3. Elio
ELIO
The muted vibration of my phone skittering somewhere across the hardwood floor is a persistent mechanical hum beneath the heavier quiet of the apartment.
The screen throws a dim, fractured glow up the side of the bed and across the ceiling, pale enough to look almost ghostly from where it lies half under the foot of the bed.
For a second, I do not move.
I lie there on my back with Isabella draped against me, the warmth of her body still sunk deep into mine after hours spent tangled together in the sheets.
Her leg is hooked lazily over mine.
One arm is curled across my ribs. Her hair is spread over my arm while her cheek rests against my chest, using it as a pillow.
The faint scent of her perfume carries beneath the musky remnants of sex.
The phone keeps vibrating, nearly making me sigh. Reality always knows when to intrude at the worst of times.
I close my eyes for half a second and exhale through my nose, already irritated by the simple fact of being needed.
There is always another demand, another problem requiring a firm hand and a cold mind.
Another late-night call most likely demanding blood be spilled or money collected. Maybe both.
Tonight, instead of purpose forcing me to rise from the warmth of my bed, resentment keeps me still.
For the first time in my life, I have something I do not want to part from.
When the vibrating stops, plunging the apartment into silence once again, I let my eyes slowly drift shut.
The absence of the sound feels like a small mercy I’m rarely ever granted. Whatever it is can wait until morning.
Sleep begins to creep back in at the edges of my thoughts.
The tension in my shoulders slowly starts to unwind once more, dragged down by the steady cadence of Isabella’s breathing and the residual ache of spent desire in my bones.
Then the phone starts vibrating again.
The sound rips through the room with the persistence of a barking dog, somehow louder this time.
The cold glow of the screen flares once more against the ceiling, flashing through my closed eyelids like a signal fire.
This time, I do sigh.
That is how it always works, though, isn’t it?
Every good thing in my life has always arrived with the shadow of consequence close behind it.
Peace never stays unpunished, desire never comes easily.
And love, if that is what this is shaping itself into, is probably the most dangerous indulgence of all to give in to.
For one wild second, I consider smashing the goddamn phone against the wall.
Watch the screen shatter and the call die unanswered on the other end before I drag Isabella closer against me and choose oblivion over obligation just this once.
The fantasy is brief and probably the clearest evidence yet that she is changing me in ways I do not entirely understand.
It is harder than it should be to disentangle myself, not because she’s particularly heavy, but because I simply don’t want to.
The sheets whisper around us as I shift and move with the slow, controlled precision I normally reserve for drawing a weapon in a crowded room.
The last thing I want to do is wake her.
She looks too peaceful like this, her face softened by sleep, her mouth parted slightly to breathe me in slowly.
The sight of her untouched by tension feels rare enough to guard.
There is no watchful edge to her like usual, no sharp, assessing eyes latching onto every detail in the room to dissect. It has all been put aside for a few stolen hours of rest, ones I know she desperately needs as much as I have.
She stirs for only a moment, shifting into the warmth I have left behind as if her body notices my absence before her mind ever could.
Even half asleep, she reaches for where I was only moments ago. When she settles again, she murmurs something soft in her sleep.
The sound is too faint to make out, little more than a breath shaped around a word, but it is intimate in the most brutal way, that small, unconscious sound.
More intimate than the gasps I dragged from her hours ago. More than the way she clung to me when pleasure stripped all the poise from her.
I cannot help myself as I lean over and press a kiss to her temple, my mouth lingering for a second longer than necessary.
Her skin is warm beneath my lips and she smells like sleep and sex and the faint trace of her perfume still clinging stubbornly to her hair.
For these few suspended seconds, I ignore the rest of the world entirely. When the vibration finally silences, the apartment falls still again.
Half of me is tempted to let the call go unanswered.
To slide back beneath the sheets and gather her into my arms again before the warmth fades from the place where I had been.
To pull her against my chest and bury my face in her hair and steal another hour, maybe two, before the life waiting outside these walls pulls me away from her again.
It is a seductive thought.
A stupid one.
It vanishes the moment the vibrating stirs the quiet once again.
Now it is no longer easy to dismiss as a drunken nuisance or some underling too incompetent to finish a job.
Whoever is trying to contact me, especially this late, must be important.
In my world, people do not keep calling at three in the morning unless something has already gone very, very wrong.
That is enough to force me to step away from the bed.
I bend and rifle through the discarded heap of my clothes scattered across the floor, my hand brushing past my shirt, my belt, the dark slacks I had peeled off in too much of a hurry earlier once we finally settled down for the evening.
Finally, my fingers close around it.
When I turn it over, the screen grows dark again in my hand.
For a second, I see nothing but my own reflection faintly ghosted across the black glass, bare-chested and disheveled in the dim light, looking less like the Conti underboss and more like a man caught between two worlds.
Then I tap my thumb against the screen, forcing it to wake once more.
My heart gives a slight, unwelcome stutter when my brother’s name appears on the notification bar, two missed calls next to his name.
The sight of it tightens something in me immediately.
Alessio contacting me after a banquet is not strange. If anything, it would be more unusual if he did not.
He is my brother, my father’s heir and other hand in all but title.
He is the only person in the family besides our father who has the standing to demand answers when I disappear from an event without word ahead of time.
After a banquet like tonight’s, there is always the expectation of a debrief. Who said what, which alliances seem strained, which politicians are leaning too hard in one direction, what opportunities surfaced beneath all the polished smiles and wine passed around in crystalline glasses.
Our father likes every detail gathered and laid at his feet before dawn, if possible.
A message from him after an event would hardly be cause for alarm. He would be curious to know where I vanished off to. Annoyed, probably, leaving him to deal with our father alone without some kind of buffer.
Suspicious enough to needle me about my absence in that nosy, older-brother way of his.
Especially because I had been expected to remain visible and circulate through guests to gather my usual share of leverage for the family machine.
But him calling this late? That is what feels wrong.
Texting is what he prefers. Alessio does not waste time engaging in long, drawn out conversations and rarely wastes urgency unless he has no choice.
If he is calling me instead of sending a clipped message about where I am, then whatever problem sits on the other end of that line is not something he trusts to text.
My thumb tightens around the phone.
When it lights up for a third time with his call, I do not hesitate to swipe my thumb across the screen to answer it and straighten to full height in one motion.
I cross the room quickly, the floor cool beneath my bare feet, and slip out into the hallway.
As I pull the bedroom door shut behind me, I take care not to let it latch too loudly.
The soft click of it closing sounds too final for my liking, almost like a line is being drawn between the warmth I have just left and whatever waits for me now.
The softness Isabella dragged out of me earlier retreats, folding itself away beneath older instincts.
The tenderness still on my mouth from kissing her forehead feels suddenly out of place on the same face that is undoubtedly about to hear bad news.
Whatever is going on is not something I want her overhearing.
I move through the apartment in silence, leaving the hallway and crossing into the living room where the floor-to-ceiling windows look out over the sleeping city.
The skyline glows in the dark like a field of banked embers, towers and street grids lit in gold and cold white, every window below holding strangers inside their own small worlds.
From up here, the city looks almost peaceful.
When I finally lift the phone to my ear, I ask, “What happened?”
Alessio’s tone is clipped, colder than usual. “Amos Russo was found dead an hour ago. Father wants you back here immediately.”
The floor drops out from under me. The sensation of falling is immediate and violent as it rips through me.
I lean forward to press a hand to the glass to steady myself. For one half-second, my mind goes completely blank.
Amos Russo.
Dead.
I just saw him tonight alive with his arm draped over his daughter’s shoulders, familiar calculation tugging at his smile like it always has.
He had been speaking to a few politicians when Isabella and I had snuck out, mostly likely trading pleasantries while silently creating plans like every other predator in that room.
And now he is dead?
I turn away from the windows without realizing it, my whole body suddenly too charged to stay still.
One hand drags back through my hair, pushing the thick waves away from my face as if the motion might somehow make any of this settle easier in my mind.
“What the hell happened?” I hiss.
There is the faint sound of movement on Alessio’s end, the sound of a door shutting.