7. Mirella
SEVEN
Mirella
I press the edge of the needle until the leather gives and the seam sighs closed.
"Dante, it's not a sacred relic," I say, frowning at my hands.
He hums behind me, close enough that I feel the heat of his body even when he doesn't touch me. "It is if you treat it like one."
I laugh, softer than I intend. "You keep things that way to make people think you remember more than you do."
"You always find the truth under the surface." His voice is low; it brushes my ear. "Even in wallets."
He leans against the doorframe, arms folded. The shirt across his shoulders rides taut, and I can't stop looking at the slope of muscle under cotton. My fingers miss a stitch. Heat climbs my spine.
"You're staring," he says.
"Can't help it." I tuck the needle between my lips for a second and feel ridiculous when he smiles—half amused, half something that makes my chest uneven. "Your wallet's nearly falling apart."
He steps forward and takes it from my hands with a care that annoys and thrills me. His fingers are callused, the knuckle scar pale and white when he flexes. He rubs the leather where I've stitched, like he's testing not just the repair but who touched it.
"Better?" I ask.
He looks at me the way a man looks at a knife he's chosen to keep—practical, private reverence. "Much," he says. "Thank you."
I hand it back. His palm brushes mine. A current, simple and stupid, goes through me. I don't pull away. Not when everything else in my life tells me to.
We move around each other easily—coffee, the small pile of clothes on the chair, the quiet that isn't empty because he's still here. But the quiet carries a weight. I can feel it like a pressure in my teeth.
"So?" Dante sets the repaired wallet on the table. "You do this for everyone?"
"Only for things I want to keep." I fold my hands to hide the way my fingers tremble. "Don't get sentimental on me."
"Too late." He lifts one shoulder. "You look good when you concentrate."
"Flatterer." I shove him with my hip and nearly kiss him because it's the easiest answer and he's dangerous and he smells like leather and citrus and something that makes my stomach drop.
The knock at the door comes like a stone thrown through glass—sharper than a text, more real. Dante freezes. Instinct narrows him in a way that is almost worshipful to watch.
"Don't answer," I whisper, though I don't know if I'm warning him or myself.
He walks to the door anyway. I stay where I am, every sense tuned to the space between us. When he pivots back, it's not alone—Enzo's smile is gone and Lucia's gentleness is an echo. That happened earlier. I don't mention it. We don't need to re-run it.
Instead, I watch Dante's jaw. His posture is a promise I don't think I deserve: he'll make this place a fortress if I let him.
"Marco called today," I say too quickly, the words a splinter.
His head snaps up. "He did what?"
"He texted." I turn my hands, the needle now idle. "Short. Didn't answer. I blocked the number. It?—"
"Show me." He doesn't hesitate.
I don't want to. I also don't want to lie. Something inside tightens. I tell myself silence protects him. Truth has always been dangerous where Marco is concerned.
"I blocked him," I repeat. "He can't?—"
"Show me your phone." Dante reaches for it like it's an order.
My pulse bangs against my throat. For a moment I consider tossing the phone away, burning the bridge clean. I have this reflex—cut contact, vanish. It's what kept me alive then. It's what could ruin us now.
He takes the phone without asking. His fingers are warm. He reads the message, the screen bright in the dim room. His eyes don't look away from mine.
"Marco Santini," he says, pronouncing the name like it's a thing that needs setting down carefully. "He said what?"
I hear the accusation before he says it. You didn't tell me. I look at my hands. "I thought?—"
"You thought what, Mirella? That keeping it from me would make me safer?"
"I'm protecting you." The words come out brittle. "If he's involved, he tracks people who touch me. Anyone close to me becomes a hole he can fall a blade into."
His face changes, not with anger but with an ugly, hot need to fix things. "You don't get to do that alone."
"I have to." My voice is small. "I learned how to disappear at fourteen. I learned that attachments are leashes and leashes get cut."
Dante takes a step closer. Close enough that his breath brushes my mouth. "I'm not a leash."
"To you it's a leash," I snap, sharper than I want.
"To me, it's the difference between surviving and.
..and being sacrificed. Marco left me. He didn't—he left me to bleed in a stairwell once.
He sent the picture to everyone who mattered.
He framed me. He promised terms I—" My throat closes. The sentence fractures.
He reaches out like he's going to steady me, but his hand hovers, uncertain. Then he closes his fingers around my forearm and his thumb finds the pale crescent scar there and traces it.
"You never told me about this scar."
"I didn't want you to see me as the thing that bled." I look away. The admission tastes like copper and release. "He took everything. He said any attachment would be leverage. He taught me how to lockpick and how to hide, and then he used the skills to put a noose on me."
Dante's thumb pauses on the scar, his other hand braced at the small of my back. His touch isn't clinical; it's reverent. "You were a kid."
"Not when he left me," I whisper. "I was twenty-three and—" I swallow hard. "I was alone on a wet stair, bleeding out and thinking I'd been stupid to trust him."
Silence folds between us. It isn't empty; it's full of consequences and a sudden, fierce need that makes my knees tremble.
"Why now?" he asks finally. "Why reach out at all?"
"He wants payment. Or he thinks I owe him leverage." My fingers curl into the hem of my shirt. "He called me a loose end once. He used to say it like a joke."
Dante's face is a stone, then liquefies into something like shame. "You should have told me. Earlier."
"Maybe then you'd have left me," I say, too quickly. "Or worse—stayed and been killed because I couldn't cut the leash in time."
His hand on my arm tightens. "I wouldn't leave you to die."
"Would you really risk the Costa family? You told Enzo—" I stop. My argument collapses under the memory of the corridor, of Dante backing me in front of Enzo. He didn't think then of rules. He thought of me.
"I'm not asking you to choose the family," he says. "I'm asking you to let me choose you."
I laugh, a sound devoid of humor. "Choosing me is choosing trouble."
"Choosing you is choosing me," he says. "And I decide."
We stand there, two people shaped by the same cruel lesson that loving pulls knives. The space between us is smaller now. I can see the pulse at his throat. I can smell him—leather, citrus, smoke. My body answers before my head does.
The first knock comes loud enough to make us both jump. There is an audible pause, a measured patience on the other side.
"Not them," I whisper.
Dante moves. Fast, deliberate. He checks the peephole, then looks back at me. "Stay."
Of course I don't. I trail after him. He opens the door a crack and it's not Marco—it's two men in cheap jackets, their hands empty but eyes hungry. The taller one steps forward, too confident. Enforcers, or worse—hunters.
"Can I help you?" Dante asks, and his voice is calm enough to be a weapon.
"Looking for someone," the tall man says, and his gaze flicks to me. "She matches a description."
Dante smiles without humor. "She's with me."
The man steps in, and the smaller one moves quicker than his eyes.
Dante's shoulder collides with his chest and the taller one stumbles back; the smaller man swings.
Dante catches his arm, twists. A fight easy and brutal.
I feel adrenaline in the hollow of my throat, then fear so sharp it makes my hands go cold.
We move through it like water. Dante's movements are economical and devastating, and I love him in that moment—love and need braided with terror. No one gets close to me. Not anymore. Not without paying something.
We spill into the hallway, the men cursing. Dante holsters whatever calm he has and pulls me behind him. "Get to the car," he says.
I obey. The street is bright with sodium lights. The city smells of wet stone and exhaust. Dante throws me a look—one of those dangerous, private promises—and then he's ahead, opening the back door of his car for me like a gentleman who knows to give a woman a way out and a way in.
We drop into the back seat. He follows, shutting the world out with the press of leather and the click of the door. His body fills the car, close enough that my ribs press against his. He doesn't say anything. He doesn't need to.
Then he kisses me.
Not a polite peck. Not a tentative test. A hard, claiming kiss that takes my breath and everything in me protests only to surrender.
His hands are at my waist, then climbing my back, fingers threading through the knot of my hair.
My mouth answers, greedy and desperate. Clothes wrinkle, breath quickens, the world outside the car becomes a rumor.
I think of sacrifice and leashes and blood on wet stairs, and my body betrays me by wanting him more.
Wanting to belong to this steady, dangerous man who would break rules for me.
My hands cup his face, rough against salt-and-scruff.
He tastes of coffee and iron and something sweet.
I remember how he sheltered me once, in a way no one had, and I am so tired—tired of running, of always calculating exits.
"Don't," he says against my mouth, breath hot. "Don’t pull away from me."
"I have to—" I manage, but he silences me with a harder kiss.
We move as if the car is a sanctuary and a battlefield both. His fingers find the line of my back beneath my shirt and the feel of him there makes a deep part of me unclench. This isn't just desire; it's a claiming, a refusal to let the past determine us.
When we pause, it's for air, for a ragged second with our foreheads pressed together. "Tell me everything," he says.
I want to. I want to unload all the dirty, jagged edges of what Marco did to me. But the truth feels too heavy to set down all at once. I catch my breath and say a fraction—enough that his eyes darken, enough that he grips my wrist so firmly it aches.
He reaches for my phone. "If he texts again—let me see it."
"No," I say, the instinct still there. "I won't drag you in."
"You already are," he snaps, and then softer: "Don't try to push me away."
I bury my face against his chest and choose honesty in the small, broken pieces I can manage.
"He took pictures the first time. Sent them to people who mattered.
He called me a loose end. He said terms. He—" The car rocks with the sound of a distant engine.
I stop. I am fragile in the way survivors get.
Dante's hand rubs slow circles on my back.
I can feel his heartbeat steady under my ear.
He holds me like a man who means to keep me. "You won't be a loose end," he says. "Not on my watch."
I want to believe that. I try to believe it. But belief feels silly and dangerous when the man I love could be dragged into a war because of me.
My phone lights up on the seat between us. The name that pops up is a knife: Marco. I don't look. Dante does. His jaw tightens, and the message preview shows like a clean cut.
"You remember the terms," it reads.
And that's when the world narrows, and I realize the only choices I have are bad and worse. I look at Dante and the panic that I have been hiding for days turns into a hot, ashamed thing at the back of my throat.
"I cannot tell you what I'll do," I whisper. "But I can't let you?—"
He silences me with his mouth. This time it's gentler, a promise rather than an escape. But his eyes when they open are filled with a question I can't answer: will you stay, Mirella? Or will you walk away to spare me?
I touch my scar where his thumb left a crescent warm on my skin and answer with the one thing both of us know is true: my body wants him.
My phone buzzes again. The screen shows one line, new and colder than any before.
You remember the terms.
I look at Dante and can't say what I'll do next.