Dante's POV
Naples smells like the sea and things that never get clean.
I have always hated this city.
I step off the private jet at eleven at night and the air is warm and heavy and Marco is already talking beside me about the morning meeting and I am listening and nodding and saying the right things and my mind is two hours away in a palazzo in Rome.
In a room on the east wing.
With a woman who said come back like it cost her something to say.
I think about the whole drive to the hotel.
The suite is on the top floor.
Floor to ceiling windows. The Naples coastline spread below like something that wants to be admired. I stand at the glass with a glass of whiskey and go through everything Marco briefed me on during the drive.
Silvio's operation.
The contact.
The meeting tomorrow with three men who will smile at me while deciding how to destroy me.
I have done this a hundred times.
I know how to sit across from dangerous men and give them nothing.
My phone buzzes.
Private number.
I know before I answer.
"Dante."
Camilla's voice. Low and warm and practiced. The voice of a woman who has spent years learning exactly how to say my name.
I close my eyes for one second.
"How did you know I was here," I say.
"You always stay at the same hotel." Soft laughter. "That is not very careful for a man like you."
"What do you want Camilla?"
"What I always want." A pause that carries everything she is not saying. "Come have a drink. I am downstairs."
I should say no.
I know I should say no.
But Camilla De Luca has known me since I was twenty three years old. She knew my father. She knows the things about this life that take other people decades to learn. And she holds all of it with the patience of a woman who understands that the right card played at the right time is worth a hundred played too soon.
She has always known which cards to hold.
"I will be down in ten minutes," I say.
She is at the bar in a red dress that was chosen with precision.
She looks up when I walk in and her eyes move over me slowly and she smiles the way she always smiles.
Like she owns something.
Like she has always owned it and is simply waiting for me to stop pretending otherwise.
We drink.
We talk about Naples. About the families. About things that happened years ago that only the two of us remember.
She is sharp and funny and dangerous in the specific way of people who never need to raise their voice to make a point.
She reaches across the table.
Her fingers close over mine.
"You are distracted tonight," she says.
"Business."
"No." She studies my face. "Something else."
I say nothing.
She reads it anyway.
"There is someone," she says. Quiet. Certain.
"My personal life is not your business."
"It has always been my business." She leans closer. Close enough that her perfume finds me. Familiar. A different kind of familiar from the kind I have been living with in a palazzo in Rome. "Whatever she is to you. Whatever you think you are building." She tilts her head. Her thumb moves across my knuckles. "You always come back here Dante. You always come back to me."
I should stand up.
I know I should stand up.
But she is looking at me with those eyes that know everything and the whiskey is warm and the Naples night is outside the window and Rome feels very far away.
The city outside the hotel window is dark when I finally understand what I have done.
Camilla sleeps beside me.
Her dark hair across the pillow. Her breathing deep and even. Her hand resting near mine with the comfortable ease of someone who has done this before and intends to do it again.
I stare at the ceiling.
And I think about a girl in a small apartment in Trastevere who pressed careful hands against my wound and made me coffee and looked right back when I looked at her.
Who said come back like she meant it.
Something sits in my chest that is not guilt exactly.
It is worse than guilt.
It is the specific weight of a man who knows exactly what he has and has just done something that puts it at risk and cannot fully explain why.
I get up.
I dress in the dark.
I do not wake her.
At the door I stop and look back at the room and feel the distance between this and what is waiting for me in Rome stretch into something I cannot measure cleanly.
Camilla stirs.
"Come back to bed," she says without opening her eyes.
I close the door behind me.
The meetings take two days.
Three men across a table. Smiles that mean nothing. Agreements made in a language that has another language underneath it. I sit through all of it with my face completely still and my mind completely focused and I do what I have always done in these rooms.
I win.
Marco handles the rest.
On the second evening I am in the car heading to the airport and my phone shows seventeen messages from various people and one from a number I do not recognize that I almost scroll past.
Does she know where you were last night?
Does she know who you were with?
Ask yourself if she would still look at you the same way.
I stare at the screen.
Camilla.
I put the phone in my pocket.
Rome at night is different from Naples.
Cooler. Older. The kind of city that does not need to try.
The gates of the palazzo open and the car pulls through and I am inside before Marco has finished his final briefing of the evening and I am walking through the entrance hall and up the stairs and down the east wing corridor before I have made a conscious decision to go there first.
Before anything else.
Before my office or my room or the security report waiting on my desk.
I go to her.
One knock.
I open the door.
She is already standing.
Right there. Like she was already coming to me before I arrived. Her phone in her hand and her dark curly hair loose and her eyes finding mine immediately and the lamp behind her making everything warm and gold.
We both still go for one second.
One second of just looking at each other across the small space of the doorway.
Then I step through.
My hands find her face before anything else. Both palms against her jaw tilting her face up and her eyes go wide for half a breath before I kiss her.
Not slow. Not patient.
The kiss of a man who spent two days in the wrong city and walked back through this door with every hour of missing sitting right underneath his skin.
Her phone drops somewhere.
Not patient.
She makes a sound of surprise against my mouth.
Then her hands go to my chest and she kisses me back and the surprise becomes something else. Something that has been building between us for weeks and does not know how to be quiet anymore.
I pull back just enough to look at her.
Her lips are slightly parted. Her eyes are dark and wide and looking at me like she is trying to catch up to something that moved faster than she expected.
"Hi," she breathes.
"Hi," I say.
She lets out a short unsteady laugh.
Then she pulls me back down.
This time slower. Both of us are finding the pace. Her fingers curled into my shirt. My hands moving from her face into her hair. The lamp is warm and low. The palazzo was completely quiet around us. The world outside does not exist right now.
She pulls back and presses her forehead to mine and her breathing is not steady and neither is mine and she looks at me from this close with those eyes that see everything.
"You came back early," she says.
"I could not stay away," I say.
It is the most honest thing I have said in two days.
She reads my face the way she always reads my face.
Her hand comes up and touches my jaw.
Soft. Warm.
"Stay," she says.
Not a question.
I lean down and press my lips to her forehead. Her temple.
The curve of her cheek.
She closes her eyes and turns her face toward me and her hand goes to the back of my neck and I pull her in and the last two days fall away completely.
Later we lie in the warm quiet of her room with the lamp still on and her head on my chest and her hand over my heart and her breathing slow and even.
She falls asleep.
I do not.
My phone screen lights up on the nightstand.
Camilla.
How does it feel going from my bed to hers?
Enjoy it while it lasts.
I reach over carefully.
Turn it face down.
And lie in the dark holding Aria and feeling the weight of everything I am keeping from her press against my chest like something that will not stay buried forever.