Page 1 of Forbidden

Chapter 1

Penelope

I get off the plane at JFK, and New York hits me all at once. Car horns blare from the pickup area, loud and insistent. The heat presses against me, carrying the pungent scent of jet fuel, and my shirt clings to my skin with sweat. Behind me, my suitcase rattles over the floor, its wheels noisy against the tile.

Everything is louder than I remember. Or maybe I’ve just forgotten how sound works here. How every honk, every distant shout, and every rush of wind between buildings surrounds me from all sides.

Italy was quieter. Here, the noise crashes over me all at once, relentlessly.

Three years away dulled the edges of this place. But now I’m back.

I tighten my grip on my suitcase and step onto the curb. I should feel something—nostalgia, maybe, or relief. Instead, there’s only a strange hollowness, like I slipped out of this city’s rhythm and can’t find my way back in.

“Penelope!”

Gianna’s voice cuts through the chaos, and then she’s pushing through the crowd with arms outstretched and her floral dress fluttering around her knees. She’s barely taller than me, still wearing that same unimpressed expression, like the world exists just to inconvenience her.

She hugs me tight, and for a second, it feels like home.

“Took you long enough,” she mutters, pulling back to scan me up and down. “You look... alive.”

“Wow,” I deadpan. “So heartfelt.”

She grins. “Come on, let’s get you settled.”

I crossed an ocean for my sister—her wedding’s tomorrow, and she guilt-tripped me into coming early to help. I have no money, no plan. Just this. And I guess that’s enough.

Italy was an escape, a hazy blur of cramped apartments and late shifts at a trattoria. My hands were raw from dish soap. Aunt Carla’s Florence apartment where I stayed stank of garlic and old wine.

I ran there after I got the call from Adriano that Sophia had died. After my best friend was ripped from my hands. One moment, we were laughing at my house. A few hours later, she was on the ground, her body mangled on the pavement and blood spilling from her mouth. Her fingers had twitched like she was trying to hold on.

I’d dropped to my knees and screamed her name. She didn’t answer. She just stared at me, eyes wide, unblinking like she knew this was the end.

I was seventeen. And she was gone before I could even beg her to stay. Or ask for her forgiveness.

Until today, those sad eyes as she laid there have never left me. They lurk in the quiet. I still wake up choking on the visual, gasping like I did that night, reaching for her even though I know there’s nothing left to hold.

People say grief softens over time. They’re wrong. It doesn’t fade. It carves you into someone you don’t recognize, someone who has to keep going and pretending you’re okay when everything inside you is still bleeding.

“Penelope, move your ass!” Gianna waves from the parking lot, her blonde hair bouncing. Her red 2003 Honda Civic is parked crooked at the curb with the hazards blinking.

I smile, dragging my suitcase over. “Still a control freak, huh?”

She rolls her eyes. “Damn right. Coffee—now.”

She hops in, already bossing me around, and a big part of me is glad some things didn’t change.

***

We end up at a small coffee shop in Brooklyn, the kind with a glinting neon sign and tables sticky from spilled sugar. Gianna talks with her hands, like the drama queen, rattling off wedding details and barely pausing for breath.

I’m stirring my latte, nodding along like I’m invested, when I see him.

My breath catches, and my spoon clanks onto the table.

He steps out of the black SUV with an easy grace, the crisp lines of his dark suit molding to him like a second skin. His double-breasted jacket hangs open, effortless and suave and the flash of his sleek watch reflects the light as he gestures. Strawberry-blond hair, now brushed with silver, falls over his forehead, unruly as ever. Well over six feet, broad-shouldered and built like a fortress. And those tattoos, midnight and ragged, climb his neck in uneven strokes, bold against his skin, like a story half-told in shadow.

The man I used to sneak looks at when he grilled burgers in his backyard, watching the way his forearms flexed as he flipped them. I was just a kid then, unaware of what that strange pull in my stomach meant. Back when he was only my best friend’s father and nothing more.

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