Chapter 6
PIETRO
Iwas beginning to understand what the men in my family had been trying to tell me.
Not that I would admit that out loud yet.
Possibly not ever, given that Matteo Genovese would enjoy it far too much and my uncle would find a way to make it a training lesson.
But the understanding was there, settling into me with a relentless certainty that I recognized from other moments of irreversible knowledge.
The moment I understood my father's fear was love in disguise.
The moment I understood that the island had been protection, not exile.
The moment I first held a blade and felt it fit my grip like something I was always meant to carry.
Some things, once understood, could not be unfelt.
Emily Hart was one of them.
Which meant, among other humiliations, that I owed several men in my life a long-overdue apology.
Starting with my uncle Hoka.
For years I had mocked him whenever he spoke about Aunt Violet as though one look into her eyes had rearranged the whole architecture of his life. He had once called it ikigai, and I had laughed at him for it without mercy.
Now I would have to go back and admit he was right.
My father deserved an apology too, though I suspected he would enjoy it far too much to make the experience bearable.
Alessandro Benetti had crossed every conceivable line for my mother and never once looked ashamed of it.
I had spent years privately regarding that kind of devotion as a form of elegant madness.
Turned out, it was hereditary.
I saw her three times since dinner. None of them should have mattered as much as they did.
The first was a study session, though calling it that suggested a degree of academic productivity that did not, in fact, occur.
Emily spent the better part of two hours bent over her notes while I studied her far more than anything on the page in front of me.
I was self-aware enough to understand how questionable and entirely unhidden that was, and yet I had made no attempt to stop.
By the end of the afternoon I could have described every inch of her face from memory, including the tiny mole just beneath her jaw, and had already caught myself wondering how long I would have to wait before I could kiss it.
The second was breakfast. Less romantic in theory, perhaps, but no less dangerous for me.
Olivero had taken up position two tables away wearing the kind of grin that ought to get him fired, while I sat across from Emily and discovered that she was even more disarming before ten in the morning, hair half tamed, coffee in hand, looking at me as though I were both suspicious and worth the risk.
The third was tonight. Another dinner. Another evening over too quickly. Another reminder that wanting her was no longer the problem.
The problem was that I was due back in Chicago for Thanksgiving, and for the first time in my life, duty had begun to feel like an interruption rather than a fact.
I had told lies about my life before without losing a moment of sleep over it.
About my family. About the business. About what waited for me once Hawthorne ended.
Men like me did not survive by advertising the truth.
Secrecy was not just habit; it was protection.
For us, yes, but also for anyone standing too close to us.
I never felt guilty about that.
Until now.
Until Emily.
Until the quiet weight of her in the passenger seat beside me, the scent of her perfume still lingering in the car, and those beautiful green eyes fixed on mine as though she already knew there was something I was not saying.
“You’re quiet,” she said at last, turning slightly in her seat to look at me properly. “That usually means one of two things. Either you’re plotting something or something’s wrong.”
I kept my hand on the steering wheel a second longer than necessary before looking at her.
“I’m going back to Chicago tomorrow.”
The words dropped between us with a weight I felt immediately.
Her face changed in that small, careful way I was already beginning to hate. Not enough for anyone else to notice, perhaps, but enough for me. A flicker of disappointment. A quick attempt to smooth it away.
“Oh.”
It should not have affected me as much as it did.
“It’s only for the break,” I said, and already the lie was forming, polished and familiar. “My father wants me home. There are things I need to help with. Expectations I can’t avoid.”
All technically true.
None of it the truth.
The words sat in my mouth like cinders.
Emily lowered her gaze to her hands. “For how long?”
“A week.”
She nodded too quickly. “That’s not so bad.”
No. Not so bad.
Except it was.
A week would once have meant nothing to me. Now the thought of seven days without seeing her felt like something lodged under my skin, impossible to ignore and worse the more I thought about it.
“Emily.”
She looked back up.
“It’s okay,” she said quietly, though it clearly wasn’t. “It’s Thanksgiving. People go home.”
People.
Not men like me. Not men with my life, my name, my obligations, my lies.
I looked away first. Another second of holding her gaze like that and I would do something reckless.
The silence inside the car deepened. It wasn’t awkward. It was worse than that. It was full. Heavy with everything neither of us had said, and with the increasingly dangerous fact that I wanted her more with every passing second.
Then she reached for me.
Her hand came to my jaw lightly at first, fingertips brushing my skin with enough hesitation to tell me she would stop if I pulled away. She was giving me the choice.
I turned my face into her palm before I could stop myself.
Her breath caught.
For one suspended second, she just looked at me. Her eyes moved over my face as if she were memorizing something. Then she leaned in and kissed me.
The first touch of her mouth on mine was soft, tentative, careful.
It still hit me like violence.
Every muscle in my body locked. My hand gripped the steering wheel hard enough to ache, and for half a second I did nothing but feel it. Her lips, warm and slightly parted. The faint taste of red wine and sugar. The soft exhale against my mouth when I finally kissed her back.
After that, control became a far less stable thing.
I let go of the wheel and caught the side of her face, pressing my thumb just under her jaw as I angled her toward me and took the kiss deeper. She made the smallest sound, barely more than a breath, but it went straight through me, hot and immediate, settling low in my body with brutal efficiency.
Christ.
I had wanted this.
I had not understood how much.
My other hand slid to the back of her neck, into the silk of her hair, holding her with just enough pressure to keep her there while I kissed her again, slower this time, deeper, learning the shape of her mouth with a greed I was no longer interested in disguising.
She tasted warm and sweet and entirely too easy to lose myself in.
When her fingers slid from my jaw into my hair, my restraint snapped another inch.
I dragged her closer without thinking, my hand cupping the nape of her neck as I kissed her harder.
She shifted toward me with a helpless little movement that put the line of her body closer to mine, and the contact was enough to send a sharp wave of heat down my spine.
My pulse had become a riot. My thoughts had ceased to be useful.
I wanted her.
I wanted to pull her across the console and into my lap. I wanted to taste every sound she was trying not to make. I wanted the soft blue dress I’d spent half the evening pretending not to notice gone and my mouth in its place.
That thought hit me so hard I had to break the kiss before I disgraced myself entirely.
I pulled back with real effort, breathing harder than I cared to admit.
For a moment neither of us moved.
Her forehead nearly brushed mine. My hand was still in her hair, the strands wrapped around my fingers, and her lips were parted in a way that made every decent instinct I possessed leave the vehicle.
Her cheeks were flushed, her breathing unsteady.
Beautiful.
Dangerous.
Mine, some primitive part of me thought at once, with a conviction so raw it almost made me recoil from myself.
Emily blinked up at me, dazed.
“Well,” she whispered.
I let out a breath that was meant to be a laugh but failed halfway through. “That was one way of saying goodbye.”
Her lips curved, still swollen from my mouth. “I wasn’t aiming for subtle.”
“No,” I said, my voice rougher now. “You really weren’t.”
Her gaze dropped then, and I followed it.
One of my hands had braced so hard against the seat that my knuckles had gone pale.
I forced myself to let her go.
The loss of contact was immediate and unwelcome.
“That,” I said after a moment, “has made leaving tomorrow significantly more difficult.”
A slow smile touched her mouth. “Good.”
Then I leaned in just enough to brush my mouth against hers again. A promise, not a loss of control. "You have no idea," I murmured. "Are you going home for the break?"
She leaned back slightly, her breathing steadier now, though the color was still high in her cheeks. “No. I’ve got too much work. My supervisor already thinks I’m behind, and if I disappear now I’ll never catch up.”
I nodded once. Too much work.
No trip home. No one to spend Thanksgiving with.
The thought settled into me with dangerous speed, and before I could stop it, a single instinct rose up so hard and clear it nearly made me speak.
Come with me.
The words stopped just short of my tongue.
I went still.
It was not the invitation itself that unsettled me.
It was how natural and immediate it had felt.
Men in my world did not bring women home lightly.
If I took Emily into that world, it would not be casual.
It would not be reversible. Once introduced, she would matter.
And God help me, I already knew she did.
That was exactly the problem.
I glanced away, jaw tightening as the old rules closed back around me one by one, cold and familiar. Secrecy. Distance. Containment. The things that had kept my family standing for decades. The things I had never questioned before because they always made sense.
Now they felt like obstacles.
Emily tilted her head slightly. “What?”
I forced my expression into something more neutral. “Nothing.”
Her brows lifted in obvious disbelief, but she let it go.
I did not.
The thought had already lodged itself too deep to ignore.
I could leave her in Boston and tell myself that distance would help.
That a week apart was sensible. Necessary.
Temporary. I could come back and continue as we were, stealing hours between classes and dinners and whatever lies I could get away with for a little longer.
Or I could stop pretending this was something small enough to keep in pieces.
If I wanted Emily in my life, not the polished version of it, not the student version, not the carefully edited man I let her see, then sooner or later my father would have to be part of the equation.
That should have felt like a threat.
Instead, some instinct told me it was probably inevitable.
And if I was being honest, Alessandro Benetti likely already knew.
He had raised me. He would have seen it in one glance, in the tone of my voice on the phone, in the way I had shortened our conversations, in the fact that I had come home for a funeral looking as though part of me had stayed behind and returned to Boston as soon as I could.
Nothing escaped my father for long.
Especially not when it mattered.
Emily was watching me again, that soft line between her brows appearing when she thought too hard about something.
“What are you thinking?” she asked.
I looked at her, at the woman who had unsettled the entire architecture of my life in less than a week, and knew that leaving her behind was not going to solve anything.
“I’m thinking,” I said slowly, “that I dislike the idea of being in another state while you’re here.”
Something in her expression softened.
“That sounds unreasonably dramatic.”
“It is,” I said. “I’m finding that doesn’t change it.”
I walked her to the door of her building and stood there longer than necessary, the cold night settling around us while neither of us seemed especially willing to be the one to end it.
“You should go,” Emily said at last, though there was no conviction in it.
“You’re still standing here.”
The corner of her mouth lifted. “You’re very smug for someone leaving tomorrow.”
“I’m deeply unhappy about leaving tomorrow.”
“That’s not how unhappy people usually sound.”
“No,” I said. “I imagine I’m handling it unusually well.”
She laughed softly, and the sound did the same damage it always did.
“Text me when you land?” she asked, her expression so sweet I wanted to remember it forever.
“I will.”
She nodded, then glanced toward the door before looking back at me. “And maybe… I don’t know. We could talk while you’re away.”
“Talk?”
She rolled her eyes, suddenly faintly pink again. “You know what I mean.”
I stepped a little closer, close enough to lower my voice. “No. Tell me.”
Her breath caught just enough to satisfy something in me.
“Video call,” she said quietly. “If you want.”
If I want.
I looked at her for a long second.
“Emily,” I said, “I am not going to pretend a few messages will be enough.”
The color in her cheeks deepened.
“So that’s a yes?”
“That’s me trying very hard not to sound too eager.”
“It’s not working.”
“I know.” I reached up and brushed one curl back from her face before I could stop myself. “Tomorrow night?”
She nodded. “Tomorrow night.”
I let my hand fall, though every instinct in me argued against ending the touch.
“Go inside,” I said, and even to my own ears the words sounded rougher than usual.
Her eyes searched mine, as if she heard it too.
“Goodnight, Pietro.”
“Goodnight, Emily.”
She turned then and slipped inside, and I waited until the door closed behind her before moving. Even so, I stood there another few seconds longer than made any sense, staring at the glass like a man with something essential on the other side of it.
Tomorrow I would leave Boston.
Tomorrow I would go back to Chicago, back to my father, back to the life that had always made sense before she stepped into it.
And somewhere between the promise of a video call and the memory of her mouth on mine, I knew with perfect clarity that distance was not going to lessen a single thing.