where you were," he spat out.

"I did not realise I needed to check in," 

Something shifted in his jaw. "It is not about checking in, Imogen. It is about the fact that Perry is still out there and his situation is unstable and you going somewhere alone without telling anyone where you are going is not—"

"It is not what?" I countered. My voice had an edge in it now and I was not trying to smooth it down. "Allowed? Acceptable? What word are you going to use, Silas?"

He looked at me and said nothing for a moment. "I was going to say smart," he said.

"I am extremely smart," I said. "Smart enough to have been managing my own safety long before you decided you were responsible for it."

"That is not what I meant."

"Then say what you mean," I said.

He unfolded his arms and put his phone on the table beside him and looked at me properly. His voice dropped a level.

"I did not know where you had gone or when you were coming back or whether you were—" He stopped.

I waited.

"I did not know," he said again, more quietly. "That is all."

The edge went out of me faster than I expected it to.

"I am fine," I muttered, my voice was quieter now. "I was always going to be fine."

"I know that," he said. "Intellectually I know that."

"But?" I said.

He looked at me for a long moment. "But I do not like not knowing where you are," he said. "I do not like waking up and the space beside me being empty and not knowing why."

The room was very quiet.

I crossed it slowly and stopped in front of him and looked up at his face and the look he was wearing now was not the controlled look or the dangerous look. It was something much more unguarded than either of those and it made my chest ache in a way I was not entirely prepared for.

I put my hand flat against his chest and I could feel his heart beat  faster than it should have been.

"Next time I will leave a note," I said.

Something moved in his eyes. Not quite a smile. "A note?"

"Or a text," I said. "Something to let you know the world has not ended."

He reached up and covered my hand with his and stood there for a moment just holding it against his chest.

"A text?" he teased.

"Yes," 

"Fine,"

And then his other hand came up and curved around the back of my neck and he pulled me in and kissed me and the last of the argument dissolved entirely between us.