Chapter 20
CHAPTER TWENTY
RAFAEL
There's a fucking rat in my home and when I find that rat, it'll wish it had never been born.
That's where I am after fourteen hours. Four names with soft edges, two timelines that don't hold, one communication log with a gap in it that somebody put there deliberately and thought I wouldn't notice. I noticed.
I notice everything.
That's the problem with being me, I notice everything and I still don't have the name I need and the day is ending.
The rat is still in my walls somewhere, warm, fed and breathing my air.
I push back from the desk.
My phone buzzes. Matteo.
I pick up on the second ring and move to the window. The room has been closing in for the last hour, and I need something to look at that isn't the same four walls or the same files I've been through three times already.
"Tell me something useful," I say.
"Nothing useful to tell." Matteo's voice is even, the voice he uses when he's choosing his words carefully, which is always, but more so now. "My men have been through the external communication logs twice. Nothing that points outward cleanly."
"Which means it's internal."
"Yes."
I knew but it still pisses me off.
I press two fingers to the bridge of my nose. "I'm losing my damned mind over here, Matteo."
A pause. Not surprised, Matteo doesn't do surprised, just processing. "How many have you questioned?"
"Everyone with access to the northern schedule. Four come back soft. None of them are breaking."
"Then you wait."
"I don't want to wait. I want the name."
"I know." His voice is measured, the voice of a Don who has done this before. "You'll have it. These things surface, brother. Keep the pressure even, don't let them breathe, and one of them will move."
I say nothing.
"Rafael." A beat. "Hold it together."
Gritting my teeth hard to the point of hurt, I end the call.
I stand at the window with the phone in my hand, the grounds below dark and quiet, and my jaw so tight the muscle is starting to ache.
Matteo is right. Matteo is always right, which is why he's the Don.
I know how to do this. I have done this a dozen times. I know that patience is the sharpest tool available, and I know that losing my mind serves no one.
I know all of this.
I still need air.
The grounds at this hour are mine in a way they aren't during the day, quiet, dark, the perimeter lights casting long flat shapes across the lawns.
I do the east walk, hands shoved in my pockets, the cold doing what the stale study air couldn't. The guards on rotation acknowledge me as I pass and return to their posts.
Everything is where it should be. Everything is running the way I set it up to run.
I round the corner toward the garden.
And I stop.
Gia is on the stone path that runs along the lower garden wall.
Beside her is Luca.
I approved his employment eight months ago.
Young, capable, twenty-six.
She doesn't know I'm here.
The angle of the path and the shadow from the garden wall put me outside her sightline, and I don't move to correct it.
She's talking, and then whatever she's said lands and then laugh follows, that one, the real one. Head tipping back, shoulders dropping, completely unguarded. The laugh she does not produce in rooms full of people, or at dinner tables, or anywhere that I am standing close enough to see.
Luca responds, and she says something else. She gestures in that specific way she does when the thing she's describing has a shape to it.
He laughs too and shifts his weight toward her—the lean of a man who is not aware he's doing it.
I am aware.
My hand finds the garden wall beside me, and I press my palm flat against the stone. I stand there and watch, and something moves through my chest that has no clean name, something that crawls up from wherever I keep the things I don't look at and settles in the back of my throat, hot and ugly.
She is laughing in my garden with one of my men while somewhere in my house a rat is still breathing.
I push off the wall.
I find her an hour later coming down the upstairs corridor, hair loose, the robe, bare feet on the floor. She sees me and her step doesn't falter but her posture does that thing, that small recalibration, the brace.
"Rafael—"
"What the fuck were you doing outside?"
Her chin snaps up. Her whole body goes still.
"Excuse me?"
"The garden." I stop four feet from her. "Forty minutes. Luca."
She stares at me. "I was following your instructions. You said no one moves alone—"
"I said supervised." I pull a hand through my hair, grip the back of my neck, release it. "I didn't say forty fucking minutes. I didn't say laughing in the garden like you're at a social event."
"I was taking a walk—"
"With one of my soldiers."
"Who was doing his job." Her voice sharpens, the edge coming out fast. "Which is what you ordered him to do. I didn't ask for an escort. I was assigned one. I followed the procedure you put in place. What exactly is the problem?"
I look at her.
"He was leaning toward you."
The words come out before I've finished deciding to say them and I hear them the way she does and I know what they sound like and I don't take them back because they're true.
She blinks. Then her eyes narrow. "Luca was standing next to me."
"I know what I saw."
"Then what you saw was a man doing his job while I walked thirty meters of garden path.
" She takes a step toward me, not back, never back, and her voice drops into something precise and controlled and worse for it.
"You had me followed. You put men on the inside rotation.
You have the entire staff going in and out of that room one by one.
I have done everything you've asked. I haven't questioned it, I haven't complained, I have operated inside every single restriction you've put in place since last night.
" Her chin comes up the full quarter inch.
"So don't stand in this corridor and tell me I can't take a walk in a garden because one of your men was doing what you told him to do. "
My jaw is so tight I can feel my pulse in it.
She's right. I know she's right. I knew it in the garden, and I know it now, and knowing does absolutely nothing for the thing sitting in my chest that put me in this corridor in the first place.
I throw a hand up. Let it drop. Run it through my hair again and turn away from her for two seconds, because what's in my face right now is not something I want her to read clearly.
I turn back.
"You're mine," I say. "In this house and outside it and everywhere my men can see you. That is the arrangement and it does not change because you find it inconvenient."
Something crosses her face.
"I know what I am here," she says. Quiet. "I've always known."
"Then act like it." Two feet between us. Less.
At some point the distance closes without either of us deciding it or moving to stop it. She is standing in front of me in the low corridor light, chin up and eyes direct, her robe fallen open at the collar. I can see her pulse at the base of her throat, fast and visible.
She is not stepping back. She has never once stepped back from me. That is the problem. That has always been the entire problem with her.
My hand comes up and braces flat on the wall beside her head. I am not touching her. The six inches between my chest and hers is still there. But her breath changes, the catch of it, the parting of her lips that she closes again immediately. Her eyes drop to my mouth.
I lean in.
Slow. Deliberate. My mouth is close enough to hers that I feel the warmth of her exhale against my lips. Close enough that I can see the exact moment her eyes close, her body stops fighting the thing it's been doing since before either of us had the vocabulary for it.
Her hand comes up to my chest. Fingers curling into the fabric. Not pushing. Just there. Gripping. The same involuntary thing her hands do when the rest of her has given up pretending.
The half inch between us is nothing. It is genuinely nothing.
Her lips are parted and her pulse is going at the base of her throat, and I am thinking about one specific thing with the entirety of what is left of my mind.
The sound she would make. Whether it would be the sound from the bathroom, that soft bitten-off thing, or something else.
Something she hasn't made yet. Something that would be mine specifically, not incidental.
My hand moves from the wall to the side of her face without me issuing the instruction.
Then I hear a door downstairs and voice, so I straighten and step back.
Her eyes open. Her hand drops. We stand in the corridor and look at each other, both of us breathing like we ran. The half inch of air is back, and neither of us says anything because there is nothing to say.
“Go to bed,” I say.
She holds my gaze for a long moment. Then she goes into the room, and the door closes with a quiet click without a word.
I stand in the corridor for another three seconds.
Then I go to the study and close the door. I sit behind the desk in the dark and don’t turn the lamp on. I don’t look at the files. I press both hands over my face.
The cut on my ribs pulls when I breathe.
I leave my hands where they are.