Chapter 20
RAFFAELE
The elevator chimes, and I step out into my apartment. Only it doesn’t feel like my apartment. Not anymore.
The place is too quiet for the way I’m walking through it.
I’m still wired.
The drive back was long. Lorenzo offered three different distractions on the way—coffee, a stop, a question about Nico.
I waved off them all. Now I’m here, and I still haven’t come down.
My hands have a faint tremor I’m not used to.
The adrenaline is still coursing through me, telling me, very clearly, to go find her.
I need to see her.
The bedroom door is open a few inches. Light from the city is laid across the floor and bed in long, pale strips. She’s sleeping in the middle of them.
She’s on her side with one arm tucked under the pillow. Her hair is spread across the white sheet. For longer than I mean to, I just stand in the doorway and watch her breathe.
The thought rumbles through me in a dark storm. Wake her up. Take her now. My body is still hot from tonight’s action. I’m ready for a different kind of thrill. An intensity only she can offer me.
But she’s not in the same space as me.
She’s so still. So perfect. Whatever dream she’s lost in, it’s not my nightmare.
I take a step back from the doorway and find the wall by the windows. I push my back against it and slide down until I’m sitting on the floor. It’s only from this distance that I let myself look at her again.
The city is the only sound.
I watch the shape of her shoulder rise and fall, the strand of her hair shift on the pillow when the AC kicks on. I watch her hand curl and uncurl once, slowly, around nothing.
I don’t sleep.
The light starts to change around five. The skyline beyond the glass turning into the real world again.
She stirs just before seven.
Her hand drifts up to her face, brushes hair off it, and stays there a second while she remembers where she is. Her eyes open.
She sees me.
I don’t move.
“You didn’t sleep.”
“No.”
“You’ve been watching me.”
“Yes.”
She sits up. The duvet falls away from her shoulder. She’s quiet for a few seconds, watching me back. Whatever she wants to say is taking its time arriving.
“Yesterday,” she says. “Whatever happened… is it handled?”
“Yes.”
She sighs, and an invisible tension slips off her shoulders. Her eyes drift down to the sheets, and she picks at a thread that isn’t there.
“Are-are you gonna let me go back to my apartment?”
“No.”
“Raffaele.” She’s too tired to make her voice sharp, and the softness of it is worse than anger would have been. “I thought we already had this conversation. I can’t just live in your apartment. That isn’t a thing people do.”
“You’re already sleeping with your boss.” My voice is flat. “You’re well past what people do.”
She stares at me for a long second. I can see her trying to decide whether she’s allowed to laugh.
“That’s—”
“It’s also a promotion.”
“It’s a—”
“Take the win, Bea.”
I reach over to the night table and take the cigar I keep there for nights I don’t have, and I roll it once between my fingers. I don’t answer.
She watches me roll it. She’s not letting me run out the clock the way I thought I might.
“Last night.” She says it slowly. “Did something happen with Nico?”
“Don’t worry about Nico.”
“I’m not worrying. I’m asking.”
“You don’t have to do that either.”
She’s quiet.
I light the cigar, taking my time, the way Vincenzo taught me to twenty years ago, and I draw on it once.
“Raffaele.”
“Mm.”
“I’m not—I’m not trying to—” She stops. She tries again. “I’m trying to be in this with you. That’s the only thing I’m trying to do. So, if there’s something I should know, even if it’s a small—”
“There isn’t.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
The lie is small enough that I can carry it for the rest of the morning. I tell myself that. I almost believe it.
I put the cigar down on the dish and lean over to take her face in my hand, gently. Her eyes glisten in the morning light as I tilt them up to look at me.
“Whatever I have to do, I’ll do. Nico. Vincenzo. The whole fucking family if it comes to it. None of that touches you. That is the one thing I will not let happen. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Say something other than yes.”
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
I lean down and kiss her.
But only for a moment. Just long enough to remind both of us what this is becoming.
What it might already be.
Then I get up, because if I stay another minute, I’m not going to leave, and Vincenzo needs to hear from me before he hears from anyone else.
She sighs as I pull away.
As I get changed, she pulls the duvet up to her chest and stares at the city through the glass. The morning climbs across her shoulders, and I make myself not look at her for the seven seconds it takes to find a clean shirt.
I won’t be long, I promise her, too cowardly to say it out loud. Or maybe the promise isn’t for her. Maybe it’s for me.
The elevator is at the end of the hallway. I pull out my phone on the way and type:
One on the lobby. Two on the garage. One on every elevator that touches this floor. Twenty-four-hour rotation. Starting now.
I stand in front of the elevator with my finger near the send button, but I don’t press it yet.
This isn’t what I do. I’ve set up security details for half this family at one point or another. Wives. Cousins. The judge’s daughter the year of the Mendez thing. But never for myself. Never for one of my own.
Well, fuck. It’s about time.
Finally, I have someone I care about enough to protect.
I press the button.
My phone buzzes in my hand.
Should the princess be allowed to leave her castle?
I think about her on the other side of the door I just walked through, sitting up in my bed with her hand still where mine had been a minute ago, listening to the elevator come for me.
I type back.
No.
The doors open.
I get in.