Aria's POV
She is standing in the doorway.
That is the first thing I see when the car pulls through those iron gates. A woman in the entrance of the palazzo with perfect posture and a silk blouse and dark hair that has never once in its life done anything it was not supposed to do.
She is beautiful the way expensive things are beautiful.
Deliberately. Completely. Without accident.
Her eyes find mine across the courtyard before I have even opened the car door and I watch them do something fast and cold that she covers so quickly I almost miss it.
Almost.
I have waited tables long enough to know when someone decides they do not like you before you have said a single word.
I get out of the car.
Dante is already out. He comes around to my side and his hand finds the small of my back the way it did on the street this morning and I feel it through my jacket and I keep my face completely neutral about that.
"Vittoria," he says.
"Dante." Her whole face rearranges itself when she looks at him. Warm. Open. The smile of a woman who has spent a long time perfecting exactly this moment. She steps forward and her hand goes to his arm with the easy comfort of someone who has done that a thousand times. "I did not know you were coming today after everything that happened."
"Neither did I," he says.
Her eyes come back to me.
"And you brought the savior," she says.
"This is Aria," Dante says. His voice is flat and final the way it gets when he is not inviting a conversation to continue.
She looks at me for a moment.
"Aria," she says. Like she is filing it somewhere.
"Welcome."
Her smile says the opposite of welcome.
I smile back.
"Thank you," I say simply.
Dante's hand presses slightly at my back and we walk forward and she steps aside and I feel her eyes follow me through the door like two hands on my shoulders.
Inside the palazzo is worse than outside.
Not worse. Overwhelmingly worse.
I step onto marble floors and look up at ceilings that have no business being that high and breathe in the smell of old stone and wood polish and something warm underneath it all and I stand very still for a moment because if I move too fast I might actually lose my mind.
"It is a lot," Dante says quietly beside me.
"I am fine," I say.
"You have gone very still."
"That is what I do when I am fine."
He looks at me sideways.
I look straight ahead.
A woman appears from the left hallway. Grey hair. Sharp eyes. Spine completely straight in the way of someone who has been running things for so long that good posture is just part of how she is built now.
She looks at Dante first.
Then she looks at me.
It is not unfriendly. It is the look of someone who sees everything and reacts to nothing until they have decided what to react to.
"Signora Ferrara," Dante says. "The east wing suite."
"Already prepared," she says.
She looks at me one more time and something in her expression does something small that I cannot read yet.
"Follow me," she says.
I pick up my bag.
Dante takes it from my shoulder before I can argue.
I turn and look at him.
He looks back.
"I can carry my own bag," I say.
"I know you can," he says.
He carries it anyway.
And I follow Signora Ferrara up the staircase and tell myself the warmth in my chest right now is completely irrelevant.
The room she shows me to is bigger than my apartment.
I stand in the doorway and look at the high ceiling and the tall windows and the bed that could fit four of me and I breathe in and out twice before I walk inside.
Dante sets my bag at the foot of the bed.
He stands in the middle of the room and watches me look around and there is something in his face that is careful and quiet and I cannot tell if he is waiting for me to say something or hoping I will not.
"This is too much," I say.
"It is just a room."
"Dante. My whole apartment fits inside this room three times."
"Then you have space," he says.
I look at him.
He looks back.
And in the afternoon light coming through those tall windows he looks different from this morning. Less like the bleeding stranger on my couch and more like what he actually is. The man who owns this room. This house. The city sitting outside those windows. All of it is his.
I feel the distance between our worlds land on me fully for the first time.
"I do not belong here," I say quietly.
He crosses the room.
He stops right in front of me and looks down at my face and his eyes move over it slowly the way they do when he is reading something he wants to understand completely.
"You belong wherever you are," he says.
It is such a simple thing to say and it lands so hard that I have to look away first.
That has never happened before.
I walk to the window and look out at the garden below. Dark green hedges and old stone paths and a fountain in the center that has probably been running since before my grandmother was born.
Beautiful.
And completely inescapable.
"How long?" I ask.
"Until it is safe."
"That is not an answer."
"It is the only honest one I have right now."
I turn around.
He is closer than I expected. Standing just behind me with his hands loose at his sides and those dark eyes on my face and the afternoon light hitting the line of his jaw and I feel my pulse do something it has no business doing in this situation.
"Dante," I say.
"Aria," he says back. Low and steady.
"You need to stop doing that."
"Doing what."
"Standing that close."
He looks at the space between us. Then back at me.
"I am not that close," he says.
"You are always that close."
Something shifts in his expression. Slow and deliberate and completely aware of itself. His hand comes up and his fingers brush the curl that has fallen across my face and he tucks it back and his fingertips drag lightly across my cheekbone and I go completely still and let him and my whole body feel like it has been lit from somewhere inside.
His eyes drop to my mouth.
They stay there for one long second.
Then they come back up and what is in them right now is not being hidden even a little bit.
"You should eat something," he says. His voice has dropped.
"That is what you are thinking about right now," I say.
He almost smiles.
"Come down for dinner," he says. "I will introduce you to the house properly."
I look at him.
He looks at me.
I think about his hand on my back outside. His fingers on my cheekbone just now. The way he carried my bag without making it feel like he was taking something from me.
I think about Vittoria's cold eyes in the doorway.
"Will she be there?" I ask.
He does not pretend not to know who I mean.
"Yes," he says.
"Wonderful," I say.
He does something with his mouth that is the closest thing to a real smile I have seen from him yet and it does something to me that I am absolutely not going to think about.
"One hour," he says.
He walks to the door.
He stops with his hand on the frame and turns back and looks at me across the room one more time.
"Aria."
"What."
"You do belong here."
He leaves before I can answer.
I stand at the window with the afternoon light on my face and my heart doing something loud and my skin still warm where his fingers touched my cheekbone and I stare at the garden and think about a girl from Trastevere who packed her life into one bag this morning.
She is standing in a room that belongs to the most powerful man in Rome.
And the most terrifying part is not the danger outside those iron gates.
The most terrifying part is the way she felt when he touched her face.
Like she would let him do it again.
Like she wanted him to.
Sixty minutes later I go downstairs.
The hallway at the bottom of the staircase is quiet and warm and lit by lamps that turn everything gold.
Then a voice comes from the doorway on the left.
Smooth and carrying and perfectly placed.
"I hope you are not under the impression that this is permanent."
Vittoria is leaning against the doorframe with a glass of wine in one hand and her eyes on me with something in them that has stopped pretending to be anything other than what it is.
A warning.
I stop walking.
I look at her.
"I am sorry?" I say.
"This." She gestures with her glass. Casual. Easy. Like this is just a conversation. "You being here. Dante playing protector to a waitress from Trastevere." She takes a slow sip. "It is temporary. I want you to know that so you do not start getting comfortable in rooms that are not yours."
I look at her for a long moment.
Then I take two steps toward her.
"I did not come here to be comfortable," I say quietly. "I came here because someone sent men to my apartment. But since we are being honest with each other." I hold her gaze.
"Do not speak to me like that again."
Her eyes go sharp.
"Excuse me?"
"You heard me."
Footsteps behind me.
Dante's voice.
"Vittoria."
One word.
The temperature in the hallway drops.