Chapter 7 Leone
Chapter Seven: Leone
I last three more days.
Three fucking days of the chair. Three fucking days of listening to her breathe in my bed, the sheets rustling every time she shifts, the soft sound she makes when she's almost asleep but not quite. Like a sigh caught halfway in her throat.
Three days of walking away from that door with my hands shaking and my jaw wired shut and every nerve in my body screaming at me to turn around.
I throw myself into the war instead. I coordinate strikes on Castillo supply lines.
I debrief Aurelio on the financial trails Alexandra uncovered.
I sit in meetings that last six, eight, ten hours, surrounded by men who would die for the cause, and I stare at maps and casualty reports until the numbers blur.
None of it works.
She's in my head. In my chest. In my goddamn bones. I catch myself checking my watch during strategy sessions, counting hours until I can go back to the room. Not to see her. to be near her. to sit in that chair and listen to her breathe and pretend the proximity is enough.
It's not enough.
Claudio corners me in the corridor after a late briefing. He leans against the wall, arms folded, that shark smile tugging at his mouth.
"You look like shit," he says.
"Noted."
"When's the last time you slept? Actually slept. Not whatever you're doing in that room."
I keep walking. He keeps pace.
"The men are talking, Leone."
"The men can talk."
"They're saying you're compromised. That the girl has you by the—"
I stop. Turn. Whatever he sees in my face makes him take a half step back, and Claudio doesn't take half steps back from anything.
"Finish that sentence," I say quietly.
He holds my stare. Then he lifts his hands, palms out. "I'm on your side. You know that. But you need to get your head straight before Aurelio starts asking questions neither of us can answer."
"My head is fine."
"Your head is three floors up in a room that smells like a woman you won't touch." He drops his voice. "Either touch her or let her go. This middle ground is going to get you killed."
He walks away before I can respond.
I stand in the corridor, fists at my sides, and hate him for being right.
The meeting with Aurelio runs until midnight.
We review the financial trails, the shell corporations, the accounts that bounce through six countries before vanishing.
Somewhere in the mess, there's a thread.
A name. A face. Someone powerful enough to fund a war and invisible enough to avoid detection.
Every lead we pull dissolves into another dead end, another layer of insulation designed to protect whoever sits at the top.
Alexandra's notes are spread across the table.
Her handwriting is sharp, angular, impatient.
She circles things three times when they matter and draws arrows between connections with enough force to tear the paper.
I've been studying her work for days, and every time I pick up a new page, I learn something. Not about the money.
About her.
She thinks in systems. Sees networks the way I see battlefields.
Every number is a soldier, every transaction a movement, every gap a vulnerability.
She's brilliant in a way that has nothing to do with education and everything to do with survival.
She learned to read patterns because missing one meant her father's debt collectors would show up at the door.
Aurelio taps one of her notes. A cluster of transfers that all route through the same bank in Cyprus before scattering. "She found this?"
"In under two hours."
"Impressive." He leans back. "And dangerous. If whoever is funding the Castillo’s realizes we have someone capable of tracing their money, she becomes a target."
"She's already a target."
"She becomes a priority target. There's a difference." He studies me across the table. "Can you protect her and run this war at the same time?"
"Yes."
"You answered that very quickly."
"Because the answer is simple."
Aurelio watches me for a long time. I hold still and let him look. Whatever he's searching for, whatever test he's running behind those grey eyes, I don't flinch from it.
"Go get some rest," he says finally. "You're no use to me exhausted."
I leave the war room and walk the corridors on autopilot. My body knows the way. Down two flights, through the east wing, past the kitchen that still smells like the garlic from dinner, past the guards who straighten when they see me, past the medical wing where the lights are always on.
The compound is quiet at this hour. The quiet that comes after sustained violence, when everyone is too tired to speak and too wired to sleep.
A few soldiers sit in the common room, cleaning weapons in silence.
One of them, a kid named Leonardo who can't be older than nineteen, looks up when I pass.
His eyes are red. He lost a friend in the attack four days ago.
I nod at him and keep walking. There's nothing I can say that will bring his friend back, and empty words have never been my thing.
I think about what Aurelio said. Priority target. If the people behind those bank accounts realize Alexandra can trace their money, they won't send mercenaries next time. They'll send someone quieter. Someone who knows how to make a person disappear without leaving a mess.
My chest constricts.
I've lost people before. Soldiers. Friends, or the closest thing to friends this life allows.
I watched my sister's coffin go into the ground when I was twelve years old, and I put three rounds into the man who killed her a year later, and I felt nothing.
Not grief, not satisfaction, not relief.
the cold certainty that the world had taken something from me and I'd taken something back and the math would never balance.
Losing Alexandra would not be like that.
Losing Alexandra would be Dahlia all over again, except worse.
Because Dahlia left by choice. She walked away because she knew she’d never be happy with me.
Alexandra didn't choose any of this. She was dragged into my world by her father's failures and my organization's greed, and she's stayed because the alternative is worse.
If she dies because of me, because I brought her close and made her visible and painted a target on her back with my own weakness, I will never recover from it.
I know this the way I know my own name. Absolute. Bone-deep. Terrifying.
I stop outside my door.
I can hear her inside. Not talking, not moving. ... there. A presence that fills the room even through solid wood. I press my palm flat against the wood and close my eyes.
Claudio's voice echoes in my skull. Either touch her or let her go.
Dahlia's voice follows, softer. You know what happens when you let them in.
And then Alexandra's voice, the loudest of all. Come with me.
I open the door.
She's on the bed, propped against the headboard with documents in her lap.
One of my shirts hangs off her shoulder, too big, the collar slipping down to show the ridge of her collarbone.
Her hair is down, loose and messy, curling against her neck.
She's got a pen between her teeth and her brow is furrowed, so deep in concentration she doesn't hear me come in.
I stand in the doorway and watch her, and the wanting hits me so hard my vision blurs.
She glances up. The pen drops from her mouth.
"You're back late."
I close the door behind me. The lock clicks.
"Aurelio needed me," I say, but my voice comes out wrong. Rougher than it should be. Lower.
She notices. I see her register it, see the shift in her posture, the way her shoulders tighten and her chin lifts. She's reading me the way she reads those documents. Scanning for patterns. Looking for what doesn't fit.
"You okay?" she asks.
"No."
The honesty surprises us both. I watch her set the papers aside, slow, careful, her eyes never leaving my face. She swings her legs off the bed and stands, and that shirt rides up her thigh, and I make myself look at the wall.
"Leone."
"Don't."
"Don't what? Ask if you're okay? You JUST said you're not. What's going on?"
"Nothing. Go back to sleep."
"I wasn't sleeping. I was working." She takes a step toward me. "Talk to me."
"There's nothing to talk about."
"Bullshit." Another step. She's close now. Close enough that I can smell the soap she used. My soap, because that's all she has, and the thought of my scent on her skin makes my chest crack open. "You walk in here looking like someone gutted you, and you want me to roll over and ignore it?"
"Yes. That's exactly what I want."
"Too bad." She's right in front of me now. Looking up at me with those storm-grey eyes that see too much, always too much. "What happened?"
I stare at the ceiling. At the wall. At anything except her face.
"Claudio told me to either touch you or let you go," I say. The words come out flat, stripped of everything. "He said the middle ground is going to get me killed."
She's quiet . "And which one are you choosing?"
I look at her.
That's the mistake. That's the moment the leash snaps, the moment the last thread of control frays and gives and finally, finally breaks.
Because she's standing there in my shirt with her hair in her face and her eyes wide and her lips parted, and she's not afraid of me.
She's never been afraid of me. Not when I had her strung up by her wrists.
Not when I put a gun in her face. Not when I dragged her through a firefight with bodies dropping around us.
She's not afraid. She's waiting.
And I'm done making her wait.
I cross the distance between us in one stride. My hands find her waist, her hips, pulling her against me so hard she gasps. I walk her backward until her shoulders hit the wall, and I press into her, pinning her there with my body, my hands braced on either side of her head.
Her breath catches. Her fingers curl into the front of my shirt.