Aria's POV
The darkness is complete.
Not the soft kind that comes when you turn off a lamp. The absolute kind. The kind that swallows the room whole and leaves you standing in it with nothing but the sound of your own heartbeat and the echo of a gunshot still hanging in the air outside.
My back is against the wall.
My hands are pressed flat to the surface behind me and I am breathing and counting and telling myself not to move.
He said stay.
He said do not open the door.
So I stay.
I do not open the door.
But my heart is slamming so hard against my ribs that I can feel it in my throat and somewhere out there in the dark beyond these walls someone just fired a gun and Dante walked straight toward it.
Because of course he did.
Because that is what he is.
I hear it before I see it.
Footsteps in the corridor outside. More than one pair. Fast and controlled and then a voice low and sharp and a sound that I do not want to identify.
Then nothing.
Then silence is somehow worse.
I grip the small table beside me in the dark and wait and count my breaths and think about Trastevere. About my apartment. About the flower seller on the corner who puts out roses every morning and how ordinary that is and how far away it feels right now.
Then the door opens.
I stop breathing completely.
"Aria."
His voice.
The relief that moves through me is so sharp it almost hurts.
"I am here," I say.
He crosses the room in the dark without hesitating. Like he knows exactly where I am. Like he has been tracking the sound of my breathing since he walked back through that door.
He stops right in front of me.
I cannot see his face but I can feel him. The warmth of him. The way the air changes when he is close. My eyes are adjusting slowly and in the thin darkness I can make out the shape of him. Tall and solid and right there.
"Are you hurt?" His voice is different from usual. Lower. Rougher. Something running underneath it that is not completely controlled.
"No," I say. "Are you?"
He does not answer that.
"Dante." I reach out and my hand finds his arm and I run it upward checking and he lets me and my fingers find something warm and wet at his shoulder and I go completely still.
"It is nothing," he says.
"You are bleeding."
"It grazed me. It is nothing."
"That is what you said about the last wound."
"And I was right about the last wound."
I press my hand flat against his shoulder and feel him tense under my palm and the warmth of the blood on my fingers and something fierce and hot moves through my chest that has no name yet but it is not nothing.
"Sit down," I say.
"Aria—"
"Sit down, Dante."
A pause.
He sits.
The lights come back on twenty minutes later.
In the meantime I find the first aid kit in the bathroom by feel and I work in the near dark and he sits on the edge of the bed in the east wing guest room and lets me and says nothing while I clean the wound and press gauze to it and tape it down with hands that are only slightly unsteady.
He watches my face the whole time.
I feel his eyes on me even when I am not looking up.
"There were three of them," he says.
"I know. I heard."
"Marco has them."
"And the gunshot?"
"One of mine took a graze. He is fine."
I press the last piece of tape down and sit back.
We are close like this. Me crouched in front of him. His knee almost touching my hip. The lamp on the nightstand casting warm gold light over both of us and his eyes on my face with something in them that is not being managed right now.
"You stayed," he says.
"You told me to."
"Most people would have run."
"I am not most people," I say.
Something shifts in his expression.
He reaches up and his hand comes to my face and cups my jaw and I feel the warmth of it against my skin and I go completely still the way I always go still when he touches me. Like my whole body agrees to stop doing anything else.
"No," he says quietly. "You are not."
I look up at him.
He looks down at me.
And the space between us is nothing now. The fear from twenty minutes ago is still in my blood and the adrenaline is still running and his hand is warm on my face and those dark eyes are right there and I am so tired of pretending I do not feel what I feel every single time he looks at me like this.
"You are going to get me killed," I say.
"No," he says. "I am not."
"You almost did tonight."
"Almost is not the same thing."
"Dante—"
"Aria." His thumb moves across my cheekbone. Slow.
Deliberate. "I am not going to let anything happen to you."
"You cannot promise that."
"I just did."
"You have blood on your hands," I say. My voice cracks on the last word and I hate it. "You have enemies and guns and men who break through walls and I am a waitress from Trastevere who was supposed to have a normal life and now I am sitting on the floor of a palazzo taping up your shoulder and I should be angry at you."
"Are you?" he asks.
I look at him.
"Yes," I say.
"Okay," he says.
He does not move his hand.
"Stop being so calm," I say.
"I am not calm."
"You look calm."
"I am not." His voice has dropped lower. "I walked back through that door and you were pressed against the wall in the dark and I felt something I have not felt in a very long time."
I still go.
"What?" I say softly.
His eyes hold mine.
"Afraid," he says.
The word lands in the room like something heavy and I stare at him because this man does not say things like that. This man does not say things like that to anyone. I know that the way I know things about him I have no right to know after four days.
"Dante," I say.
He leans forward.
His forehead comes down and rests against mine and we stay like that for one long breath. His hand is still on my jaw. My hands were still on his knees where they landed when he leaned in. The lamp is warm and low. The room is quiet around us and whatever this is between us sitting in the air like something that has been building since an alley in Trastevere and cannot be held back anymore.
"Tell me to stop," he says. Low and rough and right against my mouth.
I do not tell him to stop.
His lips find mine.
And it is not like I expected.
It is not fierce or demanding. It is slow. So slow. His mouth against mine like he is tasting something he has been waiting for and is in no hurry now that he has it. Warm and certain and patient and it moves through me like heat moving through cold water.
My hands go to his chest.
I feel his heart under my palm. Steady and fast and nothing like the calm face he shows the rest of the world.
He kisses me like I matter.
Like I am something he would burn things down for.
I have been kissed before. I have not been kissed like this.
My fingers curl into his shirt and he makes a sound low in his throat and deepens it slowly and his other hand comes up to my hair and I let him and I kiss him back with everything I have been pretending I did not feel for four days and it is terrifying and it is exactly right and I am so completely done pretending.
He pulls back.
Just slightly.
His forehead against mine again. Both of us breathing unevenly. His hand is still in my hair. My hands are still gripping his shirt.
"Aria," he says.
"Do not say it was a mistake," I say.
"It was not a mistake."
"Do not say it cannot happen again."
He is quiet for a moment.
"I cannot make that promise either," he says.
I look up at him.
He looks at me with those dark eyes that are completely open right now and what is in them makes my chest ache.
"What can you promise me?" I ask.
He holds my gaze.
"That I will keep you safe," he says. "That I will not lie to you. Whatever this is—" he pauses, his thumb moving along my jaw, "I am not walking away from it."
The room is very quiet.
I believe him.
That is the terrifying part.
I believe every word.
My phone lights up on the nightstand.
Sofia.
Seven missed calls.
And one message in all capitals that makes my stomach drop completely.
ARIA PICK UP. NICO IS NOT AT HIS APARTMENT. HE IS NOT AT THE GARAGE. NOBODY HAS SEEN HIM SINCE THIS AFTERNOON. WHERE IS YOUR BROTHER.