Chapter 16
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Ibarely say it. Just his name in the dim room, barely above a breath.
He's already inside behind me, already reading the same thing in the air that I am because I feel him go completely still and then I hear the quiet sound of him crossing to the kitchen counter where he left his gun.
"Get behind the couch." Low and completely level. Not a question.
I move without arguing, dropping low, my back pressing against the far side of the couch, the towel gripped in both hands. I hear him cross the room with silently, like he does when he's working.
The cabin is quiet except for water dripping steadily from my hair onto the floor.
Please don't let it be Declan's men. Please don't let it be Killian.
I count the seconds. Three. Five. Eight. Ten.
Then a knock at the door.
Not frantic. Not urgent. Not the knock of someone frightened or running. Three slow deliberate knocks with the particular rhythm of a man who expects to be answered and is merely giving whoever's inside the courtesy of a moment to do it.
My stomach drops to somewhere around the floor.
I hear Enzo at the door, the fast controlled movement of it, the crack of it opening, a grunt of surprise, the unmistakable heavy sound of a body hitting the floor and staying there.
I stand up.
Vittorio De Luca is on his back on the cabin floor with Enzo's forearm pressed across his throat and a gun at his temple, staring up at the ceiling with an expression somewhere between fury and disbelief, his perfectly pressed suit jacket twisted awkwardly beneath him.
He's wearing a full suit. In the middle of the woods. Of course, he is.
"Bianchi." His voice comes out compressed around the pressure on his throat. "Get off me."
Enzo doesn't move immediately. He holds his position for one long beat, looking down at Vittorio's face with those flat assessing eyes, calculating. Then he stands, steps back, and holsters the gun without offering a hand up and without apologizing.
Vittorio rises from the floor slowly, with the exaggerated dignity of a man who needs everyone in the room to understand that being tackled does not in any way diminish him. He straightens his jacket, adjusts his cuffs, smooths his tie back into place.
Then his eyes find me.
They start at my face and move downward with the unhurried deliberateness of a man looking at something he considers his, taking in the towel, the wet hair, the bare legs, the fact that I am clearly just back from something that didn't involve getting dressed first. His gaze moves to Enzo, still damp from the jacuzzi himself, and then back to me, and a small slow smile settles onto his face that makes the back of my neck prickle.
"Well," he says, and loads the single word with everything he intends it to carry. "You look comfortable." A pause, perfectly timed. "Both of you."
The implication drops into the room like something physical.
Beside me, I feel Enzo go very still in the particular way he goes still when he's controlling something that would otherwise come out badly.
"What are you doing here?" Enzo's voice is flat and measured and somehow more dangerous for it.
"I came to see my fiancée." Vittorio says it pleasantly, like this is a perfectly reasonable thing that requires no explanation, smoothing his jacket one more time with the air of a man who has never once in his life needed to justify himself to someone like Enzo Bianchi.
"Matteo gave me the address. I trust that's not a problem for anyone.
" His eyes drift to Enzo with a smile that stops well short of his eyes.
"You can go. This is family business now. "
"I'm staying."
Vittorio's pleasant expression doesn't change but something behind it does. "I wasn't asking."
"Neither was I."
The silence between them has texture to it. History. Something that started at the rehearsal dinner and didn't finish.
Vittorio holds Enzo's gaze for a moment that stretches uncomfortably and then he performs his dismissal of it, visibly deciding Enzo isn't worth his attention, and turns to me with the smooth pivot of a man who's practiced at transferring his focus to more important things.
"Isabella." His voice softens slightly, going into the register he uses when he wants to seem considerate. "Are you all right? Matteo told me what happened, I was worried about you."
He doesn't look worried. He looks like a man checking on an asset.
"I'm fine," I say.
"Good." He steps closer and I hold my ground, keeping my chin level, refusing to give him the inch of retreat he's waiting for.
"Our families have spoken. The alliance stands.
My father wants things resolved quickly and cleanly so the wedding will most likely be rescheduled for next week.
" He reaches out as he says it and brushes a strand of wet hair back from my shoulder with his fingertips, like the gesture is natural, like he does it all the time, like my shoulder is a surface that belongs to him.
Don't flinch. Don't give him that. He is going to remove his hand in the next three seconds or Enzo is going to remove it for him and I genuinely cannot decide which outcome I prefer.
"I can't wait to have you home, where you belong."
I smile at him. The particular smile I've been perfecting since I was old enough to understand what it meant to be a Romano woman at a table full of men who'd already decided what you were worth.
"How lovely for you," I say.
His eyes cool by a degree. "Isabella."
"Vittorio." I keep the smile exactly where it is. "It was very thoughtful of you to come all this way. You really didn't need to."
"I wanted to see you."
"And now you have." I let a beat pass. "Safe drive back."
The muscle in his jaw moves.
He takes another step forward into my space, into the territory I haven't offered, bringing with him the smell of expensive cologne and the particular energy of a man who has been told yes so consistently that the concept of a boundary has become genuinely theoretical to him.
"You've had your little adventure out here," he says, dropping his voice lower, for me, like Enzo isn't six feet away absorbing every syllable. "And now it's almost over. A week, Isabella. Then everything goes back to the way it should be. The way it was always going to be."
The way it should be.
Is it though? Is that really the way it should be.
Because, in that water, I felt something that I don't think I'm supposed to feel when it is not with the man I'm about to marry, and I'm standing here in a towel in a cabin in the middle of nowhere and I genuinely do not know what “the way it should be” even means anymore.
I open my mouth.
Enzo moves.
He crosses the room and stands closer to me, his shoulder nearly touching mine, his body angling between me and Vittorio with the quiet implacability of a man who has decided where he stands and is completely unbothered by whatever comes next.
He doesn't say anything. He doesn't need to.
He just exists in that space, solid and immovable, and lets Vittorio understand what that means.
Vittorio's eyes drop to the distance between Enzo and me, and his face does something that briefly strips away the pleasantness and shows what's underneath.
"Move," he says.
Enzo doesn't. He doesn't shift his weight, doesn't acknowledge the word, doesn't look away from Vittorio with anything other than that flat patient attention he gives to things he's already decided how to handle.
He is not going to move. We both know it, Vittorio knows it, and the look on Vittorio's face right now is the best thing I've seen all day.
Vittorio's jaw tightens. He looks at Enzo and then he steps forward, puts both hands flat on Enzo's chest and shoves with the full weight of his considerable frustration behind it.
Enzo doesn't move.
Not an inch. Not a fraction of one. He absorbs the shove like Vittorio pushed a wall, his feet planted, his expression not shifting by a single degree.
Vittorio breathes through his nose.
The silence in the room is the kind that happens when everyone present understands exactly what's happening and nobody wants to be the one who names it out loud.
I watch Vittorio calculate. Watch him weigh Enzo's stillness against what he can actually afford to do right now in this room, in this situation, with Matteo involved and the alliance still fragile and a wedding next week that he needs to go smoothly.
I watch the moment he decides.
He straightens, smooths his jacket for the last time, and looks at me with an expression that carries a very specific message about how temporary this evening's arrangement is.
"I'll see you at the wedding, Isabella."
Will you?
He walks to the door and opens it himself, steps through, and closes it behind him with a click that's almost polite, which is somehow worse than if he'd slammed it.
The cabin goes quiet.
I'm standing in my towel with water still tracing slow lines down my legs and my heart beating in my ears and Enzo a foot away from me, still facing the closed door, his breathing even and his hands loose at his sides.
I'm not going to think about the wedding right now. I'm not going to think about next week or alliances or Salvatore De Luca or any of it. Right now I'm just going to breathe.
"Enzo," I say before I can stop myself. Before I remember what happened before stupid Vittorio came.
He turns.
His face is controlled, but his eyes are doing something dark and complicated and too layered for me to read all of it, and he doesn't try to name it and I don't try to name it either, because I think if we named it something would have to happen about it.
And I don't have anything left tonight. I have nothing left.
I go upstairs without another word.