9. Paolo
NINE
Paolo
She tastes like steeped lemon and sleep.
We're chin to chest on the terrace steps, twilight turning the river silver.
Rosa's hair is loose, a soft halo against my collarbone.
My hands know the map of her back; I can trace the slope of her shoulders with my thumb and memorize the small freckle by her left ear.
Her skin smells of rosemary and the shop's dirt—clean, honest—and it steadies the furious drum in my ribs.
"You keep staring," she says, breath warm against my mouth.
"Can't help it." I let my fingers ghost over the line where her blouse cups her shoulder. "You look better than the photographs in my head."
She rolls her eyes with that little, threatening smile of hers. "Flatterer. Say something useful. Like you make tea or carry my plants downstairs."
"I make terrible tea and very good excuses." My voice drops. I press my mouth to hers.
The kiss is slow, easy, the sort that comes after trust. Her hands find the hollow at the base of my throat and hold me as if she owns that place. I want to stay. I want to fold time into this fragile pocket and live there; her pulse under my palm says I could.
Then a light breaks across the seam of the kiss and everything goes noisy and too-bright.
A grainy strike—chapel wood, the smell of wet earth, a coat that is black and too familiar.
Soil under nails. A shot. Metal hitting a floor.
Voices that are not mine. For one breath I am back in a room I don't remember living in.
My hands clamp on her hips until my fingers hurt.
I pull away. My lips feel raw. Rosa's eyes widen. "Paolo?"
"I saw something." The words come out thin and professional, all control. They're the words I use when I don't have the right honesty. Her smile folds at the edges. She reaches for my face.
I press my palm to my mouth and close my eyes. "Not now, rosa. Not tonight."
Her hand lingers on my jaw. "You said we'd tell everything. You promised."
"I did." The promise tastes like iron. "I didn't promise I could find the end of it tonight."
She huffs, soft and half-angered. "You keep backing away when I ask you to look. I'm not going to rebuild a house if you won't show me the cracked foundation."
I should tell her. I should hand over the jagged, raw image and let it be sharpened or softened by truth. Instead, fear arranges a different plan in my chest: absence as armor. If I'm not there, maybe no one drags her into what I was. If I'm gone, her hands won't be bloody because of me.
"Come inside," I say. I guide her by the small of her back, keeping my mouth clamped shut.
We move through the apartment—there's lingering domesticity: a chipped mug on the counter, a lemon tree in the window, a towel Rosa left draped over the chair.
She busies herself making tea anyway; ritual calms her.
I watch the way she tucks hair behind one ear while she steeps the herbs.
My pulse is loud. I think of the scar at the base of my neck and how her fingers brushed it last week, gentle and reverent. The memory hums like a lit fuse.
"How long are you staying tomorrow?" she asks.
"Until Tuesday," I say without thinking. I should have said longer. I want to say forever. The words snag like a wire.
She plants her mug on the counter and leans in. "You realize Matteo will judge me for letting you sleep here."
"Matteo will judge everything," I say, and it sounds like a prayer and a curse. "Tell Lucia to lock the back door. And don't let the apprentices rearrange the wildflower baskets."
She snorts. "Ordering me around now?" Her fingers tap my wrist. "You make a good tyrant."
"It's a careful tyranny." I let the teasing bend into something softer. "And you always like ordering me around."
"Only when you're useful." She tugs my sleeve and kisses the inside of my wrist. "Stay. Please."
I want to stay, and that knifes me. But that flash—wet wood, a woman in a dark coat—keeps looping.
I see the same hands as mine, but the hands are someone else's because mine are callused with ledger work and a different shape.
I don't know whose hands poured soil into a crate.
The not-knowing is worse than any admission.
My phone buzzes, a sharp sound on the counter. I don't look. I should. The buzzing grows insistent. I step away to silence it.
Matteo's name on the screen.
He doesn't call often for pleasant reasons. I let it ring once, twice, then answer because the sound of his voice will settle something, or demand it.
"You're with her?" he says without hello.
"I'm here," I say. "Do you need something?"
"Need? You need to remember why we don't go soft. You don't get to—" He interrupts himself. The line goes low, dangerous. "You know. People are talking."
"They always do." I keep my tone even. Matteo hates tremors.
"Pictures," he says. The word is small but it carries weight. "Old photographs. Someone's been feeding the papers with images from Porto Vecchio. They make it look like you were involved."
A cold tightness wraps my ribs. "Who?"
"Enough people," he replies. "Come up to the palazzo tonight. We speak. Don't invite her."
"And if I don't come?" I ask.
"Then you leave the family," Matteo says. "Don't make me spell it out. You owe more than you're willing to admit."
The line goes dead. I stare at the phone like it might explain itself.
When I return to the kitchen Rosa is watching me, face soft with worry. "Matteo?"
"Family business," I say. I can hear my voice close as if from the bottom of a well. "They're worried about reputation."
"Your reputation?" Her laugh is small, incredulous. "More like people's curiosity about the past they want to see confirmed."
She crosses to me and presses her forehead to mine. For a long moment we just breathe against each other. Her lips are merciful. Her hands promise safety with the lightest touching of my sleeve.
"Don't go," she whispers.
I close my eyes. "I have to."
"To palazzo?" She tries to parse it. "Or to?—"
"Out." The lie is a clean, fast blade. "For a while. To tell them I'm not the man they fear."
Her fingers curl into my shirt. "Paolo?—"
"You can't fix what I'm part of by staying." The words feel rehearsed, but I believe them in the small cold place where my guilt lives. "If I leave, they'll focus on me. If I'm not here, they won't hurt the shop. They won't use you."
"You can't protect me with disappearing." Her voice cracks. "You protect me by telling the truth. By staying. By letting me choose with full facts."
She always makes it sound so simple: stay, tell, be together. She doesn't live with the looping flashes. She doesn't wake in cold sweat with someone else's hands in her memory. She rebuilds with sunlight and soil and doesn't understand how thick fear can be.
"I'm not asking you to understand," I say. "I'm asking you to trust me to keep you safe."
She huffs, exasperation returning in a heat that still makes my mouth twitch. "You couldn't keep me safe the last time. You left me with scars and didn't tell me why. I'm not letting you walk out the second your history looks like trouble."
I step closer. "Rosa?—"
She lifts a hand and puts it over my heart. "Promise me no more secrets."
"I promise," I say on reflex. But the promise isn't mine to make fully; it's tethered to memory I don't possess. "I promise to try."
She smiles, small, reluctant. "Then don't leave tonight."
I hear it then—the sound of someone at my door. Boots on the corridor stone. Not Matteo's gait; smoother. Predictable. Antonio steps in through the doorway before I can think.
He looks the same as always—formal, a face that has given up on smiles. He crosses the room and sets a hand on my shoulder. "You can't wear this on your conscience forever," he says quietly to me, not to Rosa. "You need to decide."
"I'm deciding," I say. "I'm choosing what will keep her safe."
He studies me. "Are you choosing to run, Paolo? Or to fight?"
The words land like weights. I bristle. "Flight feels like protection."
Antonio's mouth twists. "Flight is an admission of guilt you refuse to test. It looks like hiding."
Rosa, who has been silent with her mug forgotten in her hands, looks at Antonio. "So he should stay?"
"He should stay if he wants to be a man who faces consequences," Antonio says. "But if you leave, make sure you have teeth to bite with when you come back."
The bluntness is oddly comforting. I want teeth I can show. I want to be brave. I want to be forgiven. I also want her not to be dragged into whatever slow rot is coming from Matteo's circle.
Later—I move with a cruel, methodical speed.
I fold shirts into a suitcase. I put in a sweater that smells faintly of his mother, because ordinary things anchor people.
I take a small jar from the terrace box where we've been storing the terrace soil—a ridiculous, sacred object we used last month to plant a baby rose.
I seal the jar; the lid clicks. My hands tremble enough to make the sound real.
I slip a note under the jar's taped base. The handwriting is terrible. I write as much as I can stand: For when you want to remember where we planted the first seeds together. Forgive me later—if you can.
The jar feels heavy in my palm. It is the most honest thing I will leave behind.
Rosa wakes on the couch with a blanket over her knees, the tea cold by her mug.
For a mad, ridiculous second I consider waking her, trying to make her stay because leaving without a conversation feels like betrayal.
But obligation pulls me like wind. I place the jar on her counter and slide the note on top.
I press a kiss to the top of her head, the only part of her awake enough to feel it, and I whisper, "I'm sorry. "
Her breath is even in sleep. She makes a faint, contented sound that breaks me.
The suitcase feels heavier than memory as I leave.
The corridor smells of old polish and lemon.
I pause at the palazzo door and take one last look at the apartment—the light in the kitchen, the towel over the chair, the lemon tree silhouette against the window.
My fingers tighten on the handle until my knuckles shine.
"You're making a mistake," Antonio says from the threshold. He looks at me as if weighing the measure of my soul.
"Maybe." I step down the marble stairs.
Outside the night presses around me, cool and indifferent.
I shoulder the small suitcase and walk toward the steps that lead to the street, my breath a visible thing in the air.
With every step the image that chased me settles its teeth into whatever courage I have left, and I tell myself I'm doing the right thing.
Halfway down the last flight a man emerges from the shadow of an arch and stops me.
"Paolo." His voice is even, too familiar in the way people who own you are familiar. He blocks the bottom of the steps with his broad frame. The lamplight throws his face into sharp planes.
"Matteo," I say. My spine straightens despite the suitcase.
He doesn't smile. He lifts a hand and taps the side of the case with one finger. "You going somewhere?"
I want to say I'm going to fix things. I want to say I'm going to stay. My mouth opens and closes. The old impulse to explain claws at me.
"You can't run," Matteo says softly. "Not when the past likes to walk after you."
My throat tightens. The street hums around us—voices, a delivery cart rattling past—and behind Matteo I see the villa doors yawning closed, the palazzo swallowing the night.
I have one foot down on the steps and one on the pavement. The suitcase digs into my palm. Somewhere behind me a light blinks in the apartment window, a soft yellow square. It might be the kitchen lamp. It might be the place where the jar waits and a woman sleeps, trusting.
Matteo's hand drops to his side with a quiet, dangerous patience. He doesn't move. He waits for me to choose.
I inhale. The scent of rosemary and sleep ghosts behind me like a promise I am about to break.
"You're not leaving," Matteo says. The words are not a demand so much as a test.