Chapter 4 #3
“Have them go as ghosts,” I counter. “No conversations. We don’t spook her. Pull the dumpster bag, verify what’s inside, tag the room number from the maid’s cart schedule, set a camera on the corridor, then fall back and wait. She sleeps; we watch. She leaves; we follow. No one touches her but me.”
Faustino’s mouth curves. “ Capito. ”
Marcello relays. Rafe hums like a kid at Christmas. “Copy.”
“Good,” I say.
“You’re assuming she comes quietly,” Marcello says, but he doesn’t mean quietly as much as he means willingly.
“I’m assuming she comes,” I answer, and feel the calm that only arrives when a plan and a desire click.
“I took her virginity; now I take responsibility. She’ll hate the word marriage until I teach her a different definition.
She’ll hate the word possession until she understands it means protection when it comes from me.
And she’ll learn love isn’t a weakness when a man like me kneels to it. ”
Faustino pours the drink he knew I’d need after all. This time I take it, not for the burn, but for our ritual. We drink to beginnings and endings in rooms like these. Tonight is both.
The door opens without a knock—again—and Leone slides in, efficient, breath barely raised.
He sets a black garbage bag on the floor.
“From the Mirto alley,” he reports. “Housekeeping chart says they serviced Room 214.
The maid's name is Giovanna. Twenty-four minutes between her going in and coming out.”
I slit the tie. Layers of fabric spill like a corpse made of lace. A bodice with pearl buttons ripped from its seams. Skirt cut in angry, clean strips. A satin shoe with the heel broken and blood on the strap where it blistered skin.
My body goes silent.
Marcello watches me. “That’s your proof she’s still bleeding,” he says, unsentimental. “Not from you. From the day.”
I nod once. “She’ll rest now.”
“Room 214?” Faustino confirms with Leone.
He nods. I picture the Mirto’s corridor—faded runner, brass numbers screwed crooked into doors, a housekeeping cart squatting like a fat dog outside one.
Paolina inside behind a lock she believes can stop the world.
Her breathing calming, her fingers unclenching one by one, a shower washing sugar and sin off skin, the curls at her nape frizzing in cheap steam.
A bed that is not mine holding her lush body safe for a few hours .
“Two on the exits,” I say. “One watches the desk. I’ll take the rest.”
Marcello lifts a brow. “You going to sit in a lobby chair and read a newspaper like a husband who forgives?”
“I’m going to sit where she can’t see me and listen to the sound the elevator makes when it stops on the second floor.” I look at them both. “When she comes down, she’ll meet me, or she’ll meet the day. I prefer that she meets me.”
Faustino tosses me a key fob. “S-Class out front. You won’t drive it far.”
“I won’t drive it at all,” I say, and tuck the veil from the hotel into my jacket pocket because I took the note and I take the symbol. “When she sees me, she’ll run. I’ll let her. Once. She needs to learn what it feels like to be chased by a man who never stops.”
Marcello chuckles. “You’re a romantic, fratello . ”
“I’m a hunter,” I correct. Then I set the empty glass down with a soft click. “And I’m done waiting.”
The Mirto sits in the shadow of Viale della Libertà , a dowdy three-story building that pretends it was elegant once and knows it wasn’t.
I park half a block away, walk past a newsstand that peddles lottery tickets and magazines featuring actresses with impossible lips, and nod to a woman watering geraniums on a balcony.
Inside, the lobby smells of lemon cleaner and old air-conditioning.
A fan ticks at the ceiling. The clerk at the desk looks up, eyes widening, then dropping, survival instincts quicker than fear.
I don’t speak to him. A cracked leather chair in the corner faces the elevator and a wall mirror angled to catch the stairwell. I sit. People become invisible fastest when they act like they belong. Kings and thieves know this trick equally well.
Time lengthens. The mirror shows me distorted, taller, the way carnival glass makes men into myths.
Footsteps scrape upstairs, slow and tired.
The elevator hums, stops on three, goes nowhere, grinds back to two.
A maid’s cart squeaks. Somewhere a TV plays a soap opera argument dripping with betrayal and wild violins.
The elevator shudders, opens, and breathes out a woman in a black T-shirt and denim, baseball cap low, sunglasses oversized, a canvas duffel slung across her chest like a shield, trainers silent.
She looks left, then right. Her chin lifts, a small, stubborn tilt I want to kiss.
Blood dried like a thin necklace across the top of her foot where the strap cut earlier; she put the trainers on too fast for socks. It makes me love her more.
She doesn’t see me. Instead, her eyes track the door. She walks. Her hand brushes the desk, a ghost tip that leaves two keys she doesn’t want to need again.
Just before she reaches the threshold, wind bellies the awning outside and the street noise swells—voices, the pop of a scooter backfiring, an old man laughing, the click of a woman’s heels. It distracts her for a fraction of a second. She decides in that second to look back .
Her eyes hit the mirror first. Then they ricochet to me.
Everything in the room goes still.
Her breath stops. Mine doesn’t. I rise without hurry because speed is for prey, and I am not prey.
“Paolina,” I say, and my voice comes out quiet and certain, the way a tide speaks when it takes a shore. “Come.”
She makes the only choice she can make: the one that proves she’s exactly the woman I already decided to spend the rest of my life chasing. She bolts.
Out the door, into the late afternoon, down the steps in one flying leap, cap tightening with the force of motion. I let her go, count three heartbeats because I promised myself I would, then I follow.
Hunt begins.