Chapter 8
Chapter Eight: Matteo
I followed her.
I need to sit with that fact because the fact is a problem. I followed her and her friend to a bridal boutique and then to a bar and I sat in a borrowed car across the street and watched through the window and waited.
It was obsessive. It was the behavior of a man who has lost control of a variable and is compensating by monitoring it constantly. In my case, my variable is a twenty-five-year-old woman with two karambits who told me I'm not special and hasn't said my name in four days.
Fucking idiot… following her like that.
Now, I'm in my room. The door is locked.
My knuckles are split on the right hand, the skin peeled back over the first two knuckles, the blood dried to a dark crust that flakes when I flex my fingers.
The man in the bar is probably in an emergency room right now with a broken nose and a fractured jaw and no understanding of why a stranger in a jacket just rearranged his face for touching a woman's leg.
I should feel something about that. Remorse. Concern about the legal implications. The rational awareness that assaulting a civilian in a public bar is exactly the kind of behavior that gets a man arrested, or worse, noticed by the people I've spent eight months hiding from.
Instead, I feel good. The violence felt good…
no, better then good. Fucking great. The sound of his nose breaking under my fist was relieving.
The look on his face when I crouched in front of him and told him that if I ever saw him again I'd finish what I started felt good.
The moment I grabbed him by the neck and pulled him off that stool, the rage found an exit, and it was so needed.
That's the problem. The violence felt right, and the reason it felt right is the woman who was sitting on the stool beside him, and the rage that drove my fist into his face wasn't about territory or strategy or the treaty marriage.
It was about her.
I wanted to hurt him because he was touching her, and the simplicity of that motivation terrifies me because simple motivations are the ones you can't control.
Complex motivations have levers. They can be adjusted, redirected, rationalized.
Simple motivations are just impulse, and impulse is what gets men killed in the world I'm trying to enter.
I run my knuckles under cold water in the bathroom.
The sting is clarifying. I watch the dried blood dissolve and run pink down the drain, and I tell myself that what happened in the bar was an aberration, a lapse in control brought on by proximity and tension and the fact that I haven't fucked anyone in three months and my body is redirecting the need into violence.
That's the explanation. Frustration converted to aggression. A basic psychological mechanism. Nothing more complicated than that.
The mirror doesn't believe me. Aurelio's jaw stares back, split knuckles dripping over the sink, and the man in the glass looks nothing like a lawyer from Connecticut.
He looks like what he is: a man who beat someone bloody over a woman he's supposed to be using as a political tool and who is now standing in a bathroom lying to himself about why.
I dry my hands. Wrap the knuckles with gauze from the first aid kit under the sink.
Change my shirt because there's blood on the cuff.
It's eleven at night. The compound is quiet.
The second-floor corridor is empty, the doors all closed, and the only sound is the ventilation and the distant hum of the generator.
I sit at my desk, and open the documents, and try to work.
I can't work. The numbers are there. The shell companies are there.
Project Threshold's construction timeline is there, and Alexandra has already cross-referenced half of what I gave her this afternoon, and the picture is coming together and I should be focused on it because the Replication Initiative is the thing that matters, the children inside it are real, and the plan requires—
Knock.
One knock. My door. Not Emilio's knock, which is a pattern. Not Leone's, which is a single firm rap. This is lighter. Deliberate in a different way.
I know who it is before I open the door.
Antonia is standing in the corridor in a t-shirt and shorts and bare feet.
No boots. No karambit belt. Vita in her right hand, loose, not in a combat grip, the blade hanging at her side.
She's been drinking. Not entirely drunk, but getting close.
Her eyes are focused and her posture is controlled, but the edges are softer than usual, the fury dialed back to something warmer and more dangerous.
"Your knuckles," she says, looking at the gauze on my hand.
"They're fine."
"I didn't ask if they're fine. I'm looking at them.
" She pushes past me into the room. Doesn't ask permission.
Walks in and looks at the space, the desk, the documents, the bed, the window, making whatever notes she makes about spaces she inhabits.
She does it everywhere she goes and the habit is so ingrained that she probably doesn't notice anymore.
"It's late," I say. "Whatever this is—"
"You followed me." She turns and faces me. The room is small and now she's in it and the door is behind me and the space between us is six feet and closing. "You followed me to a dress fitting and then to a bar and then you beat a man half to death because he touched my leg. I want to know why."
"I told you why."
"You told me I'm your bride and nobody touches what's yours. That's not a why. That's a statement of fact. I want the why."
"There isn't one. I saw him touch you and I stopped thinking. That's it. There's no strategy behind it, no plan, no legal argument I can build around it. He touched you and I wanted to break his hands, and I settled for his face."
She takes a step closer. Five feet.
"You wanted to break his hands."
"Specifically the one that was on your thigh. Yes."
"Because I'm your bride."
"Because the thought of another man's hand on your skin made me want to do something I can't put into words without sounding unhinged."
"You are unhinged. You committed assault in public and then told me I belong to you. In what world is that hinged?"
"In the world I grew up in, it's not. In the world I'm entering, I'm told it's standard."
"Mafia men don't get a pass for possessive bullshit just because they carry guns."
"I don't carry a gun. I used my fists. Which, if we're being technical, is actually less dangerous."
"You're not funny."
"I'm not trying to be."
Four feet. She's closing the gap the way she did in the corridor the first day, confident, controlled, her body moving forward while her face stays hostile.
The difference is that in the corridor she was armed and dressed and furious.
Now she's barefoot with one karambit hanging at her side and her hair down and the t-shirt is thin enough that I can see the shape of her body underneath it, and my brain is doing the thing it does every time she's too close, which is shut down every function except the one tracking her proximity.
"Give me your hand," she says.
"Why?"
"Because you split your knuckles open hitting a man for me and you wrapped them with gauze from a first aid kit, which means nobody's cleaned them properly, and if they get infected you'll be useless and I refuse to marry a man with a bandaged hand. It'll look pathetic in front of Leone."
I extend my hand. She takes it with her free hand, Vita still in the other, and unwraps the gauze. Her fingers are warm and quick, and she handles the wound with the competence of a woman who has dressed injuries before, probably her own.
"This is deep," she says, looking at the torn skin over my knuckles. "You hit bone."
"His cheekbone, I think."
"I've hit cheekbones before. You're supposed to angle the strike, so the impact lands across the flat of the bone, not the ridge. You hit the ridge, which is why the skin split." She traces the edge of the wound with her thumb. "Amateur."
"I didn't say I was a professional."
"Clearly." She's holding my hand and looking at the wound. Her thumb is on my skin, and the touch is practical in purpose and devastating in effect because she is touching me voluntarily for the first time and my body is responding with the subtlety of a freight train.
She looks up from my hand, and catches me looking at her.
The moment holds for two seconds, three, and in those seconds the room changes.
The air between us loses the hostility and gains something else, something heavier, the specific gravity of two people who have been circling each other for a week and are now standing in a locked room at eleven at night with one of them barefoot and the other one hard and neither of them pretending anymore.
"Antonia," I say. My voice comes out lower than I intended.
"Don't." She doesn't drop my hand. "Don't say my name in that voice."
"What voice?"
"The one that's not the lawyer and not the diplomat. The one that's underneath both of those."
"That's my actual voice."
"I know. That's why I'm telling you not to use it."
She doesn't drop my hand. She doesn't step back. She stands there, barefoot, holding my split knuckles, with Vita hanging at her side and her eyes on mine. The distance between us is two feet and shrinking because one of us is leaning forward and I can't tell which one.
Her hand moves from my knuckles to my wrist. Her fingers wrap around the base of my hand, not gripping, encircling, and the contact sends a current up my arm that I feel in my chest and my cock and the base of my spine.
"I should go," she says.
"You should."
She doesn't go. Her thumb drags across the inside of my wrist, across the veins, the pulse point, and my heartbeat is there under her finger, and she can feel it. The fact that she can feel how fast my heart is running is the most exposed I've been since I walked through the compound gate.