When His Apology Comes Five Years Late

Nia POV

I remained tethered to Leo's anger, a ghost caught in his slipstream as he took the stairs of my old apartment building two at a time.

He waved a hand before his face, trying to bat away the cloud of dust motes his own fury had disturbed.

"Stop hiding, Nia!" Leo barked into the empty living room.

A phantom smile touched my lips at the sheer folly of his command.

I remembered the bitter night he had forced me out of his home five years ago; he had chosen Serena over me, just as he always did.

And now he was here, demanding I take the fall for yet another one of Serena's fatal mistakes.

*He did not know that Serena had made certain he would never find out the truth. She had intercepted the police report before it reached his desk. She had paid off the Family trackers to report that I was "still alive, still refusing to return." Every breadcrumb that might have led him to my grave, she had swept clean. For five years, Leo Falcone had been looking for a ghost while the woman beside him knew exactly where I was buried. *

"Serena is already under the FBI radar," Leo said, pacing the floorboards which groaned under his weight like a ship's hull.

He looked toward the closed bedroom door.

"Show yourself before she ends up in a federal supermax."

I looked down at my own translucent hands.

I could never appear to him, even if I wanted to.

His patience finally snapping, Leo raised his leg and drove his heel into the bedroom door. The cheap wood splintered with a sound like cracking bone.

The room held nothing but a bare mattress and a broken dresser.

He let out a string of harsh, guttural curses in his native Italian.

He slammed the door shut behind him and descended the stairs once more.

Back in the bodega, Leo yanked the shop door open again, making the little bell scream on its hinge.

He pointed a long, trembling finger at the owner. "Tell me where she actually went."

The owner's face was a mask of weary resignation. "I told you the truth. Her murder was on the local news. It was a bloody mess."

A flicker of something unreadable—not shock, but the dawning horror of a truth he had refused to see—passed through Leo's eyes. The line of his jaw went slack.

His phone buzzed in his pocket, a harsh, mechanical sound that sliced through the charged air.

He pulled it out and stared at the screen.

I drifted over his shoulder to read the incoming text from Serena:

"Nia hates me, Leo. She will never help us. I am ready to turn myself in and go to prison."

Leo's features hardened into a familiar granite mask, erasing the momentary vulnerability.

His thumbs moved over the screen with a furious precision:

"Nia has no right to refuse a direct order from her Don. I will drag her back to take the punishment."

He shoved the phone back into his pocket and glared at the owner. "You are spreading police fabrications."

"Death is not a joke, Mr. Falcone," the owner insisted, his voice barely a whisper.

Leo stepped closer, his shadow falling over the old man, the air growing thick and heavy. "Three days. Or Chloe loses her sanctuary."

He did not wait for a response.

He spun on his heel and strode out onto the sun-bleached sidewalk.

I felt a strange pull, an invisible current that bound me to him, and was dragged along as he climbed into his waiting black SUV.

The vehicle cut a swath through the city, a black shark moving through glittering shoals, until it reached his penthouse.

The private elevator doors opened directly into a sprawling living room walled with glass.

Serena was on him the moment he stepped out.

She wore a slip of crimson silk that clung to her form, her face a carefully constructed sculpture of anxiety.

"Did you find her?" she asked, her fingers closing around his arm.

Leo shook his head.

He seemed dislocated, his gaze fixed on a point somewhere beyond the panoramic view of the city.

"The man downstairs said she might actually be dead."

Serena's eyes widened.

She took a half-step back, her hand flying to her mouth in a gesture of rehearsed horror.

"She is faking it, Leo." Serena closed the distance again, resting her hands flat on his chest.

"She is holding a grudge from five years ago. She is lying to punish us."

Leo looked down at her, his expression unreadable.

"Let us just drop it," Serena whispered, her lips curving into a smile of exquisite tragedy. "I will turn myself in to the Commission and the Feds tomorrow."

*I watched her performance from the shadows of the foyer, and if I had still possessed a beating heart, it would have been pounding with rage. She knew. She had always known. Every tear, every trembling lip, every offer of noble sacrifice—it was all a stage play performed on my grave. And Leo, the great Don, could not see the dirt beneath her fingernails. But I could. And soon, so would he. *