18. Gianna #2
The stone beneath my soles is cold, and it feels as though it’s rising—leeching up into my spine, into my chest.
I press my palm to the wall once, just to steady myself.
It’s slick with the condensation of autumn settling into the house.
The stone doesn’t yield.
Neither does the ache spreading through my ribs.
I pass the war room without slowing.
I don’t want to see the screens, the routes lit in red, the men hunched over data points, drawing circles that tighten by the hour.
I don’t want to see if my name is among them.
Or his.
If I stop, I’ll have to breathe.
If I breathe, I’ll have to feel.
And if I feel, I might scream.
So I keep moving, silent and steady, like a thread unraveling one loop at a time.
The garden door waits ahead, half open.
Beyond it, the cold seeps in from the courtyard.
I slip through before the house can change its mind, and let the silence follow me into the wind.
The door to the south terrace is ajar, and I slip through it like a shadow, trying not to wake the walls.
Autumn has settled more fully in the past few days, and though the sun hangs heavy above the olive trees, it offers little warmth.
The wind carries the scent of turned soil, fading roses, and the faint salt tang that always drifts in from the distant coast.
I cross the garden in silence.
The gravel doesn’t crunch.
The wind doesn’t lift my hair.
The world seems to understand that I need it to hush.
There is a narrow path behind the old guesthouse, overgrown with ivy that’s begun to yellow at the edges.
It leads to a shaded alcove tucked between a tall stone wall and a row of dense hedges that used to mark the Salvatore boundaries before Dante expanded the estate’s surveillance perimeter.
It’s not far from where we keep the children’s bicycles.
Not far from the fig tree Arietta insists grows fairies.
I lean against the stone wall, fold my arms tightly across my chest, and press my back against the wall, grounding myself in the texture of the stone.
I’m here, hiding like a child who has just discovered the monster she spent her whole life denying might, in fact, be real.
My brother’s voice echoes somewhere deep in my memory— Gianna, don’t be soft. Softness gets broken .
I never told him softness is not the same as weakness.
And maybe now I never will.
Slow footsteps come up to greet me.
It’s my husband, his face looking like he’s actually seeing me.
His sleeves are rolled to reveal his tattoos.
He is not wearing his ring, which means he knew he might have to kill someone today.
That absence does something to me.
He stops a few paces away, his eyes locked on mine like he’s reading the weather behind them. "I was looking for you," he says.
I laugh, sharp and short and not even close to kind. "You were avoiding me."
He doesn’t argue.
He just stands there, eyes tired, jaw flexing with something unspoken.
My fists clench where they rest at my sides.
I want to hit him.
I want him to hit back.
I want to burn down everything between us just to see if the ashes will settle into something clean.
"I know what’s been happening," I say quietly.
I wait for him to ask the question.
The one I don’t know how to answer.
He doesn’t.
Instead, he closes the distance between us in three steps and stops only when we are chest to chest.
His eyes are unreadable, but the silence between us pulses.
He lifts his hand like he’s going to touch my cheek, but he stops just before he does.
He hovers there, breath grazing my mouth.
The wind lifts the edge of my shirt.
"Do you believe it?" he asks.
I don’t know how to answer.
I don’t know what I believe.
I know what I saw.
I know what it means.
I know that access string was never meant to resurface, and I know who created it with me.
But belief is something else.
Belief is choosing sides before the evidence is final.
"I don’t know," I whisper. And then I kiss him.
He grabs the back of my head like he’s afraid I’ll vanish, and I bite his lip hard enough to taste copper.
His groan rips straight into my spine.
I shove him back against the wall, or maybe he pulls me forward.
I don’t know.
All I know is the rough scrape of stone against my back as he turns me and presses me into it, his thigh pushing between mine, his hands beneath my shirt, fingers bruising the skin over my ribs.
I claw at his belt, yanking it loose with more desperation than skill, and he groans when I grip him through his trousers.
We don't speak or slow.
He pulls my underwear down without ceremony.
One hand wraps around my throat, not to choke, but to steady.
The other lifts my leg around his hip.
His cock slides against me once, slick from nothing but my body’s betrayal, and then he’s inside.
All the way.
At once.
My back arches as I moan out loud, as he pins me between the wall and the length of him.
His mouth is at my shoulder, biting, breathing, whispering nothing.
My nails dig into his arms.
I don’t care if they leave marks.
I want them to.
The world narrows.
There is only this.
Only heat and pressure and the sound of our bodies crashing into each other like waves against rocks.
My hair sticks to my face.
My throat burns from holding in sound.
The wind carries the faint clatter of something falling off a shelf inside the guesthouse, but I don’t flinch. He doesn’t either.
My climax comes like a theft.
Quick, cruel, devastating.
My muscles lock, and I clench around him so tightly he grits out a curse and bites down on my shoulder.
He follows moments later.
One final thrust, and then he’s buried inside me, growling into my neck, fingers fisting the hem of my shirt like it’s the only thing keeping him upright.
His heat floods me.
It doesn’t matter that we’re not careful.
It doesn’t matter that it’s dangerous.
Nothing about this moment is meant to survive past now.
We stay tangled like that for a long time.
He doesn’t move.
I don’t speak.
Our hearts beat against each other like fists.
Eventually, he steps back, pulling out slowly. I wince at the emptiness.
At the wet sound of separation.
My thighs tremble.
My shirt is ruined.
His trousers are still open.
We look like wreckage.
And maybe we are.
He just looks at me.
And I look back.
And for the first time since the war started pressing in around us, I feel the shape of the end curling beneath my ribs.
The tears will come too quickly, and I don’t want comfort.
The pain is mine to nurse, so I fix what I can of my outfit and begin walking as quickly as I can.
His voice reaches my ears. "Would you tell me if it was him?"
There’s no reply I have that could make any of this any better, so I offer none as I break into a run.