A moment earlier, into Damiano's question, which softly stroked even as it felt like a physical blow. For Serena, the first instinct now was to withdraw, the barricades of secrecy she had so carefully built now showing so many cracks. She slammed the laptop shut-somehow the sound resonating in the vast silence of the room-and hurriedly wiped at the wetness of her cheeks with her palm. "It's nothing," she said. Her raw voice cracked. "I'm just tired." The most miserable excuse she ever uttered. He stood there, motionless in the doorway, silver world eyes on her, dismantling her feeble attempt at self-defense with nothing more than his gaze. The hard, regal fury he had worn like a cloak since Vecchio's unmasking finally danced away, leaving behind an intense, focused curiosity. He saw past the lie and the genuine wreckage beneath.
He walked across the room, silent as a cat on the plush carpeting. He did not maintain a safe distance but came to stand directly before her, forcing her to look up. "Don't," he said, voice low but certain, cutting off her next denial. "I have seen men break under interrogation. I have seen soldiers weep on the battlefield. I know the look of someone whose world has just been pulled out from under them. That is the look you have right now. Was it the laptop? Did you find something else?" To him, the hell of losing all hope seemed an aftershock to their shared hunt, an echo of the night's bone-crushing revelations. It was the only rational deduction and for Serena, she seized it like a lifeline tossed to a drowning woman. It was a way to speak half-truths without actually telling the truth.
She trembled, almost sobbing, out of genuine sorrow for Marco-a potent fuel to ignite her next lie. "I kept digging," she said, her voice shaking with true pain, "after you left... I cross-referenced the financial records from the data packet with everything I knew about my family's... concourse," The substitute narrative she desperately clung to flowed with the agony of her very real findings. "Not just the Russians. There were some back-channel payments. From the Falcones." She finally turned to face him, again letting him see tears well up in her eyes. "Vecchio didn't sell you out. He sold us out. He was the one who gave the Falcones the information they needed to find my family. To... to kill them." The sob that escaped her was real, a gut-wrenching expression of loss for her brother, now conveniently pointed at their shared villain.
Damiano's face hardened; his momentary concern crystallized into an alien, rage; but not directed at her or inward; it was now protective fury on behalf of her. He looked upon her not as a dubious variable or fascinating captive but as a fellow victim to the same man's treachery. Her pain justified his war. He didn't bother with some clumsy comfort. Instead, he was doing something far more unexpected: He sat on the edge of the bed beside her, introducing a solid weight of reassurance. "Then his betrayal is deeper than I knew," he said, voice a low growl of promised retribution. "Not only did he try to sink my ship; he burned your world to get to it." At that instant, a gulf that had separated them-captor from captive, hunter from hunted-felt to shrink. They were now two people, at opposite sides of a war, who had just learned the other was fighting the same enemy.
The unexpected camaraderie was utterly disorienting. Without the burning hatred that had characterized every moment of interaction with him, Serena looked at the man sitting next to her in an entirely new light. She saw tiredness etched around his own eyes and felt the crushing weight of a king bearing up an empire on the verge of collapse. The monster stayed a monster, yet he was also a man who had been terribly betrayed, so were her. He did reach out, and for the most terrifying moment, she thought he might once again touch her face. Instead, his large, warm hand closed over hers where it rested on the lid of the laptop. It was not a caress; it was an anchor. A claim. A seal. "Vecchio wanted a war," he said, without conscious thought brushing his thumb against her skin. "He will have one. He tried to annihilate my house; he helped destroy yours. He will pay every bit of his debt. In blood. I swear to you." Serena stared down at their hands, then up at his face. The man she had sailed across the world to kill, the focus of all her pain and fury, had just sworn vengeance in her name against the man who was her real enemy. All of a sudden, her mission had morphed, twisted, into a nightmare of an intima-wild alliance, tied in blood and secrets to the man she had never been supposed to trust.