Chapter 15
Chapter Fifteen
STEVIE
I’ve been wearing Dario’s tie for three days.
Not out in public. I’m unhinged, not stupid.
Just around the apartment. While I enter billing codes. While I stress-bake. While I masturbate with his pen. While I have full conversations with myself about whether this constitutes a mental health crisis or just a quirky coping mechanism.
The tie still smells like him. Even after forty-seven outfit changes, three mental breakdowns, and one near fire caused by broiling cookies too long while fantasizing about riding his jawline.
I should probably wash it. I will never wash it.
I’m collecting pieces of a man I’ve spoken to exactly zero times.
At this rate, by Christmas I’ll have assembled an entire Dario from stolen accessories. A Build-A-Mobster kit. Comes with a pen, a tie, and complete disregard for federal law. Emotional stability sold separately. Some assembly required.
Saul called yesterday. Asked how I was doing. I said “great!” while literally wearing Dario’s tie and wrapped in Saul’s blanket.
The compartmentalization required to survive my life is genuinely impressive.
But I’m out of vanilla extract and brown sugar, which means I have to go to the grocery store like a functional adult human being instead of a goblin who hoards silk neckwear and men she can’t have.
I take off the tie. Fold it carefully. Set it next to the pen.
Jeans. T-shirt. The blonde hair is really growing out now, dark roots visible, the color fading into something in-between. I should fix it. Maintain the disguise. Be a good little witness.
I don’t.
Sunglasses. Hat.
My disguise is tragic but it’s all I’ve got.
The grocery store is twelve minutes away.
I park. Grab a cart. Navigate the fluorescent hellscape with the dazed horror of someone picking out snacks for her own funeral. Chocolate-covered pretzels for the reception. Stolen dignity optional.
Baking aisle first. Vanilla extract, the good kind, not the imitation garbage. Brown sugar. Maybe some chocolate chips because I’m always out of chocolate chips and also because chocolate is the only thing standing between me and a complete psychological collapse.
I’m reading the label on a bag of semi-sweet, comparing cocoa percentages like this information matters, like I’m not going to buy whichever one is cheapest, when I see him.
Three aisles over. Visible through the gap in the shelves.
That ass. That mobbed-up, leather-wrapped, cocky piece of protein that once stood in my apartment and made me forget how vowels worked.
Enzo.
I blink. Look again.
Still Enzo.
Still right there, casually examining pasta sauce like he has any goddamn right to be in my grocery store in my city in my new life that he is absolutely not supposed to know about.
My brain does that thing where it throws every possible explanation at the wall.
He followed you. He found you. He’s here to bend you over the Haagen-Dazs and rearrange your ability to walk down a frozen foods aisle without getting wet.
Or more likely, the family knows where you are. You’re about to die in the pasta aisle.
At least the chocolate chips are on sale.
Oh absolutely the fuck not.
I’m the emotionally compromised baked goods banshee in this story. I’m the stalker. You don’t get to out-stalker me in my own unmedicated delusion. Who the fuck does he think he is?
I walk straight toward him.
He sees me coming. Has the absolute audacity to look amused and be sexy about it.
“What the fuck, Enzo.”
“Good to see you too, sweetheart.” He sets down the pasta sauce. Marinara. Store brand. “How’s the vanilla extract shopping going?”
“You can’t be here.”
“And yet.” He spreads his hands. “Here I am.”
God, hands. That’s not a man, that’s a sex injury waiting to happen. I’m ovulating just looking at him. I’m probably pregnant now. Immaculate intimidation.
“There’s a U.S. Marshal who keeps tabs on me.” I drop my voice, glancing around like Saul might materialize from the cereal aisle. “If he finds out.”
“Relax. I’m better at not being seen than you are.” He picks up another jar, pretends to read it. “Sunglasses inside a grocery store? Really? That’s your disguise?”
My face heats. “It’s fine. No one’s noticed.”
“I noticed. In about three seconds.” He sets the jar down. Those caramel eyes find mine, lighter than Dario’s, warmer, but with something sharp underneath. “You broke into his house.”
My stomach cannonballs into my pelvis. Fuck. Fuck.
“How did you?”
“Cameras.” He’s trying not to smile and failing. “Also you left cookies. In his kitchen. With a note. And.” He pauses for effect. “You moved stuff in his closet.”
Oh God. Oh no.
The jacket. The jacket I hung up wrong because I was panicking.
“I didn’t.” Wait, cameras?
“Dario’s very particular about his closet.” Enzo leans against the shelf, arms crossed, looking like he’s enjoying this way too much. “Took him about ten seconds to figure out someone had been trying on his clothes.”
I want to dissolve into the linoleum.
“The door was unlocked,” I say weakly.
“So you just... wandered inside?” His grin widens. “Totally normal behavior. Very stable.”
God, Enzo smiling could make angels drop to their knees.
“I was going to leave the cookies on the porch but.”
“But you couldn’t help yourself.” He tilts his head, studying me like I’m a particularly interesting species of disaster. “Did you take anything?”
Did I take anything? Just a little keepsake. A minor felony. Just his tie, which I’ve now worn more often than any bra I own.
“No,” I lie.
“Liar.”
“I’m not.”
“Your left eye twitches when you lie. Did it just now.” He pushes off the shelf. Steps closer. “What’d you take?”
Would it be weird to say “break me open like a bag of flour and rearrange my organs between the penne and the rigatoni”?
“Nothing that’ll hold up in court.”
“Stevie.”
Umm yes, Enzo. Say my name again.
“A tie. Maybe. Hypothetically.”
“You’re unbelievable.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
He’s close now. Close enough that I can smell him, leather, spiced, completely different from Dario’s cedar cologne.
Close enough that my brain unhelpfully supplies: He hurts people for a living. He’s probably killed people. Why is that hot? Why is this hot?
My trauma has a type.
“Where are my cookies, by the way?” he asks, derailing my spiral. “I’m the one who didn’t rough you up when I was supposed to. I feel like that earns me some cookies. The peanut butter chocolate ones are my favorite.”
Despite everything, the panic, the mortification, the fact that I’m having this conversation in a grocery store, I almost laugh.
“You want cookies?”
“I want an easier job, a vacation, and world peace. But I’ll settle for cookies.”
“What job? Stalking me in supermarkets?”
“Keeping you alive.” He says it casually. “You’re really bad at it yourself, so someone has to.”
I stand there, in the pasta aisle, having the most surreal conversation of my life with a man who was sent to threaten me six weeks ago and is now apparently my... bodyguard? Mob-appointed babysitter? How do we escalate this to me wrapped around his waist?
“You want to get milkshakes?” I ask, because apparently self-preservation is just a rumor I used to believe in. “Talk somewhere that’s not...” I gesture at the aggressive fluorescent lighting. “This?”
Enzo considers me for a moment. His whole face tilts, like I threw him off balance and he doesn’t hate it.
“Yeah, okay.” He grabs the marinara sauce and puts it in my cart like that’s a normal thing to do. “But you’re buying. You owe me.”
“For what?”
“For keeping your tie theft off the official family drama spreadsheet.”
Fuck.
There’s a diner two blocks away.
Not the one I go to with Saul. That one feels sacred somehow, part of our pattern, and it’d be wrong to imagine riding Enzo at that place. I have boundaries after all.
This diner we go to is impossibly older. Shabbier. Checkered floors and cracked vinyl booths and a jukebox that definitely hasn’t worked since before I was born.
Enzo slides into one side.
I take the other.
A waitress appears. Sixty years old. Zero fucks remaining.
“What can I get you.” It’s not a question. It’s a demand for information so she can leave.
“Vanilla shake,” Enzo says. “And fries.”
“Chocolate shake,” I add. “Also fries.”
She scratches it down and disappears without another word.
I love her.
We sit in silence. The kind that should be awkward, but my brain’s too busy wondering how long it would take him to crawl under this table and make me see God in a cracked vinyl booth.
I take the opportunity to catalog him the way I catalog everyone. The way I can’t seem to stop cataloging.
He’s built different from Dario. Less lean, more solid. The kind of body that’s been in fights and won most of them. His hands are big, scarred across the knuckles, the kind of hands that have done things I probably don’t want to know about.
But his face is almost boyish when he’s not trying to be intimidating. Long lashes. Full mouth. The kind of features that probably got him underestimated before people learned better.
“You’re staring,” he says.
“I stare at everyone. It’s a problem.”
“I know. You stared at Dario for five weeks.”
“You know about that?”
“I know everything that might affect the family.” He leans back, one arm draped over the booth. Easy in his body in a way that makes me feel like a collection of anxious angles. “I watched you watch him. Thought you might be a threat.”
“I’m five-foot-four and my idea of violence is overbaking cookies. I’m a walking liability, not a threat.”
“You’d be surprised.” His eyes meet mine. “Threats come in all kinds of packages.”
“Is that what you are? A threat?”
“Depends who’s asking.”
“I’m asking.”
He holds my gaze for a long moment. And I see the thing underneath the teasing, the easy smile. Something sharp. Something cold.