Chapter 15
"Don't you think," I said quietly, "that you've seen me like this too many times to still be acting like this?"
She blinked "W- what?"
"Like a deer caught in headlights," I said.
"I am NOT!!" She spun around, index finger pointed at me with the energy of someone who had been waiting for an argument and was fully prepared for it.
"And why do you remove your clothes at every chance you get? Are you an exhibitionist??"
Both her hands came up and pressed flat against my chest to push me back, presumably. They stayed there.
We both continued talking as if they hadn't.
"A what?" I said.
I looked at her. Then at her hands, which had come up to push me back and were now sitting squarely on my chest, flat palmed, having apparently forgotten their original purpose.
She was still talking something about decency and personal space and basic social awareness but I had stopped following the words because I was looking at her hands and she was still talking and then she followed my gaze downward and looked at her own hands and went very still.
"Kitten, you're naug-"
She grabbed my arm and the next thing I knew I was being propelled toward the bathroom with a force that was genuinely impressive given the difference in our sizes, the door banged shut behind me, and from the other side came
"GO WASH UP YOURSELF."
I stood in the small bathroom for a moment. Then stepped into the shower.
When I came out there was a hoodie on the floor outside the door. Not folded. Thrown, by the look of it launched in the general direction of the door handle and left where it landed.
I picked it up and pulled it on. Too small, obviously. The sleeves ended somewhere between my wrist and elbow and the fabric pulled across my shoulders with the same optimistic tension as the t-shirt from the night before, maybe worse.
But it smelled like her. Warm and faintly sweet, the same thing I had noticed walking through the front door last night, when I kissed her on that couch. I had used her bodywash in the shower. I did not smell like that. I walked to the kitchen and sat down.
She came out of her bedroom a few minutes later, dressed for work.
My mind went, without consulting me, back to the first time I had seen her the wine red dress, the bar's golden light, the way she had crossed that room with complete conviction and sat herself in my lap like she had every right to be there.
She had looked gorgeous was accurate and also inadequate.
She had looked extraordinary and she had known it and worn it like armour.
This was different. Work clothes, practical, her hair pulled back. Entirely ordinary.
These clothes didn't do her justice.
She caught me staring and cleared her throat.
"You look better in darker shades," I said. "Do you know that?"
She blinked. She had clearly expected something else embarrassment, maybe, or deflection. Not an opinion delivered without apology.
"I like lighter shades," she said.
"They hide your beauty."
Something happened to her expression. Small and involuntary, the corner of her mouth moving before she could decide whether to allow it. She looked away and hummed something that wasn't quite agreement and wasn't quite dismissal, and went to the kitchen.
"I didn't have much time so I made pancakes," she said, setting a plate in front of me. "Hope you don't have any problem eating sweet first thing in the morning."
I looked at the pancakes.
"I can manage," I said.
I did not know why I said that. I hated sweets. Had always hated them something about the way sweetness sat on the tongue, too insistent, too much, like it was trying too hard.
I took a bite regardless.
They weren't bad. Not aggressively sweet the way I had braced for something more subtle, a gentleness to it, like she had considered the balance carefully.
I found that I had finished the entire plate before I had consciously decided to continue eating.
She watched me from across the table with a small satisfied expression she probably didn't know she was wearing, and I said nothing about any of it.
After breakfast she stood, collected the dishes, came back for her bag and her watch and her phone from the counter.
"I'm going to work. I'll be back before dinner." She pointed at me. "And I'm telling you one more time, don't try to-"
"I know, kitten. No stealing."
She stopped and turned.
"Elera," she said flatly. "Elera Carter. That is my name."
She looked at me, waiting. I hummed. She let out a huff and went out, closing the door with enough force to announce to the neighbors she was leaving.
____________________________________
Romano picked up on the first ring.
"Boss, you were supposed to be back last night," he said.
Not an accusation. A statement of fact delivered in the tone of a man who had many questions and was deciding which ones were survivable to ask.
"I'm aware."
"Luca has three things that need your decision. Drago called again about the eastern situation. And Seraphina-"
"Handle Luca. Tell Drago I'll call him tomorrow. What does Sera want?"
"To know where you are."
"Tell her I'm handling something."
A pause. The particular pause Romano used when he was processing information he had been given and comparing it to information he had gathered independently.
"The chain," he said finally.
"Yes."
"You haven't found it."
"No."
Another pause. Longer this time.
"Do you need me to-"
"Bring me clothes," I said. "Plain. Nothing recognizable. Cheap looking."
The silence on Romano's end lasted exactly long enough to communicate everything he had chosen not to say out loud.
"I'll have them there within the hour," he said.
I ended the call.
The clothes arrived within the hour. Plain. Common. I changed and felt immediately less conspicuous, which was the point. Then I started searching.
She was organized in ways that surprised me and chaotic in ways that didn't.
Her bookshelf first. Three shelves of fiction in no particular order, spines facing out at varying angles, the chaotic accumulation of someone who bought books faster than they organized them.
What I did find was a baking section on the bottom shelf that took up more space than everything else combined recipe books stacked two deep, some with folded corners, some with sticky notes marking pages, one with a small chocolate stain on the cover that had clearly seen extensive use.
There was a photograph on the shelf. Small, framed. A much younger version of her being held by a woman who had her same eyes, smiling at something outside the frame. Her mother, presumably. The kind of photograph that gets moved from place to place because leaving it behind was never an option.
I checked the kitchen last. Every drawer, every cabinet, the space behind the cookware. Then the living room. Then the hallway. Every room. Methodically, thoroughly, without assumption.
Nothing.
The chain went to work with her every day inside a bag she carried on her shoulder without any idea what she was carrying.
I sat with that for a moment, then opened the laptop Romano had delivered alongside the clothes.
The empire had not stopped requiring attention simply because I was sitting on a small couch in a civilian apartment.
If anything it required more the appearance of normalcy maintained from a distance, decisions routed through Romano, communications managed carefully.
I worked through the afternoon with the laptop balanced on my knees and the apartment quiet around me and the faint smell of her still present in the hoodie I had not taken off.
She came back that evening and looked at my clothes.
"You got clothes now?"
"Mhm... didn't want you to have a heart attack this young."
She laughed short, surprised, the kind that escaped before she decided to allow it. She freshened up, came back to the kitchen and cooked something that filled the apartment properly, and we ate at the small table in a quiet that had started to feel less strange than it should have.
She went to her room.
I went to the couch.
The same happened the next day. And the one after that.
____________________________________
The third evening I looked up from the laptop and the clock said eight seventeen.
She had said before dinner.
I put the laptop down. Looked at the door. Looked at the clock again as though the numbers might change if given another opportunity.
Eight twenty.
I went to the kitchen and started cooking because I was hungry and it was something to do that wasn't looking at the door.
I found what I needed not much, but enough.
The cooking was automatic, muscle memory, and while my hands worked my mind ran through the reasonable explanations for her lateness.
Work. Traffic. Some client she had mentioned and a last minute crisis.
The kind of thing that kept people in offices past the hour they intended to leave.
Reasonable. Entirely reasonable.
By nine thirty the apartment smelled like something real and she still wasn't back and I had turned the heat down twice to keep things from overcooking and I was standing in her kitchen holding a wooden spoon with no particular reason to keep standing there except that sitting down would mean
admitting I was waiting.
Nine forty. If she wasn't back in ten minutes I was going out to find her.
I was putting on my jacket when the door opened. She stood in the doorway with her shoulders slumped and her head down and her bag hanging from one hand like she had forgotten it was there.
She stepped inside without looking up, closed the door, and stood there for a moment in the way of someone who had been holding something together for a very long time and had just reached the place where they were allowed to stop.
"You said before dinner, do you realise what time it is?" I said.
She raised her head.
Her eyes were red. The kind of red that came from crying that had already happened or from holding back all the way between the office and here, alone on a route she walked every day.
I didn't know what to do with that.
I was not, by any reasonable measure, someone who knew what to do with that. I stood there and looked at her and took one step forward because it was the only thing that presented itself and I had nothing better. She stood still, looking at nothing in particular, her chin trembling slightly.
Before I fully decided to move I was standing in front of her.
Helpless. Awkward. Probably for the first time in a very long while.
She looked at me for a moment. Then her head found my shoulder and the first sob came quietly, the kind that had been held in too long and didn't know how to be loud anymore.
Then less quietly. Her hands found the front of my jacket and held on and I stood very still in the middle of her small warm apartment with her crying into my shoulder and the dinner getting cold on the stove and said nothing at all.
Because I didn't know what to say.
And because I didn't want to move.