Obsessed with a Mafia Assassin

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EMILIA

Some stories begin with once upon a time. Mine began with a man who broke into my life and stayed.

My apartment is all paper. Pages on the rug, the couch, and one in the sink I refuse to acknowledge. Burnt coffee in the pot. A lavender candle burning, the one I light when panic needs a prettier name. The only heartbeat in here is mine. I built it that way.

Tonight, I'd rather have neighbors.

The writing has taken a strange turn this year. Six novels in, I know my own machinery, and this isn't it. The pages arrive with details I never chose. Terra-cotta tile, warm beneath bare feet. A cologne so specific that one of my readers once asked which brand it was.

Tonight, the page that's killing me is a kitchen scene I have no business knowing. On the page, a boy of fifteen stands in the doorway, the way strays stand at the edge of traffic, starving and trying not to look like either. The woman at the counter doesn't look up. She pushes a plate toward him.

Eat. You're too thin, she tells the boy.

I've never owned a terra-cotta-tiled kitchen, never fed a stray, and haven't named him yet. But his eyes are already there. They are dark, too old for fifteen, the kind that take more than they give.

If my mother were here, she'd say it now: You have such a gift for imagination. Writing suits you.

She'd call me tesoro - treasure- at the end of it, the way the word still surfaces in my head with no memory attached. Except she isn't here. The word arrived on its own, the way the tile did.

No memories from me before I was nine live for me.

My mother told the story the same way every time: a bad marriage, two suitcases, a new city.

She moved us to the Village of Sleepy Hollow upstate under names that weren't ours, and we never went back.

She died a decade ago, before I thought to ask why a frightened woman fleeing a husband keeps checking the street through a gap in the curtains for the rest of her life.

I moved to the city the month after, found an apartment with three locks of my own, and built a career out of inventing what I'd never lived.

The padded envelope on my desk has been waiting all day.

No sender, no card, my address typed. I open it now because everything else is failing.

Inside, wrapped in tissue paper, is a fountain pen.

Italian, vintage, black lacquer with a band of worked silver, heavy as modern things rarely are.

It sits in my palm, its weight settling somewhere below my sternum, familiar in a way I have no receipt for.

I uncap it and write one line on the back of a dead draft, just to see.

Hours later, I surface.

The candle has guttered out in its own wax. My hand aches at the knuckles. Handwritten pages are spread around the closed laptop, written with the stranger's pen. Best work I've done in months, and the writing of it has gone from memory.

I stretch, stand, and walk to the kitchen for water.

That's when I hear it.

A soft click, not from the radiator or the building. My front door is closing from the outside.

The glass stops at my mouth.

For one long second, I can't move. The hallway light bleeds under the door in a faint gold seam, as it has every night for over a decade. Tonight, the seam means someone just stepped over, heading the other way.

The bread knife sits in the block by the toaster, and the hilt is colder than my hand when I grab it.

At the front door, the chain hangs loose; I never set it after dinner. The deadbolt has recently been thumbed open from the inside by someone who took the time to be quiet. I unlock it again, my hand shaking, and pull the door open in one motion.

The hallway is empty.

At the far end of it, the elevator dings.

The doors close on a tall, dark-coated figure I can't make out from this distance. Then the indicator above the doors descends, floor by floor, all the way to the lobby.

I stand in my own doorway, holding a bread knife, looking at the carpet someone has just walked across in shoes that made no sound.

Then I remember the apartment behind me.

I close the door, lock the deadbolt, set the chain, and turn back toward the apartment.

Room by room, knife first. The bathroom is empty, the shower curtain pulled back with my left hand while my right keeps the blade up.

In the closet, coats and a vacuum, nothing else.

The bedroom holds a made bed, nothing under it, no one behind the door.

My office, where I just was, is a mess with pages everywhere, and the laptop is dark.

The balcony is still locked and latched, exactly where I left it.

Nothing. Nobody. The apartment is exactly as I left it, except for the book.

I find my own first novel, The Deadline Superstition, and touch the spine to remind myself I've survived this before.

Signed first edition, inscribed by me to me at a book party where nobody knew the author was the woman refilling her own wine.

Third shelf, left side, between the dictionary and the dead succulent. Has been there as long as I have.

It's gone.

Heart loud in my ears, I work through the manuscript I just wrote, page by page, my free hand at my throat.

On page eight, in the margin beside the paragraph where my heroine guesses what her dangerous man is hiding, there's a word in handwriting I have never seen in my life. Small, black, precise as a scalpel.

Close.

The word lands like a hand on the back of my neck.

Every lock gets a recheck: deadbolt, balcony, every window. All exactly as I left them. No signs, no muddy footprints, no broken glass. Whoever was here didn't break in. They walked in.

The apartment doesn't feel like it was broken into. It feels visited, and visited is worse.

A call runs in my head: Officer, someone walked into my locked apartment, took a romance novel, and wrote in my margins. I know how it sounds, so I don't call anyone.

On the floor of my office, back against the wall, the bread knife on the rug beside me. The pen on the desk, the page that says Close, the shelf with the missing book. Four things tonight with no innocent explanation, counting the figure in the elevator.

The door goes gray, then gold, in the morning. I watch all of it.

My phone rings at 9:02 a.m. Francesca. I answer on the first ring, the way I always do.

"Tell me you slept." Her voice goes mother-superior, warm with a ruler hidden in it.

"I slept." The lie comes out clean.

She lets it pass. "Listen, before you read this in an email and spiral." A door clicks shut behind her. "The house was acquired on Friday. New ownership, same contracts, anonymity clauses survive the sale. There's one addition."

A pause, exactly long enough to butter something.

"They're assigning a consultant to the new book. Authenticity, organizational dynamics, that world. He’s highly credentialed. He starts this week."

The lavender candle has been out for hours. The notice of it comes now.

"A consultant." The word comes out of me like a tapeworm. Like a parasite. "In my home? Reading my pages, watching me work?"

She doesn't push back right away.

"Emilia." The voice that has talked me off every ledge this career has built, smooth as poured cream.

"I read your new chapters Friday night. Whatever has gotten into your work this year, it's the best you've ever done.

The new owners want to protect the investment.

That's all this is. Money protects money. "

I sit with that a moment, already knowing what I'm about to ask and what she's about to answer.

"And if I refuse?" I ask.

She doesn't pause. "Clause eight. There's no version in which you refuse, cara -sweetheart-. Let's make it painless."

After she hangs up, I sit very still. She never told me his name; I never asked.

In the silence she leaves behind, every fact of last night arranges itself into a new shape. A pen I didn't order, a word in my margin, a book missing from my shelf, a figure in an elevator. A consultant is arriving this week. Nothing changes for you.

Francesca and I go back a decade. She has never once steered me wrong.

I tell myself that twice.

The doorbell rings at 10 a.m. exactly.

Yesterday's clothes are still on me, a coffee I haven't drunk in one hand, and a bread knife I haven't put away in the other. Through the peephole, the rational voice starts up again, reciting what Francesca told me. Consultant, this week, highly credentialed.

The man on my doormat is wearing a suit that costs more than my first advance: charcoal, single-breasted, broken at the wrist where a watch heavy enough to be a weapon catches the morning light. He has no coat or briefcase, just a slim leather folder in one hand, the way other men hold a phone.

He's in his late thirties, possibly forty, with dark hair and the first silver at the temples. The jaw I have failed to write convincingly for years, eyes that take more than they give. The woman who lets any of that matter right now is not the one I plan to be.

Every animal part of me looks at him and forgets the entire English language.

He is the kind of dangerous man I have been describing in three novels without ever having seen one.

The knife goes on the side table. Not the coffee. The knife.

He's tall in a way the fisheye lens can't distort, with the kind of stillness that makes the hallway around him look like it's fidgeting. The same stillness I saw at the far end of the corridor four hours ago, framed by closing elevator doors.

The man in the elevator was someone else, I tell myself, though belief doesn't quite arrive.

The chain stays on as I crack the door because I'm scared, not stupid. The smell of him reaches me first. Bergamot and ink. My body, sleepless, scared, running on fumes, fires every nerve at once like a struck match. Like recognition, except this man is one I've never seen in my life.

His eyes find mine through the gap. Dark, unhurried.

They flick once past my shoulder, taking in the slice of apartment behind me, the candle still burning, the carpet of paper, the bread knife on the side table that says everything about my night.

Then back to me, before I can decide whether to be insulted.

"Good morning." A small concession to civility, slightly stiff in his mouth. "Leo Veraldi. Francesca Mancuso sent me." He lifts the folder a half-inch, an entire bureaucracy of permissions on his side of the door. "She said ten."

The professional tone is so out of place in my hallway that for a second, fear takes a back seat.

"She called me less than an hour ago," I tell him.

He doesn't blink. "Yes."

A small step into my own annoyance feels safer because annoyance is more useful than terror.

"And here you are, exactly when she said."

He doesn't take it as a question. "I'm exact." A flicker at the corner of his mouth, gone before I can call it a smile. "This afternoon may be easier for you."

The offer is correct on paper. None of this is correct.

"It's not. Not at any time."

He doesn't argue or fidget during the pause; he just waits. He’s already worked through several versions of this conversation, and he has time for each.

My grip on the doorframe tightens because the alternative is to reach for the side table instead.

"What exactly did Francesca tell you about me?"

His eyes don't move from mine.

"That your real name is Emilia Marchetti." He doesn't rush the second name. "And that you publish under Bianca Cross."

The two names land one after the other under my ribs like the moment a doctor confirms what I'd been hoping was nothing.

A consultant is given a real name. A consultant is not given a pen name.

The pen name has never shared a room with the legal one.

Not on a contract, not on a tax form, not anywhere a man in a charcoal suit should have read it.

My face stays very still.

"Francesca told you that?”

He doesn't look away. "She told me to use whichever name you prefer."

The lie is so clean it almost earns my admiration.

"My pen name does not exist on paper."

A pause that doesn't feel like surprise.

"It doesn't." His voice gives nothing away. "Which is why I would not use it anywhere; it might cause you trouble."

God help me, my first thought, before fear, before sense, is that this voice has lived in my own head before. Reading my own pages back to me.

The bread knife is two steps to my right, and we are both aware of it, the way chess players track pieces that haven't moved yet.

"She said you would not be ready," he adds, quieter. "I'm not in a hurry."

The name finds somewhere in me I didn't know was empty, and stays there.

Then he doesn't say anything else, just waits.

The patience of furniture. The patience that comes from knowing the door will open, because some animal in me already wants it to.

Every reasonable cell I own votes to close the door.

The chain comes off, and I step back.

He moves past me, and the side of his hand brushes mine on the door frame for half a second. Bergamot, ink, and the heat of him. Then he is through.

Inside, he turns and finds my eyes.

The door clicks shut behind him.

The same soft click I heard four hours ago.