Chapter 25
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Gemma
The elevator doors slide shut and the numbers above the door start climbing.
"The guests stayed too long," I say. "You said nine. It's almost one."
"Italians don't leave weddings," Luca says. "They leave funerals fast. Weddings, never."
The elevator hums. My feet throb inside the heels Antonella picked, and the champagne runs a lot in me. Someone kept refilling my glass for the last hour—Vittoria, I think—and I kept drinking it.
The floor shifts under me.
"I'm dizzy," I announce, and I turn to look at him. "I never get dizzy. I don't drink, so I don't get dizzy. This has never happened before."
Luca looks down at me. The tie is gone, the top button open.
"You had five glasses," he says.
"Four."
"Five. I counted."
"You counted my drinks?"
"I count everything," he says. "It's the job."
My feet send up a fresh complaint and I lift one heel off the floor to give it a break.
"These shoes are wrong," I say. "They looked normal in the box. They've been eating my feet since four o'clock. I've been smiling at people I don't know while my shoes ate my feet, and nobody could tell, which I think means I did a good job."
"Take them off."
"The floor's dirty."
He exhales through his nose, and then he says, "I'm going to pick you up."
The warning lands two seconds before his arm hooks behind my knees.
The other one catches my back and the ground leaves me.
My shoulder hits his chest and my arm goes around his neck on instinct.
The whole thing takes less effort from him than opening a door.
His shoulder is solid under my hand. He got shot there three months ago and he just lifted a grown woman like a grocery bag.
A laugh comes out of me.
"You can't carry me everywhere," I say.
"I can."
The doors open on our floor. Our floor. He walks us out and my heels dangle off my toes. The hallway lights are soft and the carpet swallows his footsteps, and the champagne makes all of it funnier than it is.
"Question," I say into the side of his jaw. "That Orsini man. The old one who held my hand too long. Is he going to check if we're—" and the word just comes, greased by five glasses, "—fucking around tonight? Since it's the wedding night? Is that a thing they verify?"
My own hand flies up and covers my mouth.
Luca stops in front of a door.
"I don't say that word," I say through my fingers. "I've never said that word. Out loud. In my life."
"You just did."
"I know. I heard it."
The corner of his mouth moves. He shifts my weight to one arm so he can work the key, and his voice comes out even.
"There are two Orsini cars parked on this street," he says. "They'll watch the lights go on. They'll watch them go off. That's all they get. Nobody's fucking anybody tonight, Gemma. Breathe."
"I wasn't asking for—"
"I know what you were asking."
The apartment opens up in front of me. Windows run floor to ceiling along one wall with the city stacked behind them, lit yellow and white all the way to the dark line of the lake.
The furniture matches. The kitchen has an island with stools and a bowl of actual fruit on the counter.
The air smells like new paint and clean fabric.
"This is fake," I say.
"It's not."
"This is one of those apartments you see online and you think, nobody lives there, that's fake.
" I walk into the middle of the room and turn.
The second bedroom door stands open down the hall, and I can see the small bed inside, made up with a yellow blanket, waiting for Nina tomorrow morning.
My chest tightens at the yellow blanket.
"There's fruit in a bowl. Who bought fruit? "
"Megan."
"Of course Megan bought fruit." I spin again, slower this time, arms out, taking in the ceiling, the windows, the clean lines of a life that has nothing to do with mine, and the laugh comes back up and out. It fills the room. It's too loud but I don’t care.
When I stop spinning, Luca hasn't moved from the door. He's watching me with both hands at his sides, and the look on his face isn't amusement anymore.
The laugh dies in my throat.
Nina is twenty miles away, asleep next to Lily, and she's fine, and she's coming in the morning. Which means it's just me in this apartment tonight.
Me and my husband.
"Right," I say, and neither of us moves.
Luca
"There are three bedrooms," I say. "You and Nina take the two on the east side. I'll take the one down the hall, away from yours."
She looks at the hallway, then at me. The champagne is still working in her; I can see it in how slow her blinks come.
"Away from ours," she repeats.
I hang my coat on the hook by the door. "You'll have your own space. Both of you."
"Okay." She stands in the middle of the living room in her white dress, barefoot. She turns a slow circle, taking in the windows, the lake past the glass, the dark. Then she says, "I would love a cigarette right now."
I sigh. It comes out of me before I decide on it.
"You're going to pick up bad habits being around me," I say.
She crosses the room. Not fast. But she comes close enough that I can smell the champagne and whatever they put in her hair for the wedding. She tips her head back to look up at me.
"What other bad habits do you have to show me?"
The question pulls low in my gut, and I stand very still with it. Her eyes are glassy.
This is the alcohol talking. I know it.
"I've got a long fucking list," I say.
She blinks at me. Waits, like there might be more.
"There's a small balcony off the kitchen," I say. "We can smoke out there."
The cold hits us hard when I slide the door open.
I take the two chairs stacked in the corner and set them out.
She drops into one and pulls her knees up under the dress.
I put my suit jacket over her shoulders before she asks.
She goes stiff for half a second at the weight of it, then lets it stay.
I light two cigarettes and hand her one. She takes it more carefully this time.
For a while we smoke and neither of us talks.
"What am I going to do now?" she says.
I look at her.
"From now on. Every day." She pulls on the cigarette and gets it right, a small drag, no coughing. "I've worked. I clean, I wait tables, I do things. What do I do tomorrow? And the day after that?"
"You can't work," I say. "Not now. A waitress married to a Sartori draws every eye in the goddamn city. You'd put a target on the diner and everyone in it."
Her jaw tightens. She doesn't argue, which is worse than if she did.
"Your own card gets delivered this week," I say. "Until then you use mine. It's in the drawer by the fridge. There's no limit on it. Whatever you want, whatever Nina wants, you buy it."
She stares out at the lake. The cigarette burns down between her fingers and she doesn't smoke it. Her eyes go wet, and she keeps them fixed on the dark water so I won't see. I let her think I don't see.
I should say something. I don't know what the fuck it would be.
"Have you ever felt lonely?" she asks.
The question opens a gap in me. I look at the cigarette in my hand.
"Yes," I say.
She nods slowly, like I've confirmed a fact she needed checked.
"I don't like it," she says. "It's the ugliest feeling I've ever had. Worse than being scared. When you're scared at least you're busy." She taps ash over the railing and watches it scatter. "Lonely just sits there."
She reaches over and puts her hand on my forearm. Over the sleeve, light, barely any weight to it.
"Goodnight, Luca," she says, and goes inside with my jacket still on her shoulders.
I sit in the cold and smoke another one.
Gemma
The pine needles cut into my bare feet and I keep running anyway.
The trees stand too close together, and every trunk I pass looks the same as the last one, so I can't tell if I'm moving forward or in a circle.
Behind me the footsteps don't hurry. They never hurry.
He walks and I run and the gap between us keeps shrinking, which doesn't make sense.
A root catches my ankle and the ground comes up fast. Dirt in my mouth, cold and wet. I flip onto my back and he's already there, kneeling over me, his weight pinning my hips, and the knife in his hand is ready to end me. The blade comes down slow. He has all the time in the world and he knows it.
I scream.
The light snaps on.
I'm sitting up in the bed, and Luca is in the doorway with a gun aimed past me at the window, his eyes moving across the room in one hard sweep. He's shirtless. The tattoos run from his collarbone down both arms, and the pink scar on his shoulder stands out against the ink.
"There's no one," I say. My voice comes out shredded. "Sorry. There's no one here."
He checks the window anyway, then the closet, moving through the room in the same order every time, and it's only when he's cleared all of it that he looks at me. Whatever he sees makes him set the gun on the dresser.
"A dream," he says. "It was a dream."
"Yes. Sorry."
He crosses the room and drops to his knees beside the bed, which puts his face level with mine, and this close I can see his chest working hard, faster than mine. His hand comes up toward my face and stops an inch short, hovering there, and he swallows before he speaks.
"I heard you scream and I thought—" He stops. His jaw shifts and he doesn't finish it. He looks at the sheets twisted around my legs instead of at me.
I'm shaking. I only realize it when I watch my own hands on the blanket. The room is warm but I'm shaking, small tremors that won't quit. My whole body still thinks I'm on the ground in that forest.
"Stay," I say. "Please. Just for a while."
I slide over and pull the blanket back, making space on the mattress. It's a big bed. There's room for three of him.
"I'll take the floor," he says. He's already lowering himself, his back finding the wall beside the nightstand, his bad leg stretched out in front of him. He winces when it straightens and pretends he didn't.
"No." I lean over the edge and grab his wrist. I pull. He doesn't move, so I pull again, harder, both hands now. "You're not sleeping on hardwood because of me. Get up here."
"Gemma."
"Get up here or I'll come down there, and then we're both on the floor and nobody wins."
He exhales through his nose. Then he stands, slow, and looks at the empty half of the bed the way a person looks at a form they don't want to sign.
"I'm not going to seduce you," I say. "In case that's the concern." A smile gets out of me before I can stop it. I don't know where it came from. My voice is still wrecked from screaming.
His mouth moves.
"Christ," he says, and gets in.
He lies flat on his back on top of the blanket while I'm under it, arms at his sides, staring at the ceiling.
The fear doesn't leave just because he's here.
That's the thing nobody tells you about being scared.
It doesn't respond to logic. There's an armed man in my bed who has killed people for a living, the door is locked, we're forty floors up, and my heart is still going like I'm face-down in pine needles.
I lie there and count his breaths because counting mine doesn't work.
After a while I give up on the foot of space.
I move over and put my head on his chest, and he goes rigid under me, every muscle locking at once, and then, slowly, one of his arms comes up and settles across my back.
His heart is loud under my ear. It's beating faster than mine now, which is its own information.
"Okay," I whisper. "Okay."
His hand moves once against my shoulder blade, careful, like he's checking whether I'm real.
I close my eyes and the forest is still there behind them, and so is the face above the knife. I'm not going to tell Luca. Because the man kneeling on my hips with all the time in the world wasn't a stranger.
It was Dominik.