10. Dante
TEN
Dante
S he wakes me by running her thumb over the pale line at my jaw. Not a question. A declaration.
"Mornin'," Mirella says, voice small against my skin.
"Morning," I answer, because the rest of the world can wait and because the truth wants to come out of my mouth and not linger like something dead between us.
Her fingers are cool. I close my eyes and let the memory of her hands sink in—the scar at the corner of her mouth, the slope of her collarbone, the way her hair spills over my chest in a dark mess.
Heat rises where her thigh presses along mine.
My pulse kicks. My breath catches. She smells like smoke and citrus and the rain from two nights ago.
"Don't make that face," she says, amusement returning. "You look like someone who just remembered a funeral and a dessert."
"You always make me ridiculous," I say. It's true. She's trouble in an elegant package, and I'm already ruined.
She laughs. "Good. I like my assassins ruined."
A soft knock at the penthouse door cuts across us. Mirella tenses; a strip of worry crosses her face and I tighten around her like muscle remembering bone. Lucia's voice floats in, cheerful and sharp.
"Coffee and more noise," Lucia announces as she enters, two steaming cups in hand. Her presence is a line in the sand—family, safety, the small domestic world I've been trying not to fall into.
Lucia sets down a cup beside Mirella and nudges my shoulder. "You two look terrible. In love or in mourning?"
"In love," Mirella says without missing a beat, and the way she says it—bright and mock-innocent—makes Lucia's mouth twist.
"About time," Lucia says. She looks at me for a beat longer. "About time you chose someone who doesn't make you bleed."
I don't answer. I let the heat from Mirella's body speak. Lucia stays three minutes, making small jokes, offering practical help—cleaning supplies, a spare shirt for Mirella that smells faintly of lavender—and then she backs out, folding the privacy around us like a curtain.
When the door clicks shut, silence lands heavy and soft.
"You're quiet," Mirella says.
"I have a choice to make," I admit. Short sentences. The only kind I ever use when danger is a living thing at the edge of the house.
"Which one?" she asks, propping herself on an elbow so she can look at me properly. Morning light catches the gold in her eyes and makes them softer than I deserve. My mouth goes dry.
"The one where I keep you safe by keeping you away," I say. "Or the one where I stand in front of whatever comes and take it with you."
She smiles like she's been waiting for me to stop talking like a man deciding from a ledger. "Is that a threat or a proposal?"
"Both," I say.
Mirella reaches across the rumpled sheets and lays her palm against the scar that runs along my jaw. She doesn't flinch. She doesn't look away. The touch is small and volatile. Electricity folds through me.
"Then choose me, Costa," she murmurs. "You're stubborn; use it for once."
I cup her face with two fingers, then both hands, feeling the soft give of cheek to bone. I could catalogue the reasons—the lean of her neck, the way a rib moves when she laughs, the small scar on her forearm—but the truth is simple and dangerous and too human.
"I love you," I say. It comes out raw, immediate, the admission of an idiot who would die for a laugh.
Her breath stops. Then she grins, half a sob and half a dare. "Finally. Took you long enough."
"Shut up." I don't mean it.
She leans in, lips brushing mine for a second that behaves like a promise. "Say it again," she whispers.
"I love you," I say—clean, true, with the weight of everything that made me afraid to say it. I place each word like a hand on a ledge, steadying myself for the fall.
She presses her forehead to mine and laughs, a sound that tears something open inside me. "Good. Because I love you, too. Idiot."
The room shifts. Choosing her doesn't erase the world outside. It sharpens it. But inside these walls, for this small bright hour, we are allowed to be shameless human animals.
"Toast?" I ask, pulling a battered bottle from my nightstand. It's cheap whisky—two fingers for rituals and promises. It tastes of smoke and grit and the sort of living that always smelled of rain for us.
Mirella sits up and accepts the small glass. Lucia's bar of judgment is gone; it's just the three of us—two lovers and a sister who will kill anyone who looks at us sideways. We touch rims and drink.
"To staying," Mirella says.
"To the stupidest choice I ever made," I say, and she slams the glass down, lips curved into a smile.
"I didn't choose stupid," she counters. "You did. Stupidly heroically."
Flirting slides under every confession. We trade barbs like knives, easier than saying vulnerable things, until the knives heat and we stop pretending.
"Where's the jacket I left here?" she asks, tugging the shirt from my shoulder.
"In the chair," I say, moving to stand. My hands brush her hips as I shift, a small charged touch that says more than declarations. Her breath stutters and heat blooms between us.
"Always careful with the hands," she teases.
"You started it," I reply, and she lunges, pinning me to the mattress with a laugh. Clothes go in a clumsy arc. We are hurried and deliberate, two trained people making a private truce with our bodies.
"Is this—are we—" she asks in a broken rush as fingers find neck, jaw, hair.
"This is us," I say, kissing the question into silence. "This is choosing. No hiding. No exile. Together."
She nods. "Okay. Then be terrible and brave."
We move slow until we are not. I spread my hands over the places I want to memorize: the flat plane of her abdomen, the bone at her hip, the small valley where collarbone meets skin. I watch her as if mapping a city I'll never leave. She watches me with the same greedy attention.
"Say my name," she murmurs between kisses.
"Mirella," I say, voice rough. "Say mine."
"Dante," she breathes, and it cracks something open. Our names are weapons and shelter.
I take her with a tenderness that surprises me—careful, reverent, the opposite of the way the world taught us to use our bodies.
Between hard kisses my hands speak the promises I can't put into sentences.
She answers each touch with equal fire, with the kind of consent that is soft and fierce at once.
"Is this okay?" I ask when I slide a hand lower and the moment hangs between us, delicate.
"Yes," she says, simple and absolute. "God, yes."
We let the rest of the morning unrush around us. The sex is everything it should be—rough at times, worshipful at others, whispered confessions threaded through the motions. We say each other's names often, not as an invocation but as a map home.
After, we lie tangled. Her hair spills over my chest again. My palm traces her spine in slow circles. We breathe each other in. There's a hush, the kind that comes after a storm when the world is waiting to see if the shore holds.
"You're pale," she says, tracing the old scar at my knuckle as if it's a secret she wanted to find.
"You ask a lot of questions for someone who once tried to shoot me," I reply, half-amused. "You know all my weak spots."
"Not all," she says. "Some I have to earn."
Lucia knocks softly and slides the door open enough to show she hasn't forgotten we exist. "Food's on the stove. You two domesticate and I'll leave you to it."
"Bring extra napkins," Mirella calls.
Lucia rolls her eyes but there's a smile there—my sister's way of approving danger wrapped in affection.
We eat badly—cold pizza bites, burnt coffee, hands still touching across plates.
Driftless conversation about nothing solidifies into the smallest domestic ritual: sharing the mundane.
We plan in half-sentences, because the world outside demands economy.
Mirella slides me her phone and I flip it open.
Names, messages, a handful of transfers.
Marco's contact is blocked but the memory of him is still a thorn.
"We'll use what you have," I say, thumbing through the entries. "We make the ledger talk."
"You're going to hack a bank now?" she asks, eyebrow high.
"No," I say. "We make him reveal himself."
Her laugh is short. "You, subtle."
"I'm not subtle with people who hurt you."
She studies me. "You still think the life will take me if you keep me," she says, voice fifty percent accusation, fifty percent pleading.
"It probably will," I admit. "But I'm done pretending my absence protects you. I'm not going to exile myself when you asked me to stay."
"I didn't beg," she snaps, and then softer, "Not exactly."
"You did," I say. "And I should have listened sooner."
She reaches for my hand and folds our fingers. The fit is easy, inevitable. I think of the ledger, of Enzo's frown, of Marco's reach. I think of Lucia, who will stand with me. I think of the price family will make me pay.
"I can't promise there won't be consequences," I warn. "But I'll take them. For you."
She squeezes my hand until the knuckles blanch. "Good," she says. "Because I'm staying."
We make plans—small, stupid, human. We will stage a leak, push a false transfer, bait Marco to move and show himself. We will use Mirella's handler records and the one name Enzo won't expect. Lucia will hold the floor if anyone asks. We laugh at our optimism. We accept it.
"Promise me you'll let me protect you sometimes," she says, suddenly solemn.
"I promise," I answer.
She leans in and kisses the line of my collarbone, soft and private, and I think I may actually start to believe in forever.
A soft chime—comm in the wall—goes off, a sound I feel in my teeth. We both freeze. Conversation dies mid-breath. The small rituals scatter like dust.
I reach for the comm, thumb quick. Movement on the east stairs. Two operatives. Close. The speaker carries a voice I hate to hear.
"Marco says hello," the voice on the comm says, clipped and smug. "Tell Costa to remember the terms."