Chapter 29 Mia
MIA
Enrico stood there with the phone still in his hand, jaw set, shoulders squared. Rain threaded down the window behind him.
“Whose past?” I pressed. “Yours or mine?”
His eyes lifted to mine, and there it was—the flicker of fury he couldn’t cage and the guilt he kept scraping at with bare hands. “Both.”
I wanted to step closer and shake him until secrets fell out. I wanted to run back upstairs and bar the door and pretend my world hadn’t shifted. Instead, I did the harder thing: I stayed.
“You’re shutting me out again.”
He exhaled, slow, as if forcing air through a blade. “If I give you everything, I put you in more danger.”
“And if you give me nothing, you place me in a cage.” My voice didn’t rise. It didn’t need to. “I asked you for honesty. Not comfort. Not protection dressed up as mercy.”
His mouth curved without warmth; not a smile—an admission. “Protection has never been a mercy in my world.”
There it was. The truth behind his teeth.
I took a step and then another, until the desk cut the space. “Tell me about the voice.”
He sat the device down, screen facedown like a body. “A man who should be dead. A name my father used to say like a curse—Gallo. And not just him.”
My pulse stuttered. How’s the wife? She reminds me of her mother. The chill of it had not left my bones.
“He mentioned my mother.” I forced my throat open around the sentence. “Why?”
Enrico’s eyes sharpened. “Because men like him reach for whatever cuts deepest. They say your mother’s name, or they say they knew her—anything to plant rot. Don’t let him.”
“So he’s lying?”
“I don’t know yet, but I know what he wants. He wants me to be reckless. He wants you to be afraid.”
“When you found us,” I whispered, “I saw two versions of you. I need to know which one I’m married to.”
His mouth softened at the memory, then hardened again. “Both,” he said. “And neither. I’m the man who will stop this.”
“And what does stop look like?”
“Death.”
The way he said it—bare, unarmored—tugged something loose in my chest. I hated that the truth could be a comfort and a wound in the same breath.
“I’m tired of being brave,” I admitted. “Just for tonight.”
He rounded the desk and stopped in front of me, close enough that the heat off him found my skin and settled there like a claim.
“Say the word and I will ruin every plan I made for the night. I will keep you awake until the morning light is a mercy and the only thing you can think about is the shape of my hands.”
The breath left me in a sigh that wasn’t surrender so much as recognition. I stepped closer until the cotton of his shirt brushed my stomach, until the faint touch of his stubble lifted goosebumps along my throat. “Don’t promise what you can’t deliver.”
His smile finally reached his eyes. “I never do.”
When he kissed me, it wasn’t gentle. It was careful. His mouth tasted like rain and something darker. His hand slid to the nape of my neck, thumb finding the hinge of my jaw, guiding rather than taking. Heat unfurled low in my body, not the panicked tremor of nights ago.
“Tell me if I hurt you,” he murmured against my lips.
“You won’t.”
The room fell away. The storm outside became a metronome for a song only audible to me.
He lifted me to the edge of the desk and the wood was cool beneath my thighs, a straight line under the curved chaos of us.
His mouth trailed to my throat—slow, deliberate.
When he reached the stitches, he stopped, breath warm as he hovered.
He didn’t have to ask. I nodded, and he pressed his lips above the line, reverent, a benediction he didn’t believe he deserved to give.
I tugged at his tie and he let me strip it away, the silk whispering over my wrists. The power between us pivoted, as easy and inevitable as a door swinging on a well-oiled hinge.
“Look at me,” he said, when I closed my eyes. “Don’t disappear.”
“I’m right here,” I whispered, and opened them.
His gaze searched mine, intense and unflinching. In that moment, something shifted between us—a final wall crumbling. I felt exposed, but not vulnerable. Different.
“I’ve never wanted to be seen before.”
His fingers traced the curve of my cheek. “And now?”
I leaned into his touch, savoring the warmth of his palm against my skin. “Now I can't imagine hiding.”
Lightning flashed, illuminating his face in stark relief—the sharp angle of his jaw, the shadow of stubble, eyes that held mine with quiet certainty. When darkness returned, I reached for him, finding my way by touch alone.
I unbuttoned his shirt, each newly revealed inch of skin a discovery.
He remained perfectly still under my exploration, only the quickening of his breath betraying his composure.
When I pushed the fabric from his shoulders, my fingers traced the constellation of scars across his chest, each one a story he hadn't told me yet.
The rain intensified, drumming against the roof like impatient fingers.
I reached for his belt, but he caught my hand, bringing it to his lips instead.
His eyes never left mine as he removed it himself.
He lifted me from the desk with surprising gentleness.
My legs wrapped around his waist as he carried me toward the couch in the corner of the room.
He stood over me for a moment, eyes traveling the length of my body, then lowered himself next to me. “You're the most dangerous thing that's ever happened to me.”
I laughed. “I’m not the one with a gun.”
His smile didn't reach his eyes. “There are different kinds of danger, my love.”
“That sounds ominous.” I traced the line of his collarbone with my fingertip.
His hand caught mine, holding it against his chest where I could feel his heartbeat, steady and strong beneath my palm. “It's not meant to be. Just honest.”
When he kissed me again, it was with a hunger that matched my own. His weight pressed me into the cushions, solid and real in a way nothing had felt in months. I tugged at his remaining clothes, impatient now. His lips found my shoulder, my collarbone, the hollow of my throat.
I arched into his touch, desperate to feel more of him. My fingernails scraped lightly down his back, and he shuddered against me, his breath catching in his throat.
“Tell me what you want.”
“Just you.”
His eyes darkened. He pulled my shirt over my head, and the cool air raised goosebumps across my skin. For a moment, he just looked at me, his gaze tracing every curve, every scar. I should have felt exposed, but instead I felt powerful. Wanted.
When his lips returned to mine, the kiss was deeper, more urgent. Our remaining clothes fell away, barriers dissolving until there was nothing between us but heat and hunger. His hands mapped my body like he was committing every inch to memory.
His palm slid down my stomach, fingers dipping lower, finding the heart of me. I bit my lip to keep from crying out as he moved, watching my reactions with those intense eyes. My hands clutched at his shoulders, needing something to anchor me as pleasure built like a gathering storm.
“Don't hold back,” he murmured against my ear. “Not with me.”
I let go. The sound that escaped me was raw, honest in a way I hadn't allowed myself to be in years. He caught my cry with his mouth, swallowing it as if it were something precious.
When he finally moved over me, positioning himself between my thighs, he paused, searching my face one last time. I nodded, unable to form words, and he pushed forward. The fullness, the completeness of him inside me, stole my breath.
I wrapped my legs around him, pulling him deeper, and he groaned against my neck. His pace quickened, responding to my silent plea. Each thrust brought me closer to the edge, a precipice I both feared and craved.
“Look at me,” he commanded again, his voice strained with effort. “I want to see you.”
I forced my eyes open, meeting his gaze as the tension inside me coiled tighter. His face was transformed by pleasure, all his careful control stripped away, leaving something raw and beautiful in its place.
When release came, it crashed through me like a wave breaking against rocks, powerful and inevitable. I clung to him as my body shuddered, his name a prayer on my lips. He followed moments later, his rhythm faltering as he buried his face in my neck, a strangled sound escaping him.
Afterward we didn’t speak. He tucked me against him on the leather couch beneath the tall window, our breaths falling into a rhythm.
The rain softened to a hush. He pressed his mouth to my hair and said nothing because the words he had were violent and the words I had were soft, and both could live, but not yet together.
I drifted for a while—the kind of drifting that isn’t sleep, just distance. I traced the line of his jaw with my fingertip, the ridge of an old scar along his cheekbone, the place where the gold chain at his throat disappeared beneath his shirt.
“You’re still going out.”
His thumb swept slow circles along my hip. “Yes.”
“I hate it.”
“I know.”
“Will you come back before dawn?”
“I’ll come back,” he said, and didn’t give dawn the dignity of a promise.
“Don’t become him.”
He touched his forehead to mine. “I won’t.” Then, quieter, truer: “I’ll try.”
“I’ll take try,” I said, because that was what loving men like him meant—you held on to the trying and let the winning come later.
He rose, straightened his shirt, gathered his tie. When he turned to go, I caught his hand. “Wait.”
He did. He always did with me. That was the difference.
“Be careful.”
“I will,” he answered, and even if it was the oldest lie, it was also the oldest spell, and I let it work.
He left with the soft surety of a man who has made peace with danger.
I pulled his shirt tighter and found my way upstairs. Catrina’s door was closed. In our bedroom, I didn’t turn on the light. The bruises faded to the color of late violets; the cut tugged when I moved my arm wrong.
Sleep flirted. It didn’t commit. Not long after, the digital clock on the bedside table washed the room in green.
2:11. I laid still and listened. Nothing.
And then—something. Not footsteps inside, but a sound carried through walls and rain: the faint crunch of tires on wet gravel far beyond the gates, then the soft, unmistakable click of a cigarette lighter giving birth to flame.
I slid out of bed and crossed to the window.
The lawn stretched away in clean lines, the driveway a long black ribbon.
Beyond the iron, the street was mostly empty.
Then I saw it: not a car—just a small, stubborn ember hovering at shoulder height in the dark, flaring, dimming, flaring again.
Someone standing still, smoking and watching our house.
After a minute, the ember dropped. The shape moved, a darker shadow peeling from shadow, and vanished down the block.
I should have called Enrico. Instead I stood there and let the fear gather, then thin. It wasn’t bravery. It wasn’t foolish. It was the decision that I would not be prey to my own imagination, not tonight.
Still, when I turned from the window, something on the balcony caught the corner of my eye. I eased open the door. Rain ticked off the iron railing. There, tucked where the balcony meets the gutter, a small thing waited—white against dark. An origami crane.
It slumped from the rain, wings softened, but the folds were careful, precise, almost loving. I stared at it until my skin prickled. The paper wasn’t plain. Faint ink bled up through the whiteness—columns of numbers and a stamped seal.
By morning I could pretend it hadn’t been there. But I reached anyway, slid it into my palm.
I went back inside and closed the door. The crane sat on the bedside table. I lay down and listened for Enrico’s key in the lock or for the hum of the car returning.
I did not sleep. I did not cry. I did the most dangerous thing a woman in my world can do. I made a plan.