Chapter 12
CHAPTER TWELVE
ENZO
I watch her go.
I can't do anything else, can't look away, can't make myself move from where I'm standing as she climbs the stairs with her shoulders straight and her chin up and that quiet dignity she always carries.
Her footsteps are soft on the wood and then there's the sound of a door closing upstairs and then nothing.
Silence.
My fingers are still tingling where I touched her face.
I stare at my hand like it belongs to someone else, like I can't quite reconcile the thing I just did with the man I've been telling myself I am.
Five seconds. That's all it was. My palm against her jaw, my thumb on her cheekbone, and she came back to herself like she'd been waiting for exactly that, like my hands were the thing her nervous system had been searching for.
I want to follow her upstairs.
The want is so specific and so violent that it takes everything I have to stay exactly where I am. I want to climb those stairs and push open that door and pull her against me and keep her there until morning, until she stops shaking, until whatever look was in her eyes goes away completely.
Instead, I press my fist against the arm of the couch until my knuckles ache.
The pain helps. Barely.
My cock is still hard. Has been since that hallway, since the towel and the moonlight and her breath hitching against my lips, and sitting here while she's upstairs in my shirt in my bed is its own specific kind of hell.
Every muscle in my body is wound so tight I feel like I'm going to snap, and the worst part is there's nowhere to put it, no way to burn it off, nothing to do except sit here and suffer through it.
"So."
Rafael's voice from the entrance to the living room. Easy and unhurried, like he didn't just watch me cup Isabella Romano's face in my hands while she looked at me like I was the only solid thing in the room.
"Don't." My voice comes out flat.
"I haven't said anything."
"You were about to."
He walks to the armchair, sits, crossing one ankle over his knee, completely relaxed in the way only Rafe ever manages to be.
"This is getting fucking ridiculous, Enzo."
"Drop it."
"No." Rafael's voice loses its easy edge, going somewhere harder underneath. "I've been watching you two circle each other since forever and it's exhausting. I can only imagine what it's doing to you."
"Nothing. It's doing nothing to me."
"Right. That's why you looked like you were about to crawl out of your own skin all evening. And that's why you crossed the room in about four seconds the second you saw she was struggling." He pauses. "And that's why your hand is currently about to go through the arm of that couch."
I look down. Ease my grip. Say nothing.
"She's into you."
"She hates me."
"She hates you the way people hate things they want too much," Rafael says simply, like it's obvious, like everyone can see it except me. "There's a difference and you know it."
I know it. Of course, I know it. I've spent four years knowing it and choosing to do nothing because knowing it and doing something about it are two completely different things.
"Matteo will kill me."
"Probably." Rafael doesn't sugarcoat it.
"He'll be furious. He'll break things. He'll spend days not speaking to either of you and make everyone around him miserable.
" He tilts his head. "And then he'll get over it.
Because you're his best friend and she's his sister and if anyone was ever going to end up here, it was always going to be you two. "
"You don't know that."
"I've known you for fifteen years." He looks at me steadily.
"I know exactly that. And if you go to him first, before anything happens, before it becomes something he finds out about instead of something he's told, he'll be pissed but he'll listen.
He respects you. He respects honesty." A beat.
"And he loves her. He wants her to be happy, even if it takes him a while to accept what that looks like. "
"It's not just Matteo."
"Then what the hell is it?"
I lean forward with my forearms on my knees, staring at the floor. "She deserves better than this, Rafe. Better than me. Better than a life where the people trying to kill her are doing it because of what I am and what I've done. She deserves someone whose hands are actually clean."
"She's already in this life, Enzo."
"That's different."
"How? How the fuck is that different?"
"She was born into it. She didn't choose it." I can hear how thin the argument sounds even as I'm making it. "I've made every choice I've made with full knowledge of what it costs. I've done things—" I stop. "She deserves someone who can give her something real."
"She doesn't want real," Rafael says quietly. "She wants you. And you know that too."
I don't say anything.
"She doesn't love me." I say it out loud because it's the truest thing I know. "Not anymore. I made sure of that."
Rafael is quiet for a moment. "You sure about that?"
"Yes."
"Because the woman I see, who flinched away from me like I was a stranger but leaned into your hand like it was the only safe place in the room—" He lets that sit between us. "That's not a woman who's over you, Enzo. That's a woman who's trying very hard to convince herself she is."
My jaw tightens hard enough to ache.
"It doesn't matter," I say finally.
"Jesus Christ." Rafael drags a hand through his hair. "You're going to let her walk down the aisle to another man because you've decided on her behalf what she deserves. Do you hear yourself? Is this some bad tv show or what?"
"She does deserve better."
"Maybe. But that's her fucking choice to make, not yours."
Silence.
The fire pops.
"There was a moment," I say quietly. "At the gala. We danced and I almost—" I stop. "I almost told her."
Rafael goes completely still. "What stopped you?"
"The O'Rourkes." I say it flatly. "Killian's men came through the doors about thirty seconds later."
He stares at me for a long moment. Then he lets out a breath that sounds like it was punched out of him. "Fucking hell, Enzo."
"Yeah."
He's quiet for a moment. Then: "And now you're here. With her. Alone. And you're still not telling her."
I don't answer.
"What the fuck are you waiting for?" He says it without heat, just tiredness, just genuine bafflement. "Seriously. What is it going to take?"
I don't have an answer for that either.
That's the thing I can't tell him, the thing I can't even fully admit to myself at midnight with the fire dying and her somewhere upstairs. It's not Matteo. It's not her deserving better. It's not my hands or my history.
It's that I'm terrified.
That if I cross this line and she looks at me the way I think she might and I let myself have it, let myself have her, and then lose it—
I don't know what will be left of me after that.
I press my fist harder into the couch cushion until the ache travels all the way up my arm.
"Get some sleep, Rafe."
He looks at me for a long moment with something like pity in his face, which I like even less than his usual smirk.
Then he nods, standing, picking up his bag.
"She's not going to wait forever," he says quietly.
He heads for the stairs and I stay where I am, alone in the dark with the dying fire and my hands that still remember what her face felt like.