Chapter 8 Alexandra
Chapter Eight: Alexandra
I wake up warm.
Not the artificial warmth of expensive sheets or overworked heating systems. Real warmth. The kind that radiates from skin pressed against skin, from an arm heavy across my waist, from breath stirring the hair at the back of my neck in slow, even intervals.
Leone is still asleep.
I know this because his grip on me is loose.
Awake, he holds everything with precision.
Tools, weapons, people. But right now his arm drapes over me like it forgot to be careful, his fingers curled against my stomach, his knee wedged between mine.
His chest is flush against my back, and I can feel his heartbeat, slow and deep, thumping against my shoulder blade.
I don't move.
I barely breathe.
Because if I move, he'll wake up. And if he wakes up, the mask goes back on. The soldier reassembles himself from the wreckage of the man who fell asleep holding me, and we go back to pretending that last night didn't crack the world open.
So I lie still and count his heartbeats and memorize the feel of his arm and the roughness of his palm against my bare stomach and the way his breath smells like sleep and nothing else.
No death. No war. a man, unconscious and unguarded, pressed against me like I'm the only solid thing in his universe.
I want to cry. I'm not sure why. Maybe because of the tenderness of it. The way his body chose mine even in sleep, curled around me like a question mark, like he's still asking permission even when he's not conscious enough to know he's asking.
The light through the window is grey. Early.. The courtyard below will be quiet, the overnight guards and the occasional engine. The compound hasn't woken up yet. For a few more minutes, the world belongs to us.
His breathing changes.
I feel it before I hear it. The shift from deep to shallow, the slight tension in his arm, the way his fingers flex against my skin like they're taking inventory. He's awake.
Neither of us speaks.
His thumb traces a slow circle on me, below my navel. Once. Twice. Testing. I press back into him, just slightly, and his arm tightens.
"Morning," I murmur.
He doesn't answer with words. His mouth finds the back of my neck, lips warm and dry against my spine, and he breathes me in. A long, slow inhale, like he's checking that I'm real.
"Morning, love," he breathes.
And like that, I’m hopelessly lost in him.
We stay like that for a while. Minutes. His hand splayed across my stomach, his mouth resting against my neck, my fingers laced through his. The silence isn't uncomfortable. It's the opposite. Like a held breath that finally released.
But the world doesn't stop for held breaths.
His phone buzzes on the nightstand. Once. Twice. Three times in rapid succession.
Leone reaches over me, grabbing it without letting go of my waist. I hear him clicking away at the screen, feel the shift in his body as the soldier starts rebuilding himself piece by piece. Shoulders squaring. Jaw setting. The arm around me goes from lazy to tense.
"I have to go," he says.
"I know."
He sits up, and the cold rushes in to fill the space where his body was.
I roll onto my back and watch him dress.
It's a show worth watching. Not in a sexual way, not exactly.
More like watching someone assemble armor.
Every piece has a purpose. The undershirt.
The holster. The dress shirt buttoned up.
The suit jacket that hides the gun. By the time he's finished, the man who held me in the dark is gone.
In his place stands the right hand of Aurelio Bonaccorso, and there's nothing soft about him.
Almost nothing. He pauses at the edge of the bed, looking down at me. I'm still tangled in his sheets, wearing nothing but the marks he left on my skin last night. His eyes travel the length of me, slow and thorough, and I watch his throat move when he swallows.
"Stay in this room," he says.
"I always stay in this room."
"I mean it. Today is..." He stops. Starts again. "Things are moving. I need to know you're here."
I sit up, pulling the sheet to my chest. "What's happening?"
"Aurelio has a meeting with neutral parties.
Negotiations about the Castillo situation.
The compound will be tense." He crouches beside the bed, bringing his face level with mine.
Up close, in the grey morning light, I can see every line and scar.
The broken nose. The shadow of stubble. The dark circles that never fully disappear. "I need to talk to him."
"About the war?"
"About you."
My stomach flips. "What about me?"
His jaw works. I can see him choosing words, discarding them, choosing again.
"About us. About what this is. If I'm going to.
.." He pauses, and the pause is loaded with everything he won't say in the open.
"If I'm going to do this properly, Aurelio needs to know.
He needs to approve it. Otherwise we're a secret, and secrets in this compound have a shelf life measured in days. "
"What happens if he doesn't approve?"
Leone doesn't answer immediately. His hand finds my knee through the sheet, gripping it once, firm.
"Then I figure something else out. But I'm not hiding you. Not from him."
The words settle over me. He's not asking permission.
He's telling me his plan. And the plan involves walking into a room with the most powerful man in the city's underworld and telling him that his right hand, his most trusted weapon, has fallen for the civilian prisoner they were supposed to interrogate.
"Leone, if he says no..."
"He won't."
"But if he does."
His eyes hold mine. "Then he and I will have a problem. And I don't have problems with Aurelio."
He leans in and kisses me. Brief, hard, possessive. Like he's stamping his signature on my mouth. Then he stands, ads his jacket, and walks out.
The lock doesn't click behind him.
I stare at the door for a long time. No lock. For the first time since I was brought here, the door isn't locked.
It's not freedom. But it's trust. And from Leone, trust might be worth more.
I shower, dress in the clothes that have accumulated in his closet over the past week. My clothes, technically. Someone, probably Leone, arranged for things in my size to appear. Simple stuff. Dark jeans, plain tops, a few sweaters. Nothing flashy. Nothing that draws attention.
I sit at the desk and pull the financial documents toward me.
The Cyprus accounts have been nagging at me for days.
Six shell corporations, all registered within the same eighteen-month window, all routing money through the same bank in Nicosia.
The transfers to Castillo-linked accounts are obvious once you know what to look for.
Steady, predictable, timed to coincide with weapons purchases and mercenary contracts.
But this morning, with a clearer head and the fog of tension finally lifted, I see something I missed before.
The money doesn’t flow one way.
I pull three separate transfer logs and lay them side by side.
The first shows funds moving from Cyprus to Castillo accounts.
Standard. Expected. But the second shows a parallel stream moving in the opposite direction, from accounts linked to Bonaccorso operations into the same Cyprus bank.
Different shell corporations, different routing, but the same destination.
Someone is skimming from the Bonaccorso’s and funneling it through the same pipeline that funds the Castillo’s.
I sit back in the chair, my pulse hammering.
This isn’t a third-party funding one side of a war.
This is someone with fingers in both families.
Someone who profits regardless of who wins.
The Castillo’s think they're getting outside support. The Bonaccorso’s don't even know they're being bled.
And the money all converges on the same point, the same invisible hand, before scattering into a dozen untraceable endpoints.
I grab a pen and start mapping it. Arrows. Circles. Dates cross-referenced with transfers cross-referenced with known Castillo operations. The picture that emerges is ugly.
Whoever this is, they're not backing the Castillo’s. They're playing both sides against each other. Feeding the war, profiting from the destruction, and positioning themselves to pick up whatever's left when the smoke clears.
One detail catches my eye. A single transfer, larger than the rest, routed through a subsidiary I haven't seen before. The name is generic. Apex Meridian Holdings. But unlike the other shells, this one has a physical address. Not in Cyprus. In New York.
I circle it three times and underline it twice.
This is the thread. If I pull it hard enough, the whole thing unravels.
I'm so deep in the documents that I don't hear the knock until it comes a second time.
"Yeah?"
The door opens. Not Leone. Emilio.
He leans in the doorway, arms crossed, that permanent grin splitting his face. He's in a black t-shirt that's a size too small, probably on purpose, and there's a fresh bruise yellowing along his jaw. He looks like he rolled out of a bar fight and enjoyed every second of it.
"Lunch," he says.
I blink. "What?"
"Food. The stuff you eat so you don't die. Leone asked me to bring you down to the kitchen." He jerks his chin toward the hallway. "Come on. I don't bite."
"That's not very convincing coming from a guy with someone else's blood on his knuckles."
He glances at his hands, shrugs. "Training. You should see the other guy."
I hesitate. The documents are spread across the desk, and every instinct tells me to keep working. But my stomach is empty and the walls are closing in, and this is the first person other than Leone who's spoken to me like a human being in weeks.
"Fine," I say. "But if you try anything, I'll stab you with a fork."
"Noted." He pushes off the doorframe and starts walking, not checking to see if I follow.
I follow.