Blood stained the cuff of Lorenzo's shirt, dark ribbons crawling down toward his palm. He sat on the edge of his bed like a man half-awake — not from pain, but from a strange, stunned clarity. The white band around his wrist itched where the bullet had nicked him; the fabric smelled faintly of smoke and something else he couldn't name. He ran the pad of his thumb over it as if the motion might steady him.
The door slammed open before he could move. Marco Vitale filled the doorway like a thundercloud — grand, furious, the kind of fury that had ruined empires. The old man's face was a map of cruelty and command.
"What the hell happened to you?" Marco demanded. "You let her shoot you? You had one job, Lorenzo — one! You were supposed to finish this. Instead you stand there bleeding like some fool who's fallen in love."
Lorenzo didn't flinch. He watched his father, the copper light catching the angles of that face he had learned to fear and resent, and a cold thing in him hardened.
"She shot me," Lorenzo said quietly. "Not you."
Marco took a step forward; his voice dropped to a dangerous growl. "If you won't do your duty, I will. If you won't remove the threat to our name—"
"—then you do it yourself," Lorenzo interrupted, standing up slow so his father could see the wound, see the white band, see the certainty in his eyes. "But not her. Not Alessia."
For a second they stood like two statues carved from different iron — one carved by vengeance, the other by something that had nothing to do with the family ledger or property lines.
"You choose her over me?" Marco spat. "You'd choose your enemy's daughter over your father? Over our family?"
"You choose to make enemies out of people who never wanted them," Lorenzo shot back, heat rising now. "You took away everything that mattered to me the day you decided your business was more important than the rest of us. You killed the one light in my life — and you expect loyalty because you're loud and cruel? Get out."
Marco's face went white with the kind of rage that has no sound but moves the air around it. "You will regret this insolence," he snarled. "You will regret—"
"You want to kill her? Do it yourself," Lorenzo said, voice flat and terrible. "This is between you and her father — not her. Don't drag her into the mess you two made. If anything happens to her because of you, you will not like the other side of me."
That last sentence landed like a thrown knife. Marco's eyes flickered with something like surprise, then fury. He took a step closer, nose almost touching Lorenzo's. "You would threaten me?" he asked.
"I would do what I must," Lorenzo said. "But not for you." He swallowed, and the words that followed cut deeper than anything. "You have been my enemy since the day you took my joy from me. Now get the fuck out of my house."
The room seemed to stop breathing. Marco stared as if the language was foreign; then, with a sound that could have been a laugh or a curse, he turned and left. The door slammed behind him, but the echo lingered — long and final.
Lorenzo slid back down onto the bed, fingers tracing the white band on his wrist until the band blurred beneath his touch. For a long while he sat there in the dim light, listening to the house settle. The pain in his arm throbbed, but it was smaller than the hollow that had opened inside him the day his father put power above everything else.
Outside, somewhere beyond the walls and the night, Florence pulsed on — ignorant, loud, alive. Lorenzo closed his eyes and let himself remember a laugh that used to fill a room before discord and duty replaced it. He tasted the bitterness of loss and, beneath it, something softer: a strange, fierce protectiveness that had nothing to do with vendettas and everything to do with a woman he'd only met once.
He didn't know yet what that meant. He only knew one thing for certain: he had chosen a line he could not cross back over. And he had told his father so — in the only language the old man ever understood.
The white band at his wrist felt like a promise and a wound at once. He tightened his fingers around it and watched the night through the window, thinking of a woman who had shot him and somehow, impossibly, had not broken him.