Aria's POV
Elena makes me laugh for the first time since this whole thing started.
We are in the sitting room at the end of the hall with dessert she produced from somewhere and wine she poured without asking and she is telling me about a seven year old Dante walking into a room full of dangerous men and telling them to leave because they were being too loud.
I laugh until my stomach hurts.
It feels strange.
Laughing in a place like this. In a room with high ceilings and expensive furniture and men positioned at every exit with guns under their jackets. But Elena has this thing about her where she makes wherever she is feel like the safest room in the building.
I needed that tonight.
I needed it more than I realized.
"He really did that?" I say.
"Hand on my heart." She holds up her palm. "My father's face. I have never seen anything like it. These enormous men and not one of them said a word to a seven year old because even then he had those eyes."
"The eyes," I say.
"You know the eyes."
I know exactly the eyes.
I look into my wine glass so she cannot see whatever is on my face right now.
"He looked at you at dinner," Elena says. Casual. Like she is commenting on the weather.
"He looks at everyone at dinner."
"Not like that, he doesn't."
I look up.
She is watching me with that warm steady gaze of hers that sees too much and says exactly enough.
"Elena," I say.
"I am just telling you what I saw."
"I know what you are doing."
"What am I doing?"
"You are trying to make me feel something I should not be feeling about a man whose name makes the whole city go quiet."
She is quiet for a moment.
Then she says, "Maybe the whole city goes quiet because they do not know him the way you already do."
The sitting room is very still.
I open my mouth.
The door opens.
And Dante is standing in the frame.
He fills it completely the way he fills every space he walks into. Dark jacket. Sleeves pushed up now. Eyes that find me before they find anything else in the room and stay.
Elena stands up immediately.
"I was just leaving," she says cheerfully.
"You were not," I say.
"I absolutely was." She squeezes my shoulder as she passes. She stops beside her brother in the doorway. Looks up at him. Say something low that I cannot hear.
Whatever it is makes something move in his jaw.
Then she is gone and it is just the two of us and the low warm light of the sitting room and whatever this is that sits in the air between us every single time we are alone together.
He crosses the room.
He does not sit across from me.
He sits beside me.
Close enough that his knee is almost touching mine and I feel the warmth of him through the small space between us and I keep my eyes on my wine glass and tell myself to breathe normally.
I do not breathe normally.
"She was telling stories," I say.
"About what."
"You. Seven years old. Clearing a boardroom."
He is quiet for one long second.
"She has no boundaries," he says.
"She is wonderful," I say.
Something in his voice shifts when he says, "Yes. She is."
I look at him sideways.
He is looking at me directly and the sitting room light is warm and low and it catches the line of his jaw and the dark of his eyes and I think about how four days ago this man was bleeding on my kitchen floor and now he is sitting beside me in a palazzo that costs more than everything I have ever owned put together.
"Are you okay?" he asks.
The question catches me off guard.
Not because it is the wrong question. Because it is the right one and I did not expect it from him.
"I do not know yet," I say honestly.
"That is a fair answer."
"I keep thinking about my apartment," I say. "About whether my plants are going to die. Which is ridiculous because there are people outside who want to hurt me and I am worried about my plants."
"It is not ridiculous," he says.
"It feels ridiculous."
"It means you have a life worth going back to." He pauses.
"That is not nothing."
I look at him.
He is still looking at me and his eyes are not just dark. They are layered. Deep. The kind of eyes that have seen things and kept them and are very careful about what they let out.
"Dante," I say.
"Aria," he says back.
"You are doing it again."
"What."
"Looking at me like you are trying to figure something out."
He does not look away.
"Maybe I am," he says.
"Have you."
"Not yet."
His hand moves.
It comes up slowly and his fingers find the curl that keeps falling across my face and he tucks it back and this time his touch lingers. His fingertips stay at my temple for one moment longer than before and I feel my whole body go completely still the way it does when something is happening that it does not want to interrupt.
I look at him.
He looks at me.
And the air between us is so charged right now that if either of us moves even slightly something is going to break open that I am not sure I know how to close again.
"You should not do that," I say. My voice comes out quiet.
Too quiet.
"Do what."
"Touch me like that."
"Like what."
"Like you mean it."
He goes very still.
His eyes drop to my mouth and come back up and when they land on mine again they are darker than they were thirty seconds ago and what is in them is not being hidden even a little.
"What if I do," he says.
My heart slams against my ribs so hard I am certain he can hear it.
"Then that is a problem," I say.
"Why."
"Because you have blood on your hands, Dante. Because men came through my apartment door because of you. Because I packed my whole life into a bag this morning and drove away from everything I know and I do not even fully understand why." I look at him. "Because I am a waitress from Trastevere and you are whatever you are and none of this makes any sense."
He listens to all of it.
He does not argue with any of it.
He just looks at me with those steady dark eyes and when I finish he leans forward slightly and his forearms rest on his knees and he turns his face toward mine and the space between us is nothing now.
"All of that is true," he says quietly.
"I know."
"And none of it changes the way I look at you."
I cannot breathe.
I literally cannot find a single breath.
He reaches up again and this time his hand cups my jaw. Just hold it. Warm and certain and completely unhurried. His thumb grazes my cheekbone the way it did this morning and my eyes close for one second because I cannot help it and when they open he is watching me with an expression that has stopped pretending to be anything other than what it is.
Wanting.
Open and real and completely focused on me.
"Dante," I whisper.
"I know," he says.
"We cannot."
"I know that too."
But he does not move his hand.
And I do not move away.
We stay exactly like that for a moment that stretches out long and warm and impossible and I think about every reason this is a terrible idea and none of them feel as real as the warmth of his palm against my face right now.
Then his phone goes off.
He closes his eyes for one half second.
He drops his hand.
He pulls the phone out and looks at the screen and whatever is on it rearranges his entire face into something else. Something cold and focused and completely in control.
Every soft thing in the room disappears.
"What is it?" I ask.
He stands.
"The lights are about to go out," he says.
I stare at him.
"What?"
"Someone cut the external line. It is about to go completely dark." He looks at me and his eyes are not the eyes from thirty seconds ago. They are the other ones. The ones that the whole city is afraid of. "Do not move from this room. Do not open the door for anyone except me."
"Dante what is happening—"
The lights go out.
Every single one.
The whole wing drops into absolute darkness and my heart stops and I reach out without thinking and my hand finds his arm and I grip it.
His hand covers mine immediately.
"I have you," he says into the dark. Low and certain.
And then from somewhere outside beyond the garden walls.
A gunshot.
Sharp and close and real.
His hand tightens over mine for one second.
Then he is gone and the door closes and I am alone in the dark with my heart slamming and the echo of that shot still hanging in the air.
And somewhere in the darkness outside this palazzo something very bad has just started.