58. CHAPTER SIXTY
CHAPTER SIXTY
Alina
She woke to layered warmth: body heat, the gold of morning sunlight, and the unfamiliar comfort of an industrial loft far from any coordinates she’d ever called home.
For a moment, she was blank—a consciousness with no story, stripped down to the animal pleasure of sheets and skin and Dante’s arm anchoring her to the world.
His weight across her waist was both a restraint and a guarantee.
She watched the dust motes float in the beam of sunlight, the ceiling’s faint water stains tracing pale rivers across concrete, and let her eyes close again.
The morning offered an illusion of safety that was almost, almost convincing.
She lay still, counting the seconds by Dante’s slow breathing, until the illusion fractured with his first movement. He shifted behind her, nuzzling the space just below her ear. “You awake?” he murmured, voice all gravel and heat.
“Maybe.” She didn’t move. If she moved, she’d remember the war, the network of betrayals, the fact that even this morning carried an expiration date.
He gathered her closer, arm tightening until her ribs compressed against his. “Stay like this a little longer,” he said, and there was a kind of plea buried deep in the request—a note she’d learned to recognize in him, even when he tried to bury it.
She let herself be held. “Okay,” she whispered, and meant it.
In the silence, she catalogued every layer of sensation.
The hard mattress beneath them, the worn blanket curling at her ankles, the faint scent of sweat and pine that clung to his chest. It was the first time in her adult life she’d felt safe enough to want a morning to last. And in that safety, a new anxiety bloomed: the certainty that everything could be lost, that this peace was not only temporary but a kind of prelude to disaster. She didn’t want it to end.
He shifted again, lips ghosting along her shoulder blade. “We should get up.”
“We should,” she agreed, all pretense of sleep gone. But neither moved.
She rolled onto her back and found him watching her with a kind of nakedness she’d never seen.
His hair was a wild mess, eyes soft—none of the sharp edges that usually defined him survived the night.
Morning Dante was an animal with its claws sheathed, all raw devotion and none of the violence.
She almost laughed, except it felt too fragile to name.
“Morning,” she whispered, not knowing if it was a greeting or an apology.
He brushed her hair off her face and searched her with that surgical attention she found both flattering and terrifying. “How did you sleep?”
She shrugged, suddenly shy. “I had good company.”
His mouth twitched. “That’s not what you said at three a.m.”
She rolled her eyes. “You snore.”
“I do not.”
“You do,” she insisted, she felt herself flush. Some part of her wanted to freeze this moment in memory: the light, the warmth, the shared laughter. This was not the life she’d planned, but in this bed with him, she could almost believe it was a life she could want.
He moved to sit up, but the air shifted as soon as he left the warmth of the bed.
He became the Dante she’d known before: predator, sentinel, every muscle ready to brace against the next crash of chaos.
He scanned the loft from the mattress, eyes flicking to each window, each shadow.
She watched as he catalogued the points of entry, the pathways of escape, and with each calculation she felt the old tension return between her shoulder blades.
Even here, especially here, none of it was ever really over.
She wrapped the blanket around herself and drifted to the edge of the mattress, legs dangling.
The loft was still half-shadowed, pools of gold on the concrete floor, the city noise distant but steadily growing.
The illusion of domesticity was almost complete: a coffee pot salvaged from the corner bodega, a bowl of oats, even a battered deck of playing cards on the kitchen counter.
She wandered in that direction while Dante checked every lock on every door in a ritual she recognized as both performance and necessity.
“What time is it?” she asked, just to hear her own voice echo in the hollow space.
He checked his watch, then the phone, then the watch again. “Late.”
She smiled, not at the answer but the way he said it—like time was a beast he could master if only he stared it down. “We overslept.”
“We needed it.” He softened, just for a moment, then turned away to peer through the blinds.
She found the coffee pot and hit the button.
The engine of it grumbled to life, filling the space with a promise of normalcy.
She set out two mugs and a bowl, moving around the kitchen as if she had always been here.
The caffeine and the morning light did their work, grounding her, and for a few precious seconds she could let herself imagine a world in which sunlight and oatmeal were the only priorities she’d need to manage.
Dante reappeared beside her, silent. He accepted the mug she handed him and drank without gratitude, as though coffee were a weapon and not a comfort.
She watched him over the lip of her own cup, noting the tiny flickers of tension in his jaw, the way his eyes never stopped moving.
She wanted to reach across the counter and touch him, to make him stay in this moment, but she knew better.
He sipped. “Any dreams?”
She shook her head. “Nothing worth remembering.”
He nodded, as if that was the only acceptable answer. “Good.”
She set her mug down. “We need a plan.”
“We do.” He didn’t look at her. “The longer we stay here, the more likely someone finds us.”
She forced a laugh. “So, two more hours?”
He smirked, the first real smile she’d seen since they left the estate. “Deal.”
For a spell, they ate in silence. Oatmeal never tasted so good.
She studied the lines of his face, the faint scar above his left eyebrow, the way he cradled the mug as if anchoring himself to the moment.
For all the talking they’d done—strategizing, interrogating, decoding—the best communication still lived in these silences.
She finished first, pushing the bowl aside. “So. Plan?”
He leaned in, lowering his voice. “We have two priorities: find the traitor, and get you out of the city alive. Everything else is noise.”
She hesitated. “What about you?”
He gave her a look that cut through every layer of performance. “I don’t matter if you’re dead,” he said, and there was no self-pity in it—just fact.
She reached for his hand. “Don’t say that.”
He let her take it, and for a second, neither of them was armed. “We’ll figure it out,” he repeated, softer now. “But we have to be smart. The traitor knows every step we make.”
She nodded. “Then let’s do something unexpected.”
He smiled, this time with teeth. “That’s what I like about you.” “Always thinking outside the box.”
The morning could have ended there—a table, two mugs, a plan.
But the world had other intentions. A car horn shattered the silence, loud enough to rattle the windows.
Dante was on his feet before the echo faded, scanning with a predator’s focus.
She followed, adrenaline burning through the last of the illusion.
The street below was a study in the ordinary: a dog walker, two men with takeout coffee, a delivery truck backing into the curb. But Dante didn’t relax. He didn’t blink.
“What is it?” she asked, standing at his shoulder.
He shook his head. “Nothing. Maybe.” He was still staring, still searching for the pattern in the noise.
She placed a hand on his arm. “If they knew where we were, wouldn’t they have come by now?”
He didn’t answer. His attention was fixed on something she couldn’t see, gaze locked with the intensity of a man accustomed to being hunted. She tried to see what he saw, tried to overlay her interpretation of the world onto his, but came up empty.
He turned from the window. “We need to move. Not now, but soon.” He was already making the calculations—routes, vulnerabilities, fallback points.
She watched him, a pang of loss surfacing.
She didn’t want to lose this version of him: the man who laughed at her oatmeal jokes, the man who remembered to check every lock, the man who fit his body around hers and held her through a night without violence.
She wanted to protect him from the world he’d built his life on, if only for a morning.
She poured herself a second mug, hands trembling. “We have maybe an hour before the street gets busy,” she said. “If you’re serious about running, that’s our window.”
He nodded, but his mind was somewhere else. “There’s a storage unit on Twenty-Second. I have supplies there—cash, burner phones, IDs. We’ll hit it first, then decide.”
She finished her coffee, trying to memorize the way the sun hit his face, the exact blue of the light above the window, the sound of his boots on the floor. She didn’t want to forget any of it. She’d spent her whole life learning to forget—now, for once, she wanted to remember.
He set his mug down and faced her squarely. “Do you regret it?” he asked.
She didn’t pretend. She looked puzzled when he asked the question. “Regret what she asked.”
“Getting involved with me.”
She laughed. “Not like I had a choice in the matter.”
Dante smiled and nodded in agreement.
“But to answer your question …no. I do not regret it.”