Chapter 15 #2
The professional thing.
“I am,” I say.
Her shoulders ease a fraction.
She closes the door quietly behind her, taking away the hallway light and plunging the room back into near darkness. For a few seconds, she’s just a shape against the dim glow of the moon through the curtains.
Then my eyes adjust.
She’s looking at me.
Her bare feet are silent on the rug as she crosses the room, slowly, like she’s giving me plenty of time to tell her to go away.
I don’t say it.
Because the thought of sending her back to an empty room to stare at a ceiling for the rest of the night after what happened feels… wrong.
That is the kind of soft, unprofessional thinking that I don’t allow myself.
I am going to have to address it later.
Right now, I let her come.
She stops a few feet from the bed, close enough that I can see the uncertainty in her eyes.
“You shouldn’t be walking around,” I say, keeping my voice low. I’m talking about her, but she takes it as an invitation.
“I couldn’t sleep,” she admits.
I shift, trying to find a position that doesn't make my side feel like it’s being torn apart. The movement makes my breath catch.
She notices, of course.
“You need to sit up,” she says. “Lying flat is probably pulling on the stitches.”
She moves toward the nightstand, her movements sure now that she has a task. She picks up the spare pillows stacked neatly in the corner and shakes one out.
“You’ll hurt yourself more if you keep trying to get up on your own,” she says, her tone matter-of-fact, like we're back in the conference room and she's the one in charge.
I want to argue. My pride, my training, everything in me wants to handle this myself.
But the idea of the effort it would take to prop myself up, the pain that would inevitably follow, the sheer logistical problem of doing it one-handed without ripping something open—it’s exhausting just to think about.
So I let her.
She puts a knee on the edge of the mattress, leaning across me to place the pillow against the headboard. Her hair brushes against my shoulder, smelling faintly of shampoo.
She smells clean.
I smell of blood and antiseptic.
“Okay,” she says softly. “On three. I’ll help you.”
She places one hand carefully on my upper arm, her touch light but firm.
“One…”
I brace myself.
“Two…”
Her other hand goes to my back, avoiding the bandaged area.
“Three.”
She lifts as I push.
The movement is sharp and fast, and for a second, the world whites out behind my eyes from a wave of agony.
A low grunt escapes my throat, the only sound I can make. I slump back against the pillows, breathing hard, sweat beading on my forehead.
“Adrian?”
Her voice is right beside me, laced with a genuine concern I have no right to expect.
I lift a hand. “Fine,” I manage. The word is a lie, but it’s the one I have.
She doesn't believe me. I can see it in her face in the dim light. But she doesn't push it. Instead, she reaches for the glass of water on the nightstand and presses it into my good hand.
“Drink.”
I do. The cool water helps clear my head.
She takes the glass back and sets it down, then perches on the very edge of the bed, her back ramrod straight, her hands clasped in her lap. She is close enough that I can feel the warmth radiating from her.
We sit in silence for a long moment.
The only sounds are my breathing, still ragged, and the faint cry of a baby from another room, quickly soothed.
“You should be asleep,” I say when I can trust my voice again.
“You’re one to talk,” she counters. “You’re the one who got shot.” She looks down at her hands. “I keep replaying it.”
“Don’t. It won't help." I speak from experience.
“I can’t help it,” she says, her voice quiet. “The fight. You yelling my name. The stairwell.”
She hesitates, then looks at me, and in the faint light from the window, I can see the raw fear in her eyes. "How did you know? I keep trying to figure it out, but all I saw was a fight."
I shift my weight, a small, careful motion that sends a hot, sharp warning through my side.
“One of them looked at you.”
Her brows draw together. “That’s it?”
“He zeroed in on you in the middle of the fight. People in the middle of a fight, actually losing control, don’t check their surroundings with that kind of focus.”
Her throat moves as she swallows.
“The fight was a distraction for security and a way to get you closer,” I say. “Guests were scattering. Everyone else was reacting to noise. They were using it.”
Her face goes paler in the dark. “And I was walking right toward them.”
Her eyes close for half a second.
“I didn’t know.”
“I know.”
Her fingers twist together in her lap. “I should have listened to you.”
“You didn’t have time to understand what was happening.”
“But you did.”
“That’s my job.”
She opens her eyes again, and the look she gives me is too full of things I do not want to talk about in this room, in this dark, with her sitting on the edge of my bed wearing sleep clothes.
“I thought you were crazy,” she whispers.
That should probably offend me.
“I know.”
Her head snaps up. “You know?”
“You looked at me like I’d lost my mind until the door took the first hit.”
A breath leaves her, shaky and ashamed. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.” I lean my head back against the pillow and stare at the dim ceiling instead of her face. “You saw a fight. I saw a pattern. Different training. Different information.”
“Still,” she insists, her soft, insistent, "If I had listened, we might have avoided it all. You wouldn't have been—"
“We might have avoided it,” I cut in, my voice flat.
“Or the third shooter might have been lying in wait around the corner. Or you might have gone down with the first push and gotten trampled. Or he might have gone for the gun at that moment instead of waiting for a clearer shot.” I finally look at her again.
“There is no ‘if’ that gets us to a perfect version of tonight.”
Her expression falters. The anger at herself, the guilt, it all flickers and then dims, replaced by the hard reality of what I’m saying.
She was there. She survived. That’s the only version of the story that matters now.
For a few seconds, she says nothing.
She just looks at me.
Not at the bandage. Not at the water glass. Not at the door, or the window, or any of the other things she has been using to keep from looking directly at what happened tonight.
At me.
The silence changes, grows heavier.
I feel it immediately, and every professional instinct I have starts to harden against it.
“Caterina,” I say quietly.
I mean it as a warning.
I think she hears it that way.
It doesn’t stop her.
She shifts closer, one hand landing carefully on the mattress beside my hip, nowhere near the wound. Her face is pale in the dark, her eyes too bright, her mouth soft and tense at the same time.
“I keep seeing the blood,” she whispers.
“I know.”
“No, you don’t.” Her voice breaks just enough to make my chest tighten. “You don’t know what it was like to realize you had been hit before the stairs and kept going anyway.”
I do know, in a different way.
But I don’t say that.
Because she is too close now.
Close enough that the warmth of her body cuts through the antiseptic and pain and dark room. Close enough that I can see the fine tremor in her hand where it presses into the mattress.
“Don’t,” I say.
I don’t know whether I’m talking to her or myself.
Her gaze drops to my mouth.
That is all the warning I get.
Then she leans in and kisses me.
Her lips are soft and impossibly gentle, a stark, startling contrast to the memory of blood and concrete and gunfire from hours ago.
For a second, everything in me stops.
The pain in my side. The calculations about security. The running inventory of mistakes and contingencies. The hard line I have drawn between myself and this woman.
All of it goes quiet.
And I feel.
I feel the hesitance in her kiss. The desperate, searching edge of it. The way her breath trembles against my skin. The way she is using this to feel alive again after tonight.
She is terrified.
And she thinks this is the answer.
My hand comes up, not to push her away, but to cradle her jaw. My thumb strokes over her cheekbone, a gesture of comfort I have no business giving. For a moment, I let myself have this.
Just one moment.
Her kiss deepens, a little bolder now, a little more sure. She’s not hesitating anymore. She is looking for something solid to hold onto in the wreckage of tonight.
And I am letting her.
This is a mistake.
I know it with every fiber of my being.
A terrible, wonderful, catastrophic mistake.
My fingers tighten in her hair, and I kiss her back.
I forget about the pain. I forget about the Don in the room down the hall. I forget about the security protocols and the threat still hanging over this family.
All I know is the softness of her lips and the way she tastes, and the desperate, aching need to feel something other than fear and failure.