Chapter 39 Back to the Real Hell

Chapter 39 Back to the Real Hell

Giulia’s suitcase was ready before eight in the morning.

She had packed it herself, methodically, folding each piece with a level of care that didn’t match how she felt inside. It was easier to focus on the fabric, the zipper, the organization of her toiletry bag than to think about the kitchen floor, his arms around her as she fell asleep, the way he had disappeared before she even opened her eyes.

When she came downstairs with the suitcase, Vicenzo was on the terrace, phone to his ear, his voice low and cutting in Italian. He looked at her once, assessed the suitcase, assessed her face, then went back to the call without saying a word. As if the night before were nothing more than a footnote neither of them needed to read out loud.

Giulia set the suitcase by the door and went into the kitchen to make coffee.

The marble island was spotless. Someone had wiped it down, rearranged the fruit tray, put the stools back in place. No trace of what had happened there. She stood staring at the marble for a few seconds, the coffee maker forgotten in her hand, feeling something inside her chest shift out of place.

She poured the coffee, sat down, drank without tasting it.

When the boat that would take them to the private airport honked below, they left with almost surgical punctuality, as if they had agreed on it without speaking. Without looking at each other too much. Without commenting on the weather, the island, anything. The house stayed behind with its curtains swaying, sunlight hitting the wood, the scent of salt in the air, everything intact, as if they had spent nothing more than a business weekend there.

Giulia didn’t look back when the boat pulled away.

She told herself it was because there was nothing worth seeing.

The private jet was ready when they arrived, the crew lined up with that trained discretion of people who see too much and know their job depends on forgetting. Vicenzo boarded first, greeted the co-pilot by name, tossed his jacket onto a seat, loosened his collar. Giulia came right after him, chose a seat on the opposite side, and rested her head against the window before the plane even began to taxi.

The silence between them was different from usual.

It wasn’t the silence filled with anger or accusation. It was a silence packed with things neither of them yet knew how to name—and because of that, it was more dangerous than any fight.

When the plane took off and the island disappeared beneath the clouds, Giulia closed her eyes. She tried to sleep. She couldn’t. Her mind kept circling the same point: the way he had whispered her name in the middle of everything. Not like an order, not like a provocation. Just her name, clean, leaving his mouth as if it were the only real thing in the world at that moment.

She hated that. Hated that the memory came back sharper than the dream ever had—the rawness of the nightmare, the blood, Luca’s name in the dark. But her name in Vicenzo’s mouth, that her body had held onto carefully.

She opened her eyes slowly.

He was across the plane, leaning back, reading glasses on, some contract or report open on his lap. A pen in his hand, jotting something in the margin, his jaw slightly tense with concentration. A fresh white shirt, one button more open than usual. His left wrist turned upward, fingers holding the paper, a thin scar she had never noticed before cutting across the inside of his forearm.

Giulia looked longer than she should have. Felt that ridiculous, traitorous thing happen in her chest—a softening she recognized in the worst possible way. Because it wasn’t desire. Desire she could file under biology, the body wanting what the body wants, no romance, no consequence. This was different. It was affection. The worst word for the worst possible moment.

She turned her face back to the window, staring at the clouds with a dull kind of anger.

You’re an idiot, she thought, with as much rawness as she could summon. A complete, irredeemable idiot.

She stayed like that, chewing on her own stupidity in silence, until she felt the plane begin its descent.

On the other side of the aisle, Vicenzo wasn’t as focused on the contract as he seemed.

The words on the page had been repeating for twenty minutes without sinking in. He reread the same paragraph four times, signed a margin that didn’t need signing, scribbled a number that meant nothing. The pen moved on inertia while his mind was somewhere else entirely.

On the marble counter in the kitchen.

On the sound she made when she arched her body back, her hair loose down her spine. On the way she had dug her nails into his arm like she needed an anchor. On how she fell asleep afterward—heavy, real, disarmed in a way he hadn’t been ready to handle.

He closed the contract, took off his glasses, ran a hand over his face.

It’s over, he decided, with the same coldness he used to close deals. It was what it was. Built-up tension, a week of forced proximity, two bodies responding to what bodies respond to. It has no name, no weight, no tomorrow. It’s over.

He repeated it in his mind with the same cadence he used to rehearse difficult speeches. Once, twice, three times, until it sounded like truth. It was a technique that worked. It always had.

He looked at her without meaning to. She had her back to him, face to the window, hair pulled into a quick bun, one loose strand trailing down her neck. Her shoulders were raised, tense, as if she were holding herself together.

It’s over, he repeated again, but the word had lost some of its weight.

He reopened the contract with unnecessary force, forcing his eyes back to the page.

Luca, he thought, and the name hit like a punch. You’d hate me for this. Or did you already know, you bastard? You said I’d hate her at first sight. But you never said what came after.

The plane descended further, the clouds giving way to the familiar gray of the city. Vicenzo put his glasses back on, adjusted his jacket, put his mask back on with the efficiency of someone who rehearses this every morning in the mirror.

By the time the wheels touched the ground, he was Vicenzo Moretti again.

Or at least he pretended well enough to fool anyone who hadn’t spent the last week in the same house as him.

The private airport had a side exit meant to avoid exactly what was waiting at the main one: the press.

But someone had leaked their arrival time. Or someone had been paid to leak it, which was even more likely.

Giulia noticed before she stepped out of the car. The line of photographers outside the glass, flashes already going off against the dark vehicle even without a clear shot. Gossip site badges, TV cameras, microphones. Vicenzo’s assistant, Renata, was already outside, speaking into a security guard’s ear, tablet in hand, wearing the expression of someone defusing a bomb.

“How many?” Vicenzo asked, his voice flat.

“About thirty,” the driver replied, eyes still on the rearview mirror. “Renata wants you to go out the side, but a Veja photographer is already there.”

Vicenzo made a low sound, assessing. Then he turned to Giulia.

She was looking at the crowd outside with an expression he recognized: not fear. The look of someone internally assembling the role they were about to play for the next fifteen minutes.

“Do you know what they want to see?” he asked.

“The perfect couple coming back from their honeymoon,” she replied, dry. “Tanned, in love, holding hands.”

“Then that’s what they’ll see.”

She looked at him for a second, her eyes scanning his face, searching for something she didn’t name.

“Fine,” she said, fixing her hair, running her thumb under her eye to erase any trace of fatigue. “I know how to perform.”

He didn’t answer. He opened his door, stepped out, walked around the car, and opened her door before the driver could. A calculated gesture, but executed with a natural ease that was confusing, because the hand he offered her didn’t carry the stiffness of a staged move. It was open, steady, waiting.

Giulia took it.

The flashes exploded.

They crossed the exit side by side, his hand at the small of her back, both moving in perfect rhythm, her face lifted with a half-smile she had mastered since childhood, his expression neutral and magnetic in the way the press loved to call “mysterious.” Someone shouted her name. Someone shouted his. A voice asked about the honeymoon, another about the company, another about some crisis in a sector she didn’t follow.

“Giulia, here!” a photographer lunged forward. “Look at the camera, Giulia!”

She turned, smiled. The flash hit perfectly.

Vicenzo, by instinct—or something less calculated than he’d like to admit—tilted his head, his lips brushing her temple in a light, almost imperceptible kiss. For the cameras, it was perfect. For her, it was an electric current running from her skin down to her feet.

The cameras clicked three times faster.

Renata guided them down the corridor with the efficiency of someone herding valuable cattle, and the crowd fell behind, voices muffled by distance. When the inner door closed behind them, the silence returned—different from the one on the plane. Heavier. More real.

Vicenzo let go of her hand with deliberate calm.

Giulia slipped her hand into her coat pocket.

“Welcome back,” he said, looking ahead as they walked down the internal corridor. “The city charges for everything the island lets slide.”

She didn’t answer right away. She glanced at her reflection flashing by in the glass of a closed room: hair, makeup, posture. The woman staring back looked whole. Looked steady.

Good lie, she thought. You learned well.

“In what way does it charge?” she asked, when the question was already too old.

Vicenzo stopped at the door leading to the internal parking lot, held it open, looked at her from the side.

“In every way that matters,” he replied.

And stepped out first, as always.

Giulia stood there for two seconds, staring at the still-swaying door. Then she took a deep breath, smoothed her coat, and walked through.

The city was waiting outside with its questions, its cameras, and its teeth bared.

She walked into it with her head held high, as she always did.

Inside, the kitchen floor still burned beneath her knees.