Chapter 3
P aolina
But it’s not Aldo.
Donatello Romano.
The name alone should make my blood run cold. Enforcer for the Lucchese family. Aldo’s boss. Papà’s associate. Dangerous doesn’t even begin to describe the man who makes hardened criminals piss themselves with a single stare.
One breath and I’m back, a year ago.
The chandelier at Teatro Massimo Bellini scatters light like diamonds across silk and shoulders, every facet catching in the air scented with orange blossom and polished wood.
A string quartet plays something lush that makes the room sway in unison, conversations threading between notes like a second melody.
Papà walks a measured path through donors and capos as if the marble belongs to him.
Mamma glides at his side with the smile she saves for public evenings, eyes soft and careful.
Cara leans close, lips brushing my ear. “If I have to compliment one more signora’s emeralds, I’m going to drown myself in the punch.”
“Please don’t,” I murmur, keeping my gaze politely engaged on an older couple approaching Papà. “The punch did nothing to you.”
“The emeralds did.” Her elbow nudges my ribs. “And the men. All so proud of their watches.” Her tone turns conspiratorial. “Except for that one. Over there.” Her chin tips toward the far side of the hall. “I don’t even notice his watch, and I’m a sinner.”
The quartet slides into a new movement. I follow her cue across the crowd.
My breath stutters.
He stands near the colonnade with two other men dressed in formal black fits like sin and money.
Age doesn’t cling to his face the way power does.
Twenty-five, maybe, but the energy wrapped around him is older—coiled, contained, the kind that makes a room correct its posture without realizing why.
Mahogany hair cut clean. A shadow on his jaw that reads as deliberate, not lazy.
Shoulders that make a tuxedo look like it was invented for him.
The eyes—God, the eyes—are the color of volcanic glass, glossy and fathomless, catching light and hoarding it.
Donatello Romano .
I’ve heard the name for years in the same tones people use for storms. Papà calls him useful.
Soldiers call him Il Cacciatore—The Hunter—when they think no one is listening.
The stories are equal parts awe and warning.
None of those stories prepared me for the way his gaze sits steady on a point in the room and makes everything else blur.
Cara’s whisper vibrates against my skin. “I’d climb that man like a tree.”
Heat pricks under my collarbone. “You can’t say that in a room full of monache.”
“They’re donors’ wives, not nuns,” she says, wicked grin flashing. “Besides, they’re thinking it too.”
The two men with him—Marcello Lucchese and Faustino Romano, if I read the angle of shoulders and the careful deference right—speak without moving their mouths much.
Donatello listens. Doesn’t fidget. Doesn’t scan for exits.
Keeps his hands loose at his sides as if they already know exactly what to do if anything happens.
He turns his head a fraction.
Our gazes collide.
Everything inside me stills, then rushes forward as if that look is a current and I’m too light to anchor.
It doesn’t feel like being seen as much as being measured and found—not wanting, not excessive—exact.
Breath slides shallow into my lungs. Nipples tighten traitorously against satin, the sudden sting hidden beneath my bodice.
Thighs press together on instinct, an attempt to quiet the pulse that taps insistently low in my belly .
Cara’s voice dims, then returns in a gasp. “He’s looking this way.”
“I know.” The words scrape, dry. “Don’t stare.”
“I’m not staring.” She absolutely stares. “You’re staring. And blushing.”
“Because you’re saying outrageous things,” I hiss, even as heat climbs to my cheeks. “Stop.”
Donatello’s mouth doesn’t smile. The line of it softens a degree, which somehow feels louder than a grin. A single nod acknowledges me without claiming, like he just confirmed an answer to a question he’d already asked himself.
Papà moves, drawing a ring of greetings with him. We shift to follow, polite shadowing drilled into me since childhood. One soldier at the edge of our orbit leans in to murmur something into Papà’s ear. His gaze flicks—first to Marcello, then to Donatello. The smallest tension threads his jaw.
“Eyes to the floor when the Lucchese boys are near,” Papà says to me without moving his lips, tone silk over wire. “You’re not on the market tonight.”
“I didn’t say I was,” I whisper back.
“You don’t have to say it,” he replies, a father who knows where attention lands at a hundred paces. “Men like that don’t share.”
The music swells. Applause rises around the room as the quartet finishes the piece, giving me a moment to breathe. Cara fans her face with the program as if she could cool both of us. “All right,” she says. “Tell me I’m wrong.”
“You’re always wrong.” Denial tastes like sweet wine and goes to my head just as quickly. My gaze refuses to behave. It returns to Donatello like a compulsion.
He speaks to Marcello, head bent enough to show the clean line of his neck above the starched collar.
My mind wanders where it shouldn’t, picturing the rasp of his jaw sliding against the heel of my hand, the heat of that throat under my mouth, the weight of his palm spanning my waist. Nineteen feels too young to think these things and too old to pretend I don’t.
Aldo appears at my elbow like a summons. “Paolina.” He offers his arm with rehearsed gallantry. “Your father said you were ready to make the rounds.”
My spine stiffens at the expectation tucked inside the words. “Of course.”
We circle tables draped in white, with names engraved on placards, glasses polished within an inch of their lives.
Aldo shakes hands and claims minor victories in low tones, every exchange a feather he tucks into a cap I’m not sure he earned.
I smile and nod and do the thing I’m supposed to do—be decorative, be agreeable, be the quiet that keeps peace.
Every few steps, the crowd parts enough to align me with the colonnade again.
Donatello remains where he was, conversation shifting partners around him like a dance.
He doesn’t hunt around the room with his gaze.
He waits for it to come to him, and of course it does. No one can teach that kind of gravity.
At the edge of a toast, our gazes snag a second time.
The surrounding sounds thin to threads. Aldo’s voice keeps going, talking up someone’s new car—something about cavalli and velocità—but it reaches me as if through water.
Donatello’s attention slides over my face like a palm not yet touching, then drops, pauses at my throat where my pulse beats, returns to my eyes.
Not crude. Not even hungry. Assessed. Approved.
Claimed without claim.
Heat pools lower. A ribbon of want winds tight, shocking enough I shift my weight to hide it. Aldo notices the movement and mistakes it for discomfort in my shoes. “Sit for a minute,” he tells me, concerned for optics rather than me. “You’ll crease your dress if you faint.”
“I won’t faint.” The words leave on a breath that trembles anyway.
Cara materializes with two flutes of prosecco and a grin that says she missed nothing. “Here. Hydrate with bubbles.”
“Bubbles aren’t hydration.”
“They are tonight.” She clinks my glass, then follows the line of my gaze like a cat tracking a beam of light. “Oh, bella mia. If that is what your father wants for you, take notes now and save yourself some time.”
“He doesn’t,” I say without thinking, because the way Papà tensed proved it. “He prefers… other qualities.”
“Like obedience.” Humor fades from her mouth. “He wants safe and convenient.”
A smile that doesn’t reach my chest answers. “Something like that.”
“Then you better never get caught staring,” she warns lightly, though her eyes are kind. “Men like Aldo don’t forgive looks aimed at men like that.”
The quartet begins again, and the dance floor opens.
Couples move out in polite pairs, hands positioned where chaperones nod.
Aldo offers his hand a second time. I take it because others would notice me saying no.
We step into the pattern, my body following the steps carved into me since those first stilted lessons with a neighbor’s son and Mamma clapping in the doorway.
Donatello doesn’t dance. He watches other people move around a center he occupies without effort, then speaks to Marcello once more.
They turn together toward the doors, business pulled by an invisible wire.
He passes my orbit with a buffer of bodies between us, no brush, no scent, no chance to be unreasonable.
The smallest thing happens then—so small it might be an accident. His head tilts for the length of a breath, that not-smile tipping the corner of his mouth. A single buonasera dips in the air like a bow you feel rather than see.
My heart forgets its job for two full beats.
He disappears into the corridor with the other men.
The room exhales and fills the space he leaves with chatter.
Aldo says something about shipping schedules and the week’s carichi as if the word romance could ever be translated into freight.
Cara squeezes my fingers hard enough to pull me back into my body.
When the dance ends, Aldo releases my hand with a squeeze meant to communicate possession. A ring of acquaintances closes around him. My role shrinks to the edges again. I take one last look across the room, at the space near the colonnade where he stood, then swallow the ache like a lesson.
“I saw that,” she sings under her breath. “If you marry someone else and never touch him, I’ll stage an intervention. And if you do touch him, tell me everything.”
“Cara.” My warning sounds weak. My insides feel weaker.
She bumps my shoulder, wickedness returning. “At least admit your body answered. Mine did.”