26. Silas
“Your calculations need work here,” I tell her, studying the graphs on her screen.
I watch her frown at the monitor, cheeks faintly flushed, that hair that never quite stays where it should be, her lower lip pushed out slightly.
“How did I miss that margin of error?”
“You’ll catch it next time,” I tell her, and without fully understanding what comes over me, I lean down and kiss her.
Her eyes are still on the screen when I pull back, and I can tell she’s locked somewhere inside her own head right now. I used to do the same thing.
“Amalia. Talk to me.”
I feel her tense in her chair, and she doesn’t answer. I already know what’s going on, I just want her to say it out loud so she can hear for herself how wrong every word of it sounds.
“What if I’m not cut out for this?” she whispers, and a quiet, understanding smile spreads across my face.
Impostor syndrome. I’ve seen it in her over these past weeks. In the way she constantly second-guesses her own work, in the way anything less than perfect feels like failure.
“This,” I tap her temple three times, “is perfectly capable of doing everything it sets out to do. You’ve put nine hours a day into this project, baby. Your brain needs to breathe too, Amalia.”
I watch her search my eyes for the catch, the lie, the trick. She won’t find one. She’s the most intelligent woman I know, and she needs to understand that it’s all right not to always be at your peak, it’s all right not to have the answer to every problem the moment it appears.
“Has it ever happened to you? Hearing that voice in your head too loudly, the one that tells you you’re doing nothing right?” she asks with so much vulnerability, so much genuine doubt in her voice, that before I can stop myself I’m pulling her into my arms and carrying her to the couch.
Once I sit down, I position her in my lap facing me. She’s wearing fluffy lavender socks and a sweater that reads Little Sweetheart, and my heart doubles its pace.
I can’t fight her demons for her, but fuck, I want to tear every last one of those doubts out by the root with my bare hands.
“Before, yes. Before, I let what everyone said get to me.”
“What changed?”
It takes me a moment to find the words, but with my eyes down, I answer.
“My brother.”
It’s the first time I’ve mentioned him. But I don’t want to lie to her.
I’m not ready to tell her about Karina and Sebastian yet, or about the monster who fractured our family, because it would frighten her.
And the thought that she might stop sitting like this, in my arms, that relaxed, it puts a hollow feeling in my chest.
She waits patiently for me to continue, because Amalia is empathetic. She’s good. I know that if she found out everything I actually do with my time, the image she has of me would fall apart entirely, and that’s not something I can avoid forever.
“When I took over the accounting for a company, I made an error. A calculation I could run in ten seconds with my eyes closed now, but at the time my mind wasn’t as sharp.
I didn’t want to eat for two days, didn’t want to leave my room, because I felt like I’d let my brother down.
He was the one who got me the job, and I’d failed at something I was supposedly a genius at.
He was the one who came, after those forty-eight hours, and put this watch in my hand, the watch he’d had from our mother.
He told me to look at it and tell him how many seconds are in a day.
Eighty-six thousand four hundred, I told him.
And all he said was: you can’t give a hundred percent in every single one of those eighty-six thousand four hundred seconds, Si.
But you can try, and I know how hard you try.
After that, I understood I needed to take breaks.
That’s how I got into sports. How I got into reading. To let my mind breathe.”
She nods slowly, because she understands. Rationally, she already knows she can’t be at full capacity every moment of every day, but it’s the emotional side, which is far more developed in her than in me, that keeps overriding it.
“Your brother sounds wonderful,” she whispers, and the knot in my throat comes back.
“He was,” is all I can manage.
She goes still for a moment, and then her lips come to rest first on my forehead, then on my cheek.
“I’m so sorry, Silas. Do you wa?—”
“Let me put some more hot chocolate on,” I tell her, moving past the subject, and I watch her quietly accept that she won’t get more than that for now.
I’m in the kitchen when I hear the knock at the door, and then the soft pad of Amalia’s footsteps crossing the apartment to answer it.
I hear his voice before I see him, and my body locks up immediately.
I leave the hot chocolate forgotten on the stove and cross the apartment in a few quick strides, stepping into the doorway.
“Silvio.” His name comes out in a register that should leave no room for misunderstanding.
Because he knows he has no business being at my home, and I don’t know how he found out where I live.
His eyes move to Amalia, so I step in front of her, cutting off his line of sight entirely.
“I didn’t want to bother you, Silas, but I really need your help this time. A few tens of thousands, practically nothing for you.”
“I told you over the phone that’s not going to be possible,” I tell him slowly.
“Come on, man!” He rakes a hand through his hair, and I can see it on him plain as day. Despair. Fear. “I can’t go back to New York empty-handed.”
“Still no.”
“You piece of shit!” His voice cracks on the last word, loud enough to bounce off the walls, and I feel Amalia go rigid behind me.
That’s it.
I take my glasses off, and with one last look at him, my hand closes around the front of his sweater.
Silvio isn’t a large man at five foot ten, but I learned a long time ago not to underestimate anyone.
I know he’s carrying at the back of his waistband, but he won’t use it.
Alessio would have him buried if the man who manages the paperwork for all his companies got shot.
In terms of value, I rank above Silvio, and he knows it.
“If you ever set foot in this city again, I will make sure Alessio handles the situation permanently.”
He knows what permanently means. He knows I’m not making a joke.
“You work for us, bastardo,” he spits through his teeth, and only because I feel Amalia’s hand on my back do I just push him instead.
“Don’t be a stronzo, Silvio. Disappear.”
He stares at me like he’d like to close his hands around my throat, but apparently the two neurons he has left make the right call, and he goes.
When I turn back to Amalia, her face is full of worry.
“Who was that man?”
“An idiot who hasn’t grasped that I don’t work for him,” I answer honestly, though I know that’s not enough for her.
I guide her back to the living room and gesture for her to sit. I take a moment to consider how much to tell her, how far I can trust that she’ll understand. Because trust is not a subject I do well in.
I think about all the lies I could tell her, but something like ash settles on my tongue, and I can’t make any of them come out.
I’m already hiding Karina and Seb. I can give her this much.
“Silvio is part of the Italian mafia. Technically, I work for his boss, Alessio Conti. I manage his paperwork so that, financially speaking, his companies don’t attract attention.”
When her eyes go wide, something cracks open in my chest, not quite pain, but close enough to it. As I let it sink, I realise it’s fear. Not fear of what she might do with the information, but fear that her image of me is about to change.
Still, I gave her a piece of truth. It’s the least I owe her.
My hands aren’t literally bloodstained, but they’re not clean either. I could shoot someone, and I don’t know how much conscience I’d have left afterward.
“Is it dangerous for you?”
She stands and brings her hands to the base of my neck, and just like that, I’m calm again.
“If it becomes dangerous, if your life is ever at risk, promise me you’ll walk away.”
“I can take care of myself, Amalia.”
“I know you can. But being capable of defending yourself doesn’t mean you have to accept danger just because you can handle it. The man from earlier didn’t look at peace with your answer.”
“The man from earlier doesn’t matter anymore.”
She watches me for a few seconds then draws in a breath.
“I sometimes do a few small illegal tasks for se?or Gustav, my high school teacher, in exchange for money.” Her eyes go wide as she rushes to add, “I don’t cross certain lines, I swear on Newton’s name!”
I smile at how concerned she looks, like this little confession could actually change the way I see her.
“Baby, I’m proud of you.”
And then I kiss her. Slowly, taking my time, because no poker game or correctly solved formula has ever felt like this. Like her body soft against mine, like lilac and hot chocolate turning into something I crave all the time.
“So you’re not upset with me, right? And about that man, maybe you should speak with—” she tries to reason with me, but what she doesn’t understand is that her worrying about me, trusting me with her little secret, the fact that she’s not throwing a dramatic tantrum about my other activities, is turning me on.
My hands go instinctively to the back of her thighs, and I lift her, carrying her over to the poker table in the corner of the living room.
On instinct, I sweep everything off it, including a few poker chips that scatter across the floor. Her eyes follow them down as they hit.
“I’ve never learned how to play poker,” she tells me, biting that lower lip as if daring me to take its place.
“Hmm,” I say, as my mouth moves along her jaw and down her throat. “Let me walk you through the important hands.”
She draws a slow breath, and I know that if I looked at her cheeks right now, they’d be red.
“Full house,” I tell her, as my hand slides into the waistband of her pants and finds its way to the center of her without missing a beat. “Three of a kind and a pair.”