9. Bella
Bella
It takes me two days to decide to trust the man I married, and when I decide it, I do it the way my father decided things: all at once, with the reasons lined up like soldiers so I can’t pretend later I didn’t count them.
The first reason is the lock. Two nights I’ve left the east rooms open and two nights no one has come through the door, and the book has stayed where I put it, under a frame in a house full of men who could find it in an afternoon if their boss told them to look.
He hasn’t told them to look. I bet my life on his pride and his pride paid out, which means the one thing I was sure of about him is true, and a person you’re sure of in even one place is a person you can start to build on.
The second reason is harder to say, so I make myself say it plainly.
On the stairs he showed me something a man like him does not show on purpose.
The fear wasn’t performance; I’ve been lied to by experts my whole life, fathers and boyfriends and priests, and I know the shape of a man saying a true thing he’d rather have died than say.
He meant it. He is afraid of losing me, and he hates it, and a man who hates being afraid of you is a man who can’t fake the opposite either.
The third reason is the coldest, and it’s the one my father would have led with.
I can’t finish this alone. I have a book I can read and no one I can send, a name that smells wrong and no way to prove it, a retired soldier and a borrowed husband and a city that would eat me in a week.
Dante has the men, the reach, the table.
And his wanting lines up with mine, which is the only kind of trust that holds in this world: my father died on his street, an execution he didn’t sanction, and a boss who lets that stand is a boss who’s finished.
He needs the killer found as badly as I do.
I don’t have to believe he’s good. I only have to believe he’s consistent, and he is the most consistent man I have ever met.
So I decide. And while I’m deciding the practical thing, I let myself decide the other thing too, the one I’ve been refusing since a hallway and a stopped elevator, because I’m done pretending the want is separate from the rest of me.
I want him. Not as the thing that ends a fight.
Not because the Commission signed a paper.
Because I looked at the whole of him on those stairs and didn’t look away.
A woman only gets so many years, and I have decided I will not spend mine wanting something in the dark and calling it strategy not to take it.
I’ll go to him tonight. With nothing on fire. The way I told him I would.
· · ·
He’s still up when I come down, because of course he is; I’ve never once beaten him to awake.
He sits in the study with one lamp on and a glass he isn’t drinking, and he watches me cross the room with the book in my hands without a word, because he already knows what it is.
He has always known there was a book but he’s just been waiting to see if I’d ever bring it to him on my own.
I set it on the desk between us. The oldest thing my father owned, in front of the man half the city says killed him.
“This is what I took,” I say. “His ledger. Forty years. I cracked it four nights ago. I’m the only person alive who can read it, so if you were ever going to take it from me, it wouldn’t do you any good.”
Something moves behind his eyes, and it isn’t triumph, which is the thing I was watching for. It’s closer to the look he gave Kessler’s manifest, a man recognizing the real value of a thing the second it’s set in front of him.
“Tell me,” he says.
So I tell him. The money that turns north and goes quiet.
A partner my father never names, only ever a letter and a sum.
A cut going to someone inside, someone so close to the top that he stopped writing the name even in cipher and drew a mark instead.
And the last line, in plain rushed letters, eleven days before Carmine’s: find out who he is talking to in the north, trust the list, no one off it.
The list he never got the chance to finish.
Dante listens the way he does everything, without moving, and when I finish he’s quiet for a long moment, and then he gives me his half, which is the moment I understand we’ve stopped being two people guarding things from each other.
“The men who killed your father weren’t ours and weren’t Moretti,” he says.
“Out-of-town. Clean, fast, paid through three banks that all wash out somewhere east of Warsaw. I’ve known that for a week and I couldn’t make it mean anything, because a Russian crew doesn’t move on a Chicago don without someone inside opening the door and turning off the lights.
Your book is the door. Someone at your father’s own table sold him north, the same north my shooters got paid from.
” He turns the ledger a quarter-turn with one finger, not opening it.
“You have the betrayal and no name. I have the buyers and no traitor. Put them together and they’re a case. ”
“Luca,” I say.
“Maybe Luca. Probably Luca. We don’t move on probably though, not with a man who can turn half your father’s people against you in a night.
We build it until it’s the only thing it can be, and then we end it once, cleanly, where it can’t come back.
” His eyes come up to mine. “We. You understand what I’m saying to you.
I don’t take partners. I’ve never had one I didn’t bury. ”
“Then I’ll be the first you don’t.”
This is about as close to a promise as we've gotten, and it definitely shifts the mood. I realize I’ve crossed to his side of the desk without deciding to. That he’s on his feet. That the book is the only thing left between us—and then it isn’t, because he moves it aside.
“You came down here for more than just that,” he says, low. Not a question. He reads me the way I read the ledger.
“I did.”
“The first one you’ve done.” His hand comes up, slow enough that I could stop it, and he sets it against the side of my face the way he did on the wedding night, checking with his palm whether I’m real.
“Tell me to go back to my side of the desk, Isabella, and I will, and we’ll be partners and nothing else, and I’ll never raise it again. ”
“I’m not telling you that.”
“Say the rest of it. I want it in your voice, not mine.”
“I want you,” I say. “And I’m tired of pretending the wanting is a strategy.” I put my hand flat over the old watch on his wrist, the one thing he never takes off. “So this time you don’t get to be the one who decides. This time it’s mine.”
And I kiss him, and I feel the exact moment he lets me have it, the control he wears like a second suit going quiet under my hands, a powerful man choosing to be led and finding he can tolerate it.
It is nothing like the hallway. The hallway was a struck match.
This is slow, and deliberate, and mine. I get his tie loose and his shirt open and I take my time with it, palms flat to his chest, learning the heat of him, the old scars I don’t ask about yet, the way his breath catches when I drag my nails down his stomach.
He lets me. That undoes me more than anything his hands could do, Dante Salvatore standing still, a man who has run every room he ever walked into letting himself be run.
“Tell me to stop and I stop,” I say, because I learned the rhythm of it from him, and I want him to hear his own rule come out of my mouth.
“I’m not going to tell you to stop.” His voice has gone rough at the bottom of it. “But you can. Any second. You say it and I’m gone.”
“I know.” It’s the knowing that lets me do the rest.
He gets my dress off me one slow inch at a time, and when I’m bare in the lamplight he doesn’t rush, just looks, and I make myself hold still under it instead of covering.
He says I’m beautiful. It’s not a word I’ve ever trusted from a man’s mouth.
From his it comes out like a fact he’s irritated to have discovered, and that, somehow, I believe.
Then he puts his mouth on me and I stop thinking in sentences.
He takes me apart slowly, one hand splayed across my hips to hold me down when I arch off the couch, his tongue working me open until I’m wet and shaking and saying things I would never say in daylight.
He makes me come like that, two fingers curled deep inside me and his mouth on my clit and his eyes flicking up to watch my face break, and it goes through me hard enough that I hear my own voice crack around his name.
Every piece of the woman who got handed across a Commission table burns off in it, and something I built myself stands up in her place, naked and unafraid and done apologizing for what it wants.
“Again,” he says against the inside of my thigh, not a question.
“No.” I pull him up to me by the jaw, breathless, because I came down those stairs to lead and I am not giving it back just because he’s ruinous with his mouth. “Now me.”
I push him onto his back and climb over him, and I take his cock in my hand, hard and thick and already wet at the tip for me, and I watch the last of his control go as I sink down onto him slow, taking him an inch at a time the way he took off my dress, making him feel every second of being had on someone else’s schedule for once in his life.
His hands close on my hips hard enough to mark.
He doesn’t move me. He lets me set it, lets me work him deeper at the pace I choose, and the sound he makes when I take all of him is the least guarded thing I’ve ever heard out of Dante Salvatore.
“Isabella.” My name comes out of him wrecked.
“I know,” I say again, and I start to move.
Slow, and then not slow. I ride him with my palms braced on his chest and his hands everywhere at once, my breasts, my throat, between my legs where we’re joined, learning what pulls the gasps out of me and handing them back doubled.
The whole time he watches my face like the rest of it is incidental and my eyes are the part he came for.
When the rhythm starts to come apart he grips my hips and drives up into me, hard, exactly as hard as I want without my having to ask for it, again and again until I shatter a second time with him buried deep and my mouth open on his name.
He follows me over a beat later, his face pressed into my shoulder, a low broken sound against my skin, both of us shaking, neither of us looking anywhere but at each other.
After, I lie across his chest in the lamplight, my father’s book closed on the desk above us, my husband’s heart going hard and uneven under my ear.
And I understand that I have just done the most dangerous thing of my life—more dangerous than the alley would have been, more dangerous than the ledger.
I have handed a Salvatore the two things that can destroy me, my father’s secrets and my own wanting, in the same night, of my own free will.
He strokes a hand down my spine, slow, and I feel him not sleeping, feel him already running the threat of me the way he runs everything.
“You’re thinking,” I say.
“Always.” A pause. “I’m thinking I’ve spent twenty years making sure no one ever had this much of me to use. And I handed it to you tonight without you even asking.” His voice is wondering and grim at once. “God help the man who finds out how.”
“Then no one finds out,” I say. “That’s the first rule, isn’t it? The thing that makes us strong is the thing they’d use to break us. So we don’t let anyone see it.”
“Now you’re thinking like a Moretti.”
“I’m thinking like a Salvatore. The Morettis got their boss shot in an alley. I’d like us to do better than my father.”
He laughs, once, low and surprised out of him, a sound I’m fairly sure he didn’t plan to make, and I keep it, quietly, on the short list of things in this world that are mine and not the marriage’s.
I fall asleep on the likeliest suspect in my father’s murder and it is the first night since the hospital that I sleep all the way through.
I don’t let myself ask yet what it means that the safest I’ve felt since he died is in the arms of the man who had the most to gain from it.
Tomorrow we hunt. Tonight I sleep, and for once I let myself.