Chapter 67 Chapter 67 - Back Home Where I Belong
Cedric's POV
Reality arrived, as it often did, at the worst possible moment.
One second he was in the warm, airless bubble of the backseat, Gianni's belt buckle cool against his fingers, his pulse loud in his ears. The next, the car door was opening and the October air hit him like a glass of cold water to the face, and he was sitting on his childhood street with a half-undone crime lord beside him and gifts for his mother in the boot.
He put his shirt back on in silence.
Gianni watched him do it with the patience of a man filing something away for later.
"Security stays with the cars," Gianni said through the partition, already reaching for the door handle.
Cedric turned. "You're coming?"
"Yes."
"I didn't invite you."
"No," Gianni agreed pleasantly, and got out.
Cedric stared at the empty seat for a moment, then got out too.
The building looked exactly as he'd left it. That was the thing about places that existed without you — they didn't mourn the gap. The same cracked front step. The same buzzer panel with half the name tags missing. The fire escape bracket on the third floor still broken, still waiting on a landlord who had been almost-fixing-it since 2019.
He stood outside it with flowers in the crook of his bad arm and a bag of gifts hanging from his good hand and felt the strange doubling of it — the boy who had run down these stairs a thousand times, and whoever he was now, standing here with Gianni Falcone at his shoulder like a very expensive, very dangerous shadow.
He became suddenly, acutely aware of the peeling paint on the front door.
"You don't have to come in," Cedric said.
"I'm aware."
"Gianni—"
"Cedric." Gianni's voice was mild. "Ring the bell."
He rang the bell. Waited. Rang it again. Nothing. He tried the intercom. A long, flat silence crackled back at him.
He shifted his weight. Tried again.
Still nothing.
"Maybe they're out," Gianni said.
"It's Saturday. Noon. My mum doesn't go out on Saturday until after Antiques Roadshow." Cedric frowned up at the building like it had personally offended him. "And I don't have a phone, or I'd just call ahead like a normal—"
He stopped. Rang once more, then pressed his forehead briefly against the intercom panel in defeat.
Ten minutes of this. Ten minutes of standing on the pavement with flowers wilting slightly in the autumn air and Gianni's guards pretending not to exist at a respectful distance down the street. Ten minutes of nothing.
He stepped back and looked up at the third floor window.
"Lily." He raised his voice, feeling slightly ridiculous. "Lily, are you in there? It's Cedric." A pause. "Your brother. Your actual brother, not a— I'm not being held hostage or anything, I just—" He glanced at Gianni, who raised an eyebrow fractionally. "I just want to come home for a bit. Lily?"
Silence.
He was about to turn away. He could feel it already — the particular weight of a disappointment you'd half prepared for and it hurt anyway. He'd shifted the flowers to his other hand and was already constructing the retreat in his head when he heard it.
A latch. Slow and cautious.
The door opened two inches, and an eye appeared in the gap.
Then the door flew open entirely and his sister hit him like a small freight train.
Lily had always hugged like she meant to leave bruises, and she hadn't changed. She was taller — when had she gotten taller — and her hair was different, and she was shaking slightly as she pulled back to look at him with swimming eyes, her hands already moving before he could speak.
You're real. You're actually here. I thought— She stopped. Started again. Mom has been looking everywhere. We didn't know if you were— Another stop. She pressed both hands to her mouth and then, because apparently she'd run out of signs, just hugged him again.
"I know," he said into her hair, his good arm tight around her. "I know. I'm sorry, Lily, I'm so sorry, I'm okay, I promise."
She pulled back. Looked at him properly, cataloguing him the way she always had — eyes moving over his face, his arm in its sling, the fading marks on his neck that he hadn't thought about until right now and absolutely could not explain. Her eyes narrowed.
Then she saw Gianni.
She took two full steps backward.
Gianni was, to his credit, standing completely still with his hands at his sides, which was probably the least threatening configuration available to him. It wasn't working especially well. He was still six feet of tailored menace on a residential pavement, and Lily was looking at him the way you'd look at a large dog whose temperament you couldn't read.
Her hands moved again, directed at Cedric. Are you in trouble.
Not a question. A statement awaiting confirmation.
"No," Cedric said firmly. "I'm fine. He's—" The word friend arrived and he used it before he could find anything more accurate. "He's a friend. He just insisted on coming up. You know how some people are."
Gianni cleared his throat.
Lily looked at Cedric. Looked at Gianni. Looked back at Cedric with the expression of someone who had been lied to by an older sibling enough times to have developed a very good detector for it.
But she stepped aside.
"Your building is fine," Gianni said, behind him on the stairs.
"I didn't say anything."
"You've been walking like you're apologising to the carpet."
Cedric stopped on the second landing. "It's just — your place is—" He made a gesture that he hoped communicated a compound with a gate and Italian marble and a wine cellar that probably has its own postcode. "And this is—"
"This is a home," Gianni said, with a simplicity that stopped him. "Do you know how many places I've lived in that were neither warm nor safe nor mine?" Something in his tone closed the subject before it had opened. "You have no idea what I looked like before all of this. So walk up the stairs, Cedric."
Cedric walked up the stairs.
He thought, not for the first time, that he knew almost nothing about this man. Gianni knew the street he'd grown up on, his sister's name, that his mother cooked on Saturdays. Cedric knew that Gianni spoke four languages and had a scar on his ribs and took his coffee without sugar.
The door to the flat was unlocked. It always was, during the day.
He pushed it open.
The smell hit him first. Something on the stove — onions, bay leaf, the particular warmth of a pot that had been going since morning. The radio in the kitchen playing something old and soft. The sounds of a Saturday that had never known it was supposed to stop.
"Lily." His mother's voice came through the kitchen doorway, unhurried. "Come and get the salt shaker off the top shelf for me. You know my shoulder's been—"
"We threw that thing out," Cedric said. "Ages ago. I remember because you made me carry the bin bag down."
Silence.
A long, suspended silence in which nothing moved except the steam rising from the pot.
Then his mother looked up.
She was older — not dramatically, not in the way he'd feared, but in the small accumulated ways that time leaves on people when you aren't watching. A little greyer at the temples. The lines around her eyes deeper. But her face, when it found his — her face was exactly the same.
The pot left her hands.
It hit the floor with a sound like a small catastrophe, and she crumpled with it — not falling, exactly, but folding, like the structural support had simply been removed. Her knees hit the kitchen floor and her hands went to her face and the sound she made was not quite crying and not quite a word.
"Mum—" Cedric was already moving, already across the kitchen, dropping to his knees in front of her on the linoleum that needed replacing and had needed replacing for years. He got his arm around her and held on. "Mum, I'm here. I'm here, I'm okay—"
She grabbed him back with both hands like she was checking he was solid. Like she needed proof of him.
And then they were both weeping in the kitchen, mother and son, with the pot overturned and whatever had been cooking slowly spreading across the floor, and Cedric thought that he didn't care about any of it — not the mess, not Gianni standing in the doorway seeing all of this, not any of it.
He was home.