10. Angelo #2
The rooftop felt smaller, the sky suddenly a ceiling. Noemi's breath hitched. She seemed older in that moment, older than our arguments, older than my guilt. She put her fingers between ours. "We decide together," she said quietly.
Sofia's expression cracked, a mixture of disdain and a very small, almost imperceptible respect. "Then decide," she said, and turned and left without another glance.
Noemi sagged against me, the fight leaving her. "They give deadlines," she whispered.
"They do," I said. "They underestimate stubbornness."
She laughed at that. It was small, an almost-sob. "You're impossible," she told me.
"And you're infuriatingly brave," I returned.
She tilted her head, eyes clear and direct. "So tell me again."
"Tell you what?"
"That you choose me," she said. "Not just words on a rooftop. Say it where it matters."
I could taste iron and cinnamon and the loudness of my own certainty.
I reached for her face with both hands and forced her to meet me, to catalog the truth in my eyes.
"Noemi. I choose you. I choose your laugh and your stubborn hands and the way you make lists that I follow.
I choose to be the man who defends you, who tells you the truth, who stays when it would be easier to run. I choose you."
She did not answer at once. The wind lifted a strand of hair across her cheek and I brushed it away, careful not to be clumsy. Her eyes shone wet, and when she spoke her voice was a vow more than a word.
"Always," she said.
I leaned in, the space between us closing like the lock on a promise. My lips hovered over hers, asking in the oldest way I knew.
"Stay," I breathed.
Her mouth came to mine and closed the question. It felt like a beginning and an end at once.
We were still kissing when a phone buzzed in my jacket on the bench below—a name I did not expect. The tone sliced through the moment, an incoming thread I had not wanted. I pulled back, forehead to forehead, and heard the sound again: an urgent vibration, persistent.
"Noemi," I said, breathless. "I have to get that."
She reached up and pressed her forehead to mine. "Go," she said. "But bring me back everything you can."
I moved for my jacket, fingers trembling in the pocket as the screen lit with an unknown number. I turned it over. The message preview made my stomach drop: Tonight. Fourteen hours.
Sofia's ultimatum, delivered in a different voice.
I looked at Noemi. Her hand found mine and squeezed.
"Then we have fourteen hours," she said. "What do we do with them?"
My answer was a promise and a plan and a hunger all at once. I pulled her back to me and kissed her again, holding onto the part of her that had already chosen.
Outside, the city stretched endless and unknowable. Between us, the rooftop was a small, defiant world, and I knew the real choice was only beginning.
END
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Giulia
The door swung farther than it should have. A sigh of linen and something warm hit me before the room did, and I slammed to a stop with my hand on the jamb.
I shoved my hair behind my ear and forced a smile that read professional annoyance, not adrenaline. Giulia Romano—senior corporate lawyer—does not open the wrong door in a palazzo built to make the indecisive feel small.
There was a man in the room. Half-dressed, towel hanging from his hip, hair wet and unruly on top.
Federico De Santis, tall and broad-shouldered with a pale scar catching the light at his brow, looked up from where he'd been bent over a low table.
His eyes were storm-gray and they catalogued me the way I catalogued clauses—fast, precise, without pity.
I should have closed the door and retreated. Instead my mouth said, “I asked for the storage room. This—this isn’t storage.”
He blinked once. The towel did nothing to hide the slope of his shoulders or the hard plane of his chest. My pulse thudded like a misdemeanor—stupid, sharp, impossible to ignore.
“Storage is downstairs,” he said. His voice was a low thing, velvet and gravel, and it pulled my attention to his mouth. “This is my private sitting room.”
My cheeks did not have the luxury of flushing. I had rehearsed composure for a decade; my mother had confirmed the plan twice this morning. I owed the Romano name steadiness, not scandal. I said, flat, “Then you might lock the door next time before you towel off.”
He smiled in a way that was almost indulgent. “Or you could knock.”
“I did,” I said. “Someone should have answered.”
He let the towel slip a fraction lower and the scar along his brow transferred from detail to punctuation.
My eyes traveled, disloyal as a file drawer: the line of his sternum, the shallow ridges of muscle beneath bronzed skin, the long fingers—hands that looked able to sign a check, or close a jaw.
“What’s your hurry, Ms. Romano?” He pronounced my surname the way a judge pronounces guilt and amusement at once.
“For once, the hurry is not mine.” I let my glove fingers curl on the handle of my leather briefcase.
My throat had gone dry. “I’m here for the Romano–De Santis negotiation.
The family mobile will be in the salon in twenty.
I—” I stopped. Saying I was late felt stupid and small.
Saying I was flustered was not an option.
“Ah.” He straightened, towel tucked, and the hush he carried filled the small room. “You’re Romano.”
“Yes.” I kept my voice level. “And you’re De Santis. Thank you for the clarification.”
He moved a half-step closer with all the small, thoughtful motions of a man who measured distance like currency.
Up close, bergamot clung to him—clean, green, a citrus I always associated with expensive soaps and travel.
The scent was disarming. My hand, stupid traitor, went to my collar to check if my pulse was visible.
“You shouldn’t be walking around an unfamiliar palazzo without a guide,” he said. “The floorplans are confusing.”
“It’s not unfamiliar,” I said. “It’s just—” I looked for the word that would keep me competent. “Different.”
He tilted his head, and I saw the pale crescent behind his ear where a lock of hair wanted to fall. He watched me as if considering whether I was a chess piece or a person. “Different can be interesting.” His eyes dropped to the pale hollow at the base of my throat when I swallowed. I felt exposed.
“You're not charming me,” I snapped. The retort came out sharper than intended and made him smile, small and private. “And I'm in the middle of an alliance negotiation. I promised?—”
The sentence stopped there because it was the only honest thing I’d allowed myself in days. I had promised my mother I would remain composed, not become compromised by headlines or hospital beds. Saying it aloud felt like folding a paper sword against a cliff: fragile but real.
He seemed to understand the unspoken more quickly than most men. “Composure suits you,” he said. There was no irony in it. Only observation.
I pivoted on my heel, intending to leave with dignity.
My elbow caught the shallow table; a pale glass trembled.
Federico's hand closed around my wrist, steady as a law clerk's stamp.
His fingers were warm and blunt, callused in the right places.
The touch was brief but held more than enough time to be noticed.
Electricity, stupid and cinematic, flared.
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