Chapter 13 Undefended
Del texted him the address to her apartment at nine at night, which she immediately regretted, and then didn't take back, which she regretted more.
Come up the back stairs. Door's unlocked.
He arrived twenty minutes later in a plain black t-shirt instead of a suit, which threw her more than she wanted to admit, standing in her own doorway looking less like the man who'd once sat uninvited in her office chair and more like someone she might have met somewhere ordinary, if either of their lives had ever allowed for ordinary.
"You said you had something to show me," Matteo said, stepping past her into the apartment, eyes moving once around the space, the exposed brick, the mismatched furniture she'd built from thrift store finds and one splurge on a good couch, the framed photo of her and Sienna and Nico at Marea's opening night hung crooked over the bookshelf.
"I do." Del closed the door, locked it, the click landing heavier than the gesture usually did. "Sit. This is going to take a while."
She'd spent the afternoon pulling every file, every spreadsheet, every ugly stretch of Marea's history that she'd never shown anyone in full, not Sienna, not even Nico, who'd only ever seen the version she'd curated for him, competent and controlled, never the raw numbers from the months she'd nearly lost everything.
"This isn't the Sorin investigation," she said, laying the first folder on her coffee table. "This is everything. Every bad month, every loan I almost couldn't cover, every point where I came within weeks of closing before anyone knew how close it actually got."
Matteo sat on the edge of her couch, unhurried, and looked at the folder without touching it yet. "Why show me this now?"
"Because you asked me for full information sharing on the investigation, and I kept telling myself I could give you that without giving you the rest. I can't. If Sorin's touched my finances anywhere, it's buried in years of history, not just the last month.
" Del sat across from him, spine straight, the particular posture she used when a conversation cost her something and she refused to let it show.
"And because I'm tired of managing what you see of me. "
Something shifted in his expression, quiet, attentive, and he opened the folder without another word.
They worked through it for two hours. Del walked him through year one, the flood that had nearly bankrupted her before she'd even opened the doors, the personal loan she'd taken against her own car to cover the gap.
Year two, a health inspector's genuine, non-manufactured citation that had cost her three weeks of closure and nearly every employee she'd hired.
The lean stretch eight months ago when payroll had come down to the wire twice in one quarter, before the club's numbers finally turned.
"You never told anyone this," Matteo said, somewhere past midnight, flipping through a bank statement from her second year that showed a balance so low it should have been impossible to recover from.
"Sienna knows some of it. Nico knows the operational side.
Nobody's seen the whole picture." Del pulled her knees up onto the couch, arms wrapped around them, watching him read numbers that represented the worst year of her adult life like it was the most natural thing in the world for her to hand him.
"I built a version of myself that never struggled.
Successful the second the doors opened, no cracks, no near misses.
It's not true. It's just easier to run a business when nobody thinks you're one bad month from losing it. "
"You're not one bad month from losing it now."
"No. I'm not." Something in her chest loosened, small, the particular relief of saying a true thing out loud after years of managing the story instead. "But I was. For longer than I've ever admitted to anyone."
Matteo set the folder down, and for a moment neither of them said anything, the quiet apartment settling around them with only the low hum of the refrigerator and the faint, distant bass of Marea two floors below, still open, still running without her for the first time in longer than she could remember.
"Thank you," he said finally. "For showing me this."
"Don't make it a bigger thing than it is."
"It's already a bigger thing than you're letting yourself admit."
Del looked at him, sharp, ready to argue, and found she didn't actually want to.
He was right, and pretending otherwise felt exhausting in a way it hadn't an hour ago, before she'd handed him the worst version of her own history and watched him receive it without flinching or pitying her or trying to fix it.
Nico's name lit up on her phone before she could decide what to say instead, a text rather than a call, and Del reached for it out of habit more than urgency.
Found something weird in the old bank records. Wire transfer, year one, $15k, sender listed as V. Sorin. No invoice attached, no explanation in the ledger notes. You know anyone by that name?
Del went very still, phone screen glowing in the dark apartment, and read the text twice before the words fully registered.
"What," Matteo said, watching her face change.
She turned the phone toward him without a word.
He read it fast, and something in his posture shifted, alert in a way that hadn't been present a minute ago, business instincts overriding whatever softness the last two hours had built between them. "Fifteen thousand dollars. Year one."
"I don't know anyone named Sorin." Del's voice came out steadier than she felt, the particular calm she summoned when panic wanted the room and she refused to give it space. "I've never heard that name before this investigation started."
"It could be nothing. A vendor, a one time consultant, a name attached to a transaction that got mislabeled."
"You don't believe that."
Matteo didn't answer right away, and the silence told her more than words would have. "I don't know what it is yet. That's the truth. Could be coincidence. Could be nothing."
"But you don't think it is."
"I think it's worth finding out before either of us decides what to feel about it.
" He set her phone down gently on the coffee table, and reached for her hand instead, an instinct that surprised them both, his fingers closing around hers with none of the ownership he usually carried into every other gesture, just steadiness.
"Nico will run it down. So will I. Whatever it is, we find out together, the way we agreed. "
Del nodded, though something cold had settled low in her stomach that no amount of steadiness in his voice fully displaced, a fifteen thousand dollar question mark sitting in her own club's earliest history that she had absolutely no memory of authorizing or explaining.
"I need to not think about it for a few hours," she said. "I've been staring at these files for two hours already tonight. I can't do anything useful with it until morning."
"Then don't."
"That's easy for you to say."
"It isn't, actually." Something rougher entered his voice, and he reached up, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear with a gentleness that felt entirely at odds with every version of him she'd met in the last month.
"I've spent the last two hours watching you hand me the worst parts of your history without flinching, and I don't know how to just sit here and not want to make the rest of tonight easier for you. "
"You don't have to make anything easier."
"I know I don't have to."
Del looked at him, close now, closer than the conversation strictly required, and felt the same current that had been building between them for weeks settle into something slower this time, no urgency in it, no bar top and broken glass, just the quiet apartment and his hand still holding hers and the particular ache of wanting to be touched by someone who'd just seen the worst of her and stayed anyway.
She kissed him first this time.
No hesitation in it, no soft opening, her mouth on his hard enough that he made a low sound against her lips and gripped her hips to pull her fully into his lap.
Del rocked against him once, testing, and felt him go rigid under her, a groan dragged out of his throat that had nothing careful in it at all.
"Bedroom," he said, voice already wrecked.
"Here's fine."
"Bedroom, Del."
He stood with her still wrapped around him, one hand under her ass, the other fisted in her hair, and carried her down the hall like her weight was nothing, mouth never leaving hers until he dropped her onto the mattress and came down over her, knee shoving her thighs apart before she'd even landed.
She pulled his shirt over his head. He got hers off faster, impatient, a seam tearing at the shoulder that neither of them acknowledged.
Her bra hit the floor a second later, and his mouth was on her breast before she'd finished arching into it, teeth grazing her nipple hard enough that she cursed and dragged her nails down his back in retaliation.
"Do that again," he said.
"Which part?"
"Both."
She did. He groaned into her skin and shoved her skirt up around her waist, hooking two fingers into her underwear and dragging them off in one rough pull instead of bothering to be gentle about it.
Del reached for his belt, fumbled it once out of impatience, and he shoved her hands aside and did it himself, freeing himself fast, no ceremony, and settled between her thighs with his whole weight pressing her into the mattress.
"You good?" he said, voice rough, checking despite every part of him clearly wanting to move.
"Move, Matteo."
He pushed into her in one long, deep stroke, and Del's back arched clean off the bed, a sound tearing out of her that wasn't a word, raw and immediate, and he stilled there for a second, buried to the hilt, jaw tight like he was fighting his own control.
"Fuck, you're tight."
"Move."
He moved. Slow at first, deep, one hand braced beside her head and the other gripping her thigh and dragging it higher around his waist, and every stroke landed with a weight that pulled ragged noise out of both of them, her nails raking his shoulders, his teeth finding her throat, the headboard knocking softly against the wall with each roll of his hips.
She wasn't quiet. Neither was he. The bedroom filled with the slap of skin, her gasping his name in broken pieces, him cursing low against her ear every time she clenched around him.
"Harder."
"Del."
"I said harder."
He gave it to her, angle changing, pace climbing, one hand sliding down to find her clit and circle it rough and fast while he drove into her, and Del's whole body wound tight underneath him, thighs shaking, a high, helpless sound breaking out of her that she made no attempt to muffle this time, nobody downstairs to hear it, nothing left to guard.
"Look at me when you come," he said, voice guttural.
She did. She came hard around him, back bowing off the mattress, his name torn out of her in a broken shout, and he followed seconds later with a groan he didn't bother to swallow, hips stuttering, burying himself deep and holding there, shaking through it, forehead dropped against her collarbone.
He pulled out slow after, breathing hard, and dropped onto the mattress beside her instead of on top of her, both of them staring at the ceiling, chests heaving, sweat cooling on skin that hadn't stopped humming yet.
"Christ," he said, eventually.
"Yeah."
He rolled onto his side, propped on one elbow, and looked at her for a long moment, something in his expression she wasn't ready to name yet. He didn't say anything else. He didn't need to.
They lay tangled together after, her head on his chest, and Del felt something in her chest settle that had nothing to do with exhaustion, a peace she didn't have an honest name for yet, unfamiliar and entirely unguarded.
"Stay," she said, half asleep already, the word slipping out before she'd fully decided to say it.
"I'm not going anywhere."
She believed him. That was the part that would have terrified her a week ago and, tonight, somehow, didn't. She fell asleep with his heartbeat under her ear and his arm heavy and warm around her, and didn't dream of anything at all.
Matteo lay awake considerably longer.
He stared at the ceiling of her bedroom, her breathing slow and even against his chest, and turned the wire transfer over in his mind the way he turned over everything that didn't sit right, fifteen thousand dollars, no invoice, a name that had already cost her one payroll cycle and might, if his instincts were right, cost her considerably more before this was finished.
V. Sorin.
He didn't wake her to say it out loud. Some part of him wanted one more hour of this, her weight warm against him, the particular peace of a woman who trusted him enough to fall asleep in his arms, before he had to become the version of himself that ran names through contacts who owed him favors and asked questions that had a real chance of breaking something neither of them was ready to see broken.
He fell asleep eventually too, her name the last coherent thought before exhaustion pulled him under, and woke before dawn with the wire transfer still sitting heavy in his chest, already reaching for his phone before his eyes had fully adjusted to the gray morning light filtering through her curtains.