Chapter 10
CHAPTER TEN
GIA
The bedroom is very quiet after he leaves.
I stand in the middle of it for a moment, listening to the sound of nothing. His footsteps down the hall. The distant click of the front door. Then just the house settling around me, small sounds that fill the silence without doing anything useful about it.
I change into my own things, the soft trousers and the oversized top I brought from Paris that have seen me through approximately forty percent of my emotional crises, and I sit on the edge of the bed with every intention of sleeping.
I lie back.
I look at the ceiling.
I think about his hands on my back.
Stop, I tell myself.
I think about his hands on my back anyway.
The thing about tonight is that those gatherings are not new to me.
Unlike my sister, I grew up in the mafia world, which means I have been in rooms exactly like Conti's estate since I was old enough to be dressed up and pointed at important men.
I know how they work. I know the handshakes that are transactions and the smiles that mean something else and the second conversation running underneath every first one.
What I was not prepared for was him.
One word. That's all it took with Marchetti. I have lived in this world my entire life and I have never seen anything like it, which is saying something, and I am furious at how attractive I found it, which is saying something else entirely.
He is such a confusing man.
Cold over breakfast but he carries my shoes and kneels on cold stone to put slippers on my feet with his thumb pressing into the arch of my foot. I felt it go all the way up my spine and told myself it was nothing and I am still telling myself that and it is still not working.
I stare at the ceiling for another ten minutes and establish conclusively that sleep is not happening.
Fantastic. Wonderful. This is going great.
I get up.
I look around the bedroom properly for the first time since I arrived.
Dark wood. High ceilings. Curtains that fall to the floor. Signs of taste and money. His wardrobe on the left, mine on the right.
And then there's the third door.
Set into the far wall at an angle, slightly smaller than the other two, half hidden behind the curtain. I walked past it this morning without registering it and I'm registering it now because I've done two full circuits of this room with my eyes and they keep landing there.
I cross the room.
There's a key in the lock. Small, old, the kind that belongs to furniture built long ago.
The man is mafia, this is probably an armoury. Rifles. Ammunition. Things with names I can't pronounce. And I have been sleeping four feet away from it for two nights, blissfully unaware, which honestly explains a lot about my life and the choices that led me here.
I am going to open it anyway because I have established that my self-preservation instincts are in very poor condition.
I turn the key.
The smell reaches me first. Something faint and dry, a room that's been closed for a long time. Underneath it, a perfume that's lost its sharp edges but kept its warmth, amber and something floral, soft and faded, like a word someone said quietly in a room and the echo of it is still there.
I reach for the light.
It is not an armory.
It's a dressing room. Small and well-proportioned, lined on two sides with shelving and a built-in wardrobe along the third.
A vanity along the fourth with a mirror above it and a small upholstered stool pulled up close, sitting at the exact angle of someone who just stepped away and will be back in a moment.
I stand in the doorway and I look at it.
The shelves hold folded garments, neat and completely undisturbed, each stack separated from the next with the deliberateness of someone who cared very much about the order of things.
Soft colors, creams and pale blues and a deep rose that catches the light from the open door.
Shoes arranged in pairs on a lower shelf, toes facing out, each pair placed exactly so.
On the vanity, perfume bottles. Six of them, clustered to the left of the mirror.
The tallest one is nearly empty, just an amber residue coating the base of the glass.
They are responsible for the smell in here, the slow evaporation of something expensive that's been sitting undisturbed long enough to become the room's own air.
Beside the bottles, a small velvet tray. Earrings laid flat. A thin bracelet. A ring with a pale stone that holds the light and doesn't let go.
I look at the ring.
This… this is no doubt a woman’s room. His wife’s room.
I heard about her dying when I was in Paris. But now it suddenly feels so real.
I look up, and my heart gives a sickening thud against my ribs.
Three frames. In the first, the light is golden, caught in a garden. A woman with dark hair is laughing, her head tipped back, her throat exposed. Beside her is Rafael.
I recognize the jaw, the scar, the sheer presence of him. But the man in the photo is a stranger. He’s laughing , fully, deeply, with a light in his eyes that I haven't seen once in the thirty-six hours I’ve known him.
He looks... happy.
It’s a terrifying sight. It means he isn't the cold statue I thought he was. It means there is a version of him that can feel, and that version is buried here, in this dark wing of the house.
He looks younger. He looks like a man who hasn't yet learned that his expressions cost him something.
In the second, his hand is at the small of her back. It’s not the possessive grip he used on me at the altar. It’s the effortless placement of a man who has touched this woman a thousand times. A man who knows exactly how her spine curves.
In the third, she’s on a windowsill, tucked away in a book. She looks settled. She looks like she belongs here. I look down at my own hands, shaking against the lace of a dress that feels like a costume. I am standing in that woman's sanctuary, wearing a ring she might have once worn.
I look at the vanity. The perfume, the ring on the velvet tray. The stool pulled up at the angle of someone coming back.
He kept it all.
Not packed away, not relocated to a spare room, not covered over and made manageable.
Left exactly as she arranged it. Preserved behind a locked door with the key left in the lock because he couldn't decide what fully closed would mean and couldn't do fully open either, and so it has been sitting here like this, in the middle, for however long it's been.
I don't remember exactly when she died or how or what she was called. It can’t have been that long ago, since I was already in Europe. I know almost nothing about the man I married except the shape of his jaw and the temperature of his hands and the fact that when he says careful men move.
I step back into the doorway.
The amber perfume is in my hair now, faint, clinging.
I can smell it on myself and it sits wrong, intimate in a way I didn't agree to, and I am suddenly very aware that I am standing in the middle of a life that was carefully and completely someone else's and that no part of this room, this house, this marriage was arranged with me in mind.
I was the replacement casting for a role that already had someone perfect in it.
I reach back and turn the key in the lock.
I stand in the dark of the bedroom with the key cold in my palm and the amber perfume still on my skin, and I think about the ring on the velvet tray and the hand at the small of her back and Rafael's face in that photograph, open and laughing and entirely unguarded, and I feel the specific weight of a place that already has a person in it.
I need a bath.
I set the key down exactly where I found it and I go to run one.