Chapter Eight Charlotte
I wake up before him.
This is not unusual. I've been waking up before every person I've slept near for three years, because sleeping means unconscious, and unconscious means vulnerable, and vulnerable is a state of being I've trained my body to exit as quickly as possible.
Four hours is my maximum. After four hours, my nervous system boots up like a computer running a virus scan, checking for threats before the rest of me comes online.
The threat check this morning is different.
No noisy cars. No motel. No chair in the corner with a man and a gun.
Instead: a farmhouse bedroom, sunlight through the window, pine trees outside, and a beast of a man asleep beside me with his arm across my waist and his face buried in the back of my neck and his breathing slow and deep and even.
My body goes rigid before my brain catches up.
Arm. Weight. Warmth. Breath on my neck. The position is so familiar that for three, maybe four seconds, I'm not in a farmhouse in the mountains.
I'm in a bedroom in a town I haven't been to in three years, and the arm across my waist belongs to someone else, and the breath on my neck is a warning, not a comfort, and I can't move because moving wakes him up and waking him up is how the bad mornings start.
Then I smell cedar. And gun oil. And the faint musk only he has.
Not him. Not that apartment. Not that man.
Claudio.
I exhale. Slow. Counted. In for four, hold for four, out for four. I do it three times before my heart rate drops and my vision clears and the room reassembles itself around me. Farmhouse. Mountains. Safe.
Safe is relative, Charlotte. You're in bed with a mafia enforcer who killed men for you and fucked you six hours ago.
I slide out from under his arm. Careful.
He doesn't stir, which surprises me because Claudio doesn't sleep.
He catnaps. He rests in shifts with one eye metaphorically open and his hand within reach of whatever weapon is closest. But right now he's out.
Actually, fully unconscious. His face is slack against the pillow and his mouth is slightly open, and his arm is still extended into the space where my body was, fingers curled against the warm sheet like he's holding a ghost.
I stand in the doorway and watch him for ten seconds. Five more than I should.
He looks younger asleep. The jaw unclenches.
The lines between his eyebrows smooth out.
Without the constant scanning, the cataloguing, the mechanical attention that makes his waking face look like a surveillance camera in a suit, he looks like a man in his early thirties who got enough sleep for once in his goddamn life.
I did that. I am the reason he’s sleeping like a man-baby. Or rather, whatever happened between us last night put it there, and I was the central variable, and the math of that makes my chest do something inconvenient that I don't have time for.
I go to the kitchen. Make coffee with the ancient machine that takes fifteen minutes to produce two cups of something barely drinkable.
The kitchen is cold. The wood stove has burned down to ash, and I don't know how to restart it, which is a gap in the survival skills of my new persona that I'm choosing to ignore.
I wrap my hands around the mug and stand at the counter and look out the window at the trees.
My body aches. Not bad. The good kind. The kind that comes from being used well by someone who paid attention, who asked before he touched, who stopped the instant I said stop and only moved again when I pulled him back.
Muscles I forgot I had are making themselves known, and there's a tenderness between my thighs that I press into slightly when I shift my weight, just to feel it, just to confirm it happened.
It happened.
I slept with him. I kissed him first. I pulled him in.
I said yes and more and harder and his name, I said his name, and the way it sounded in my mouth was nothing like the way I say it in daylight.
In daylight, his name is a fact. A label.
Last night, it was something I gave him that I can't take back.
You're overthinking this. It was sex. Good sex. Great sex. Possibly the best sex you've ever had, which is a low bar given that your only frame of reference is a man who treated foreplay like a chore and your body like something he was entitled to. Stop making it into something it isn't.
But his hands were shaking. Afterward. When he held me against his chest and his arm wrapped around me and his face pressed into my hair.
His hands were trembling, and Claudio DiAngelo's hands don't tremble.
Those hands disassemble weapons in the dark.
Those hands killed three men in a corridor without a wasted movement.
And they shook against my skin like he'd touched something he didn't know how to hold.
I take a sip of coffee. It's terrible. I drink it anyway.
He appears in the doorway a few minutes later. Jeans, henley, yesterday's clothes. His hair is wrecked from sleep and my hands, and he hasn't bothered fixing it, which is either a deliberate choice or the first sign that I've broken something in his operating system. He looks at me. I look at him.
"Morning," I say.
"Morning."
"Coffee's done. The machine might be older than both of us combined."
"As long as it works."
He crosses to the counter. Pours himself a mug. Black, no sugar. Holds it awkwardly. We stand three feet apart in the kitchen where he pinned me against the counter yesterday and I told him to let go and he did and I kissed him anyway, and neither of us mentions it.
"You left the bed," he says.
"I don't sleep well next to people."
"You slept fine."
"I slept fine for three hours. Then I woke up and your arm was across my waist, and I forgot where I was. For about four seconds. Those four seconds were bad."
His mug stops halfway to his mouth. He doesn't ask what I mean. He already knows. I told him enough last night, in the dark, in pieces. Enough that he can fill in the blanks without me painting the full picture.
"I'm sorry," he says. Simple. No performance.
"Don't be. It wasn't about you. It's about the position. My body has a memory my brain can't override. Arms, weight, proximity. It takes me a second to sort out where I am." I shrug. "It's better than it used to be. Used to take me a full minute. Sometimes longer."
He sets his mug down. Looks at me with those pale eyes, and I can see the gears turning. Not cold. Not clinical. The focused attention of a man who is understanding something he thought he already did and realizing the math is more complicated than he calculated.
"I'll sleep on the couch," he says.
"I didn't say that."
"You said my arm on you triggered a panic response."
"I said it took me four seconds to sort out where I was. That's not a panic response. That's a filing error." I take a sip. "If I didn't want you in the bed, I'd tell you. I told you to stop yesterday and you stopped. I trust that. I trust that more than you know."
He's quiet. His eyes narrow and his nostrils flare.
Then he nods and picks up his mug and drinks, and the conversation is over.
Not because it's resolved. Because we both understand that some things are better left in the space between words, where they can exist without being examined into something fragile.
He moves to the living room. I hear him unzipping the duffel, pulling out a burner phone. A new one. He swaps the SIM from last night's phone and dials.
I stay in the kitchen. I can hear his side of the conversation through the open doorway.
His voice drops into the clipped, flat register he uses for business calls.
The Claudio I've been getting to know over six days folds up and the soldier clicks into place, and the shift is fast enough to give me whiplash.
"Status," he says.
I can't hear Emilio's response, but I can hear the rhythm of his voice through the phone speaker. Fast, animated, punctuated by the occasional silence that means Claudio is absorbing something he doesn't like.
"How long," Claudio says.
A pause.
"That's not enough time."
Another pause. Longer.
"Aurelio said that specifically?"
I lean against the counter and listen. I shouldn't. This is operational, not meant for me. But I'm the reason we're out here. I'm the reason he left his brother and his compound and his armory full of weapons that make more sense to him than people do. I've earned the right to eavesdrop.
"What about Salvatore?"
My ears sharpen. Salvatore. He's mentioned the name once before, the night we left. Something about the card system, access levels, clearance codes.
"When did he ask that?" Claudio's voice has changed. Not louder. Harder. The consonants landing heavier, the vowels tighter. The sound of a man hearing something that confirms a theory he was hoping to be wrong about.
A long pause. Emilio talks. I catch fragments through the speaker. Something about questions. Something about location. Something about Charlotte.
My name. In Emilio's voice. Through a phone, through a wall, in a farmhouse in the mountains.
Claudio is quiet for a long time. When he speaks again, his voice is very controlled.
"He asked where she is. By name."
Not a question. A confirmation. I press my fingers to the back of my neck and count.
"Don't confront him," Claudio says. "Don't change behavior. Don't tip him. We need Charlotte to see his face and confirm before we move. If we're wrong and we spook the real mole, we lose the only advantage we have."
Emilio says something. Short.
"I know it's not enough time. I'll make it enough." A pause. "What about the Castillo situation?"
More talking. I catch the words docks and cleanup and news. The war continuing without them. The world grinding forward while we hide in the mountains and pretend the clock isn't ticking.
"And the club? The bartender?"