Chapter Eighteen #2
She was wearing a simple, oversized grey sweater that hung off one shoulder, her hair left loose, framing her face in natural waves. She looked soft, relaxed, and impossibly beautiful.
When she saw Raphael standing on the porch, the rain soaking his broad shoulders, her expression did not change. The mask of freezing, immaculate politeness slipped instantly into place.
"Good evening, Don Raphael," Azar said, stepping back and pulling the door wider to allow him entry. "The weather is quite severe tonight."
"Good evening, Azar," Raphael murmured, stepping across the threshold. He wiped his boots on the mat, his eyes instantly mapping the room, searching for any subtle change in her environment.
Ewan was absent, having retired early to his quarters in the staff wing after the emotional toll of the memorial mass. They were alone in the cottage.
"I have not yet compiled the evening security logs," Azar noted, walking back toward the small kitchenette to retrieve her mug of tea. "If you require the immediate data, I can expedite the process."
"There is no rush," Raphael said softly.
He walked over to the small, rustic wooden dining table situated directly across the room from her towering server racks. He pulled out a chair, sat down, and opened his laptop.
He didn't try to force a conversation. He didn't ask her about her day or attempt to engage her in mundane pleasantries about the storm outside. He knew that the anniversary of Odessa’s death was a weight in the air, and he refused to intrude upon her peace.
He simply sat at her kitchen table, opened his syndicate ledgers, and began to work.
Azar returned to her desk, wrapping her hands around the warm ceramic of her mug. She looked across the small room at the most powerful man in the Italian underworld, sitting quietly at her battered dining table, typing on his laptop as the rain battered the windows.
It was a surreal, deeply intimate domesticity.
Over the last few months, this had become their routine.
When there was nothing left to talk about, when his desperate attempts at conversation ran dry against the wall of her professionalism, Raphael would simply bring his work to the cottage.
He would sit across from her for hours, the only sound between them the rhythmic clicking of their respective keyboards and the crackle of the woodstove.
Azar took a sip of her tea, her hazel eyes quietly observing the sharp, focused lines of his face illuminated by the screen.
She felt the familiar, treacherous tightening in her chest.
Her heart, which she had so carefully encased in ice, was trapped in a perpetual, agonizing state of paradox. It was both frozen and undeniably thawing.
Proximity to Raphael still affected her.
It was impossible for it not to. When he was in the room, the sheer gravity of his presence pulled at her senses.
She could smell the sharp, clean scent of his cologne mixing with the rain.
She could see the devastating devotion in his eyes whenever he allowed himself to look up from his screen and gaze at her.
She knew, with certainty, that the man sitting at her table loved her with an unconditional magnitude.
She still loved him. In the deepest, most heavily guarded corners of her soul, she knew that she would always love the prince of the Castellan empire.
But as Azar turned her eyes back to her own monitors, the ice rapidly hardened again.
It doesn't matter, Azar reminded herself, the thought as cold and sharp as a scalpel.
Once a man had proved that he could not be trusted, there was absolutely nothing left to be said.
He loved her now, yes. He was devoted to her now.
But when the pressure had been applied, when the family had demanded a scapegoat, he had not been strong enough to protect her from his own paranoia. He had believed the worst of her.
Love, without the unbreakable foundation of trust, was meaningless. It was a beautiful, hollow house built on quicksand. She could not build her future on a man who had already proven he was capable of letting her fall.
So, she let him stay.
If sitting quietly at her kitchen table offered the Don some measure of peace, she would not expend the energy required to kick him out. She allowed him to orbit her, accepting his silent presence with the same detached grace she accepted the rain outside.
An hour passed. The storm raged on.
Raphael paused his typing. He closed his laptop with a soft click.
Azar did not look up from her screen, but she tracked his movement in her peripheral vision.
He stood up, pushing the wooden chair back carefully so as not to scrape the floorboards. He walked slowly across the room, stopping a few feet behind her chair. He didn't crowd her space, maintaining the physical boundary she so strictly enforced.
"The eastern perimeter checks out," Raphael murmured, his voice a low, soothing vibration in the quiet room. "I will let you finish your logs in peace."
"Thank you, Don Raphael," Azar replied politely, tapping a final sequence of code. "Have a safe walk back to the manor."
Raphael lingered for a fraction of a second. He looked down at the top of her head, fighting the overwhelming, biological urge to reach out and bury his hand in her hair. His fingers twitched, aching with the memory of her warmth.
Instead, he slowly lowered his hand to his side.
"Goodnight, Azar," he whispered, the words carrying the weight of a vow.
"Goodnight," she chimed back, crisp and detached.
When the door closed behind him, plunging the cottage back into the sole ambient noise of the servers, Azar finally let out a long, slow breath. She looked at the calendar on the wall, her eyes locking onto the freshly crossed-out box.
Three hundred and sixty-five days.
Her heart might be a battlefield of thawing love and frozen distrust, but her mind was absolutely made up.
When the calendar reached zero, she was leaving the Castellan-Marchetti empire behind forever.
And no amount of quiet devotion from the man walking back through the rain would ever be enough to make her stay.