18. Real #3
"I want to see the house I grew up in, stand in my mother's garden, and meet him, Leo.
" A breath. "The Don. My father." She finds my eyes in the dark.
"The third piece is in that cellar, and I'm the only person alive who knows how to get in.
But that's not why. I need to look at the life stolen from me, just once, before we burn it down. "
Walking her through Gianna's gates. Past Gianna's men, into the one square mile on earth where the woman hunting her controls the doors, the cameras, and every version of the truth. The fixer in me knows the odds; they're terrible. But the man holding her already knows what he's going to say.
"Then we go together."
Above us, a plane crosses the dark, its lights blinking. I hold the real thing I've ever touched and start planning our walk into the lion's house.
The plane is gone. She breathes against my chest. Page two has stopped being paper and has become temperature.
She lifts her head.
"Leo."
I keep my voice low. "Yes, amore. Love."
A pause, her breath against my chest. "What's on the second page?"
The wind moves across the roof, a siren somewhere, glass breaking far off. I look down at the face of the woman whose mother ordered my brother’s death, the woman I have not yet decided how to break, and I do the only thing I can do tonight.
"Soon."
She doesn't flinch, doesn't argue; she's read me cover to cover all night. There's a second page. He's had it since the church and will give it to her when his hands stop shaking.
Her head drops back to my chest.
"Soon," she agrees, and closes her eyes.
Twenty minutes later, I carry her down through the hatch, my coat around her bare shoulders, page two still in its pocket against her ribs. She's asleep before I get the blanket over us.
I lie awake, holding her, one hand on the small of her back, the other under my pillow, gripping the gun. The window goes from black to charcoal.
She wakes me before dawn.
Her mouth at my shoulder. Lips, then teeth, light. Her hand glides down my chest, finding me already half-hard. "Buongiorno. Good morning."
"You should sleep. We're walking into her house in ten hours."
"I know." She bites my collarbone. "Which is why I want you again first."
I roll her onto her side, with her back to my chest, slide my arm under her neck, and my other hand down to her hip. She's sore. I can feel it in the careful way she stretches.
"Tell me if it hurts."
"Make it hurt good." I hook my hand behind her knee, lift her thigh, and slide into her from behind in one slow, deliberate push. She makes a sound into the pillow, half-complaint, half-home.
"There you go," I murmur into her ear. "There's my girl. So wet for me already. After last night, you'd think you'd had enough."
"Never had enough." Her voice is sleep-soft and ragged. "Not from you."
I move slowly, the slow only dawn allows, half-asleep, with a woman I have already taken three different ways before midnight. My hand spreads across her belly, holding her tight against me, and I fuck her like the bed might break if I'm louder than her breathing.
"Such a good girl." My voice is low against her ear. "Brava ragazza. Look how generous my filthy girl is, letting me have her again after everything I did to her on that roof."
"Leo." It comes out broken into the pillow.
"Whose?"
"Yours. Sono tua. Sono tua."
My hand slides from her belly to her clit, slick already from last night and this morning both, and I work her slowly. Her hips push back against mine, taking me deeper. Morning light comes through the slats in pale bars across her shoulder, her hip, the place where I disappear into her.
"You're mine in the daylight, too," I murmur into her hair. "Not just on rooftops in the dark. Mia."
She comes quietly this time, a long shudder that runs the length of her back, and I follow her two strokes later, filling her, my forehead pressed to her spine.
We don't move for a long time after.
"Good morning," she murmurs, finally, in a deadpan voice.
"Good morning, amore."
She turns in my arms and looks at me, and there is something in her face I have not seen before. Something settled. She's decided what the day will be before the day even knows.
I think we are both deciding not to ask about page two this morning. Whatever I owe her, I owe it to her on her own feet, in clothes, with her hands free.
"I'm going to shower." She slides out of bed, naked, with my coat still draped over the chair. She looks at the coat, then back at me, but does not ask. "Bring me coffee. We're going to need our strength."
She walks past my jacket without noticing me watching her.
I get up, pull on my pants, take page two from the inside pocket of my coat, and put it in the breast pocket of the shirt I'm wearing today, the one over my heart.
It rides there while I make her coffee. As Tommy comes in off the perimeter and reads my face in one pass, his jaw sets without a word. She comes out of the bathroom in jeans and a sweater that used to be mine, her hair still wet. She looks at the phone.
"Make the call," she says quietly.
I lift the phone.