Elio
For three days, I do not hear from her.
Not a call.
Not a text.
No whisper through a mutual contact or sighting passed along by one of the men I trust. Not even through an indirect message people in our world know how to send when they do not want a paper trail leading back to them.
She disappears so completely, it feels intentional.
Maybe that is the point.
The silence settles into my bones by the end of the first day as a slow poison I cannot spit back out.
At first I tell myself she needs space. That grief has its own gravitational pull no one can escape from and no sane woman would want the man who allowed her to wake up alone and uninformed anywhere near her after a blow like that.
I tell myself she is with family or hidden away, guarded and somewhere safe enough to collapse without having to worry who might see her do it.
I am not sleeping much to begin with, but whatever scraps of rest I used to get vanish entirely after that.
Night becomes a series of pacing loops through my apartment, the whiskey bottle I’ve never touched slowly growing emptier and emptier while the city glows beyond the windows to a kingdom I have no hand in owning.
I find myself staring at my phone for stretches of time that make me feel insane, waiting for it to light up with her name.
But it never does.
I have never begged for anything in my life. Not for loyalty, mercy, for honor, and especially not for love.
But with every passing hour of her silence, I get closer to understanding what kind of man would drop to his knees for a single word from the right woman.
And the worst part is that I deserve it.
I deserve every second of not knowing where she is, how she is, whether she is sleeping or eating or drowning under the weight of her grief. I deserve to stare at a blank screen until my eyes burn.
I deserve the tightening in my lungs every time my phone buzzes with someone else’s name.
I answer when I have to. I give orders, sit in meetings, put on my suit and my face and my voice, and to everyone around me, I am exactly what I have always been, a man built by discipline and forged through violence.
A man who does not bleed in public no matter how deep the knife goes.
But inside, I am unraveling stitch by stitch.
I have wanted women before. Wanted bodies, mouths, a few hours of relief from the constant pressure of the life I was born into because desire is simple. Desire is cheap. It burns hot, then dies quickly.
This is not that.
This is waking up with rage tightening its grip around my heart with each beat, suffocating me slowly because the side of the bed where she slept one night is cold now and has been for days.
On the third night, I break.
I leave another meeting before it is properly over, ignoring the look Alessio sends me from the far end of the table when I rise and turn for the door.
He says my name once, the tone a warning edged with concern, but I keep walking.
I drive through the city with no destination at first, just the sick pulse of need driving me harder on every block.
Rain has started falling, glossing the streets until every light in the city looks smeared with fractured lighting.
My tires hiss over the pavement as music from the radio murmurs low through the speakers, some old blues track soaked in regret that I shut off because I cannot stand one more voice in the car with me.
I end up outside of one of the many penthouses the Russo family owns, only realizing it when I recognize the building number on the side of the brick exterior.
I sit across the street with the engine still idling, one hand wrapped tight around the steering wheel, and watch the lobby doors like a man waiting for absolution to come walking out under the fluorescent street lighting.
After two hours, I finally drive away.
I tell myself to leave it there. That if she wanted me to know where she is, she would have found a way to tell me.
Yet despite the logic of those thoughts rattling inside my head, the other ones—louder and far more desirable to listen to—urge me to keep moving.
So instead, I drive through the city until my gas gauge dings, slowly hunted by its own thoughts.
By midnight, I am back at my apartment.
I remember almost nothing of the drive there.
At some point, I park. At some point, I kill the engine and I get out and drag myself over to the elevator. But the details do not matter.
By now, my body has gone completely cold. I move through the garage on instinct alone, every motion stripped down to habit.
The mirrored walls of the elevator throw my reflection back at me and for a second, I barely recognize the man staring out of them.
Dark stubble shadows my jaw.
Exhaustion has carved hard lines into my face, sharpening me into something harsher… meaner. My eyes look empty.
I drag a hand over my mouth and close my eyes for half a second, just enough to let the steel box carry me upward while the city drops away beneath my feet.
I should be thinking about tomorrow and the men who will be waiting for orders, and the fracture spreading through both our families like rot beneath the foundation of old floorboards.
Instead, all I can think about is her.
When the elevator slows at my floor and the old familiar mechanical groan settles into place, I feel it before I understand it, my body already knowing before my mind can catch up.
Every instinct I possess hardens at once, exhaustion burning off in one hot, violent sweep.
The doors open with infuriating slowness, revealing the dimly lit entryway beyond.
I step out of the elevator, my eyes lifting automatically toward the windows facing the city.
And then I freeze at a figure standing in front of them.
For one second, my mind refuses to make sense of what I am seeing. The room is lit only by the scattered glow of the city lights beyond the glass, leaving her mostly in shadow.
She stands motionless, framed against the skyline like some ghost haunting me.
Her face is turned away, angled slightly toward the traffic below, but I can still make out the soft line of her cheek and the delicate slope of her shoulder, the impossible familiarity of the way she holds herself, confident even in an unfamiliar place like this one.
Relief hits first so suddenly, it nearly buckles my knees.
My lungs unlock in one ragged pull of air, my vision blurring for a heartbeat.
I actually sway where I stand and catch myself with one hand brushing the wall beside the entryway to keep myself upright. She is here.
She’s alive.
Real and breathing and close enough to touch.
Why is she here?
She should have known better than to come back to me.
I know what I am. Men like me do not get softness without punishment.
We do not get to lose ourselves in bright, fearless girls with clever mouths and believe for even one second that the darkness trailing behind us will stop at the bedroom door.
Yet here she is, back inside the lion’s den.
I take a step forward anyway, careful, as though one wrong movement might shatter the fragile reality of her standing in my home.
My shoes make almost no sound on the hardwood, but she stiffens all the same. It is small, the tightening through her shoulders barely there, but I catch it all the same as if she had flinched.
Every part of me is suddenly too aware of the exhaustion dragging at my limbs and the cold dampness still clinging to my coat from the rain outside.
My eyes adjust the closer I get to her, filling in what shadows had first concealed.
She is wearing all black—a simple dark blouse and fitted slacks, elegant in that effortless way that always makes her look impeccable. Her hair falls down her back in loose chestnut waves, half obscuring the line of her neck.
Both arms are wrapped around her midsection, tugging tighter around her frame when I finally stop behind her.
My chest tightens until it hurts. The instinct to go to her is primitive in how hard it tugs at me to close the distance between us and pull her away from the glass and into me.
To feel the proof of her beneath my hands and press my mouth to her temple, neck, anywhere I can reach, and tell her the one truth that actually matters—that for some impossible reason, the world has handed me something I do not deserve and would kill to keep.
“Isabella,” I murmur.
She closes her eyes. I know she does even before she turns because I see the slight dip of her lashes against her cheek in her profile and the way her mouth tightens right after. Slowly, she turns to face me.
She is beautiful still, that much is inevitable. Grief cannot rob her of that. But there is something altered in her now, an invisible thread pulled too tight.
Her face is pale beneath the city glow, her eyes shadowed, the skin beneath them faintly dark as if sleep has become a stranger just like it has for me.
Her mouth, that clever mouth I know too well, is set in a line that looks composed until I notice the strain of it around the edges of her lips.
For a long moment, neither of us speaks.
My voice feels strained when I finally manage, “You shouldn’t be here.”
The words come out harsher than I intend for them to. In all honesty, I don’t even know why I say them. While true, they are the furthest thing from what I want.
Her expression flickers, not quite from pain, but something close to it.
“No,” she says softly. “I probably shouldn’t be.”
Her gaze holds mine. In that moment, I can see what the last three days have done to her too.
Whatever this is, whatever pulled her back to my apartment despite all common sense to stay away, has gone beyond just a single night shared together.
This is no longer something either of us can dismiss as a mistake made in a moment of weakness.
She takes in a breath like it hurts. “I wanted to tell you myself that I’m leaving the city.”
I go perfectly still. “What?”