THE MORNING AFTER THUNDER
Isabella POV
The taste of copper pennies and champagne lingers on my tongue when consciousness drags me back to a world that smells wrong. Sandalwood. Cedar. Something darker that makes my pulse quicken before my mind can catalog why.
This isn't my bedroom.
My fingers find silk—torn sapphire fabric that once made me feel beautiful, now stiff with what might be blood. Not mine. I know this with the certainty of someone who has never bled for anything that mattered, but the metallic scent clings to the dress like accusation.
"You're awake."
Marco's voice flows like aged whiskey over broken glass, and I turn toward the sound before my eyes fully adjust. He stands in the doorway of what must be a kitchen, steam rising from two coffee cups, his dark suit from last night replaced by jeans and a black t-shirt that shows the bandage wrapped around his left shoulder.
He was hurt protecting me. The memory hits like physical blow—his body covering mine while bullets sparked off marble, his hands cradling my head while chaos erupted around us. The way he moved like darkness given human form, beautiful and terrible and completely focused on keeping me alive.
"Where are we?" My voice cracks like prayer in an empty church.
"My apartment. Safe house protocol." He approaches with careful steps, offering me one of the cups. "You needed somewhere to rest after last night."
I accept the coffee, and when our fingers brush, electricity crackles along my spine the same way it did in Papa's study. But now there's something else—awareness that this man has seen me vulnerable, has felt my body pressed against his while death danced around us.
The coffee tastes like salvation with cream and sugar, exactly how I prefer it. The precision makes my stomach clench.
"How do you know how I take my coffee?"
Something flickers across his face—there and gone before I can catalog its meaning. "Lucky guess."
But lucky guesses don't explain the way he moves through his kitchen like he's performed this routine before, don't explain how he knew to add the exact amount of cream and sugar without asking. My pulse hammers against my throat as I scan his apartment with new eyes.
Sparse furniture. Empty spaces that echo with loneliness. But on the coffee table, spread like tarot cards predicting futures I don't want, lie photographs.
Black and white images of me leaving Starbucks. Walking through Lincoln Park. Entering the gallery where I volunteer. Dozens of shots showing me moving through Chicago like an actress unaware of her audience.
The coffee turns bitter on my tongue. "What are these?"
Marco follows my gaze and freezes, his whiskey voice taking on edges that could cut glass. "Security assessment. Background research."
"Background research?" I set down the cup before my shaking hands betray me. "These are surveillance photos, Marco. Of me."
I move toward the table, silk rustling around my legs as I study the images. There's me checking my phone at the same intersection every morning. Me stopping at the same red light, taking the same route home every day. Patterns catalogued with professional precision.
But it's the timestamps that steal breath from my lungs. Three weeks ago. Four weeks ago. Five weeks ago.
"You've been watching me since before Papa hired you."
It's not a question. The evidence stares back from glossy paper, undeniable as mathematics.
Marco's jaw tightens, and I catch a glimpse of something that might be regret before his professional mask slides back into place. "Protection assignments require thorough—"
"Bullshit." The word slips out in Spanish, my accent thickening the way it always does when fear crawls up my spine like ice water. "These photos are dated weeks before our first meeting. Weeks before Papa even knew he needed a new bodyguard."
I snatch up the photographs, spreading them across his coffee table like evidence in a courtroom where love goes to die. "This one shows me at the coffee shop on Michigan Avenue. The one where I go every Tuesday after therapy sessions Papa doesn't know about. How did you know I'd be there?"
Marco's silence confirms what my racing pulse already understands. This isn't coincidence. This isn't random assignment or professional preparation.
This is something else entirely.
I move toward his kitchen, needing space to think, to breathe, to understand how the man who risked his life for me could have been studying me like prey weeks before we met. The morning light through his windows tastes of questions I'm not sure I want answered.
That's when I see it.
Silver gleaming against dark wood in the drawer I accidentally bump open while reaching for paper towels. My hands shake as I lift the object that shouldn't exist, that can't possibly be real.
My mother's rosary.
Not one like my mother's rosary. Not something similar that could be explained by coincidence or religious devotion.
My mother's rosary. Complete with the tiny dent near the base of the silver crucifix, the one I remember from bedtime prayers when she'd let me trace its surface with fingers that were small and trusting and believed in happy endings.
The beads burn against my palm with warmth that seems impossible after twenty-three years, as if Elena's prayers still cling to silver like ghost-perfume. When I close my eyes, I can almost hear her voice whispering Hail Marys in Italian while braiding flowers into my hair.
"Isabella—"
Marco's voice cuts through memory like blade through silk, and I turn to find him standing in the kitchen doorway, his face cycling through emotions—surprise, fear, recognition, and something that might be relief.
"How do you have this?" My voice breaks like confession. "How do you have my dead mother's rosary?"
He steps toward me, hands raised like he's approaching wounded animal. "I can explain—"
"Explain what? How you happened to buy the exact rosary my mother wore every day until the cancer took her? How you coincidentally chose the one piece of jewelry in the entire world that would break my heart to see?"
Tears stream down my cheeks, mixing salt with the copper taste of fear. The rosary trembles in my hands, silver catching morning light like captured prayers.
"It was in a pawn shop," Marco says, his voice rough with something that tastes of desperation. "I thought... I thought you might like it. Thought it might bring you comfort."
But lies have texture, have weight, have tells that someone raised in Don Torrino's house learns to recognize before learning to walk. And Marco's explanation tastes like beautiful fiction wrapped in silk and tied with ribbons that can't hide the steel underneath.
I clutch the rosary against my chest, feeling my mother's love burn through silver while questions multiply like cancer cells in my mind. The surveillance photos. The perfect coffee. The rosary that shouldn't exist.
Everything about Marco Santangelo is wrong.
Everything except the way he looked at me while bullets flew, the way his hands shook when he checked for my blood, the way he whispered my name like prayer while chaos erupted around us.
"Tell me the truth," I whisper, and the words taste like last rites. "Tell me why you really have my mother's rosary, and don't you dare lie to me again."
Marco's dark eyes hold storms I want to chase away with my bare hands, but now I see shadows I never noticed before. Guilt. Secrets. The weight of necessary sins carried in every calculated smile.
"The truth?" His laugh tastes bitter as medicine. "The truth will destroy us both, Isabella. Some doors shouldn't be opened."
But I'm Don Torrino's daughter, and destruction has never scared me as much as beautiful lies.
"Then let it destroy us. But tell me why my dead mother's rosary was hidden in your kitchen drawer."