5. romeo #2
Good fucking question. I stare at her across three feet of linoleum and I don't have an answer that doesn't blow the arrangement apart.
I can't tell her the truth — that her apartment smells like mildew and dish soap and survival and I want to put her in a room at my place where the walls aren't peeling.
That watching her grip the counter like it was the only thing keeping her upright made something in my chest shift in a direction I can't afford.
"Just a change of scenery," I say. Casual. Light. The voice I use when I'm lying to everyone including myself.
She sees through it instantly. She always does.
"No." Clean. Final. Her chin lifts half an inch and her eyes are steady on mine.
"I'm not asking as part of the arrangement."
"Then what are you asking as?"
The question hangs between us. I open my mouth.
Close it. She watches me fail to answer and something flickers across her face — satisfaction, maybe, at proving what she already suspected.
That I don't know what this is either. That the categories I built to keep her at a safe distance are dissolving faster than I can rebuild them.
"You should go," she says. Quiet. The fight drained out of her hours ago and what's left is a woman standing in a doorframe at two in the morning trying to protect herself from a man who keeps showing up when she tells him to stay away.
"Yeah." I push off the counter. "I should."
I walk past her. Close enough to feel the heat off her skin, to catch that citrus again, to see the pulse in her throat beating faster than her voice suggested. She doesn't move. Doesn't step back. Holds her ground like she always does — like giving me an inch is the same as giving me everything.
At the door I don't look back. I step into the hallway and pull it shut behind me, the swollen frame catching before it clicks.
The stairwell swallows me. Third step creaks. Fourth floor light still dead. The argument three floors down has gone quiet — either resolved or abandoned, both equally likely in a building like this.
I hit the street. The air is cold and wet and I breathe it in deep enough to hurt.
My phone buzzes in my pocket.
I pull it out. The screen glows white against the dark.
Nova.
What time tomorrow?
I stare at the four words until my vision blurs. Then I laugh — a short, broken sound that bounces off the brick facade and disappears into the empty street.
I'm so fucked.
Her Reaction to His World
She steps through the door and stops.
I've watched men walk into this penthouse — capos, allies, enemies dressed up as friends — and every single one of them did the same thing. Eyes to the ceiling. Eyes to the view. A low whistle or a comment about the square footage designed to remind both of us who owns what.
Nova does none of that.
She stands just inside the entryway with her bag on her shoulder and her sneakers still on and she looks at my apartment the way a detective looks at a crime scene. Slow. Methodical. Like everything in this place is evidence of something I'm trying to hide.
The kitchen first. Her eyes trace the marble countertops, the six-burner range that has never been lit, the espresso machine still wearing the plastic film on its display screen.
I watch her clock every detail — the empty fruit bowl, the knife block with blades that have never cut anything, the absence of crumbs or stains or any proof that a human being feeds himself here.
She moves into the living room. Runs her fingers along the back of the couch — the leather she'll sit on later like it's her own, shoes off, legs tucked.
But right now she's still in reconnaissance mode, cataloguing the blank walls, the bookshelves with nothing on them, the glass coffee table without a single ring or scratch.
She walks to the windows. The view punches outward — the whole city laid open, steel and glass and the river cutting through it like a scar. Twenty-third floor. On a clear day you can see the harbor where my father's shipments used to dock.
She stares at it for a long time.
I lean against the kitchen island with my arms folded, watching her watch my life, and the silence is so heavy I can hear the elevator humming thirty feet behind the closed doors.
"Who lives here?" she says.
The question lands in my sternum like a fist.
"What?"
She turns. Her bag is still on her shoulder. She hasn't put it down. Hasn't committed to staying. Her eyes — those dark brown eyes that hold warmth and warning in equal measure — pin me against my own countertop.
"This apartment, Romeo. Who lives here?"
I scan the room through her eyes and for the first time I see what she sees. Fourteen months. I've paid the mortgage for fourteen months. I sleep here. I shower here. I drink Macallan here at two in the morning while the Marchese deadline eats through my chest.
But nobody lives here.
There is nothing on these walls because I have nothing worth displaying. There is nothing in this kitchen because I have no one to cook for. There is nothing in this entire glossy, overpriced monument that proves a single human being has built a life inside it.
She's named the thing I've never said out loud. The thing I've buried under expensive furniture and good whiskey and the constant forward motion of a man who cannot stop running long enough to realize he has nowhere to go.
This penthouse is a crypt. I just haven't admitted who's buried in it.
"You going to put your bag down?" I ask, because it's the only sentence I can manage that doesn't crack me open worse than she already has.
She holds my gaze for three more seconds. Then she slides the strap off her shoulder, sets the bag on my empty counter, and kicks her sneakers off next to my door.
Something in my chest unlocks.
I hate it.
The Refusal That Ignites Him
She sits on my ten-thousand-dollar couch like it's a bus seat.
Legs tucked under her, one arm draped across the back, her body angled toward me with the casual authority of a woman who has never once adjusted herself to make someone else comfortable.
She hasn't lowered her voice. She hasn't arranged her face into something polite and impressed.
She's sitting in my penthouse the same way she sits in her apartment — like the furniture is just furniture and the man on the other end of it owes her honesty, regardless of what he paid for the leather.
I hand her coffee. She wraps both hands around the mug, takes a sip, and sets it on my glass coffee table without looking for a coaster.
I almost smile.
"What's the chess piece?" she says.
The coffee in my throat goes down wrong. I cough once, recover, and she watches me do it with the patience of someone who knows exactly where she aimed that question.
"What chess piece?"
"The cracked one on your desk at the club. White marble. A horse. I saw it the night you offered me the arrangement."
A Knight. She saw the Knight. She's been carrying that detail for days — filing it the same way she files everything, quietly, precisely, waiting for the right moment to pull it out and lay it on the table between us.
"It's nothing. Decoration."
"Mm." She takes another sip. Her eyes don't leave mine. "And the brother who walks into your office without knocking — the one who looks like he's never smiled in his life. What's his deal?"
Santino. She clocked him too. She clocked all of it — the Knight, my brother, the way I changed after they left. She catalogued every detail while I was busy convincing myself she was just a transaction.
"He's my older brother. He's intense."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the answer you're getting."
She tilts her head. The curl that always escapes falls across her cheek and she doesn't push it back. "Why don't you sleep?"
The question slides between my ribs like a blade she's been sharpening since she walked through my door.
She doesn't flinch when she asks it. Doesn't soften the delivery.
Just sits on my couch in her jeans and her worn cotton shirt, smelling like cocoa butter and something clean, and asks me the one question no one in my world has ever bothered with because they already think they know the answer.
Power. Pressure. The weight of the crown.
That's what they assume keeps me awake.
They're wrong.
"I sleep fine," I say.
"You answered a text at two in the morning, drove across the city in twelve minutes, and washed my dishes without being asked. That's not a man who sleeps fine."
Every deflection I throw, she catches. Every wall I build, she walks around. She doesn't climb over them. She doesn't tear them down. She just finds the gap I didn't know was there and steps through it like she's been doing it her whole life.
I lean forward. Elbows on my knees. Close enough to see the flecks of amber buried deep in those brown eyes.
"You're dangerous," I say. Low. Honest in a way I didn't authorize.
"I'm a twenty-year-old stripper sitting on your couch drinking bad coffee." She lifts the mug. "You're the dangerous one here."
She's wrong about the coffee.
She's right about everything else.
The distance between us is three cushions of Italian leather and it feels like a dare neither of us is willing to lose.
Tension to Collision
The conversation doesn't end. It evaporates.
One minute she's telling me my coffee is terrible and I'm watching her mouth shape the word terrible like it's a private invitation. The next minute there's one cushion between us instead of three and neither of us moved on purpose.
Or maybe we both did.