Chapter 11 #4
“Would you stroke my hair?”
I stare at him. Of all the things I expected him to say, this wasn’t even on the list. It’s not a sexual proposition. Not a demand. Not anything I could have prepared myself for.
“I’ve been away for so long.” His voice is low. “It would make me feel like I’ve come home, Mina.”
I can’t speak. Can’t move. Can’t do anything except stand there while memories crash over me like waves.
Sitting in the garden while he lay with his head in my lap, my fingers combing through his hair. The way his eyes would flutter closed, the tension draining from his body. The only time he ever let himself be soft. The only time he ever let anyone take care of him.
I’ve never told anyone about those moments. They were mine, precious and private, locked away in a part of my heart I don’t let myself visit anymore.
A crazy thought occurs to me. That he bought the Grand Palazzo Hotel just so he could become my boss and ask me to stroke his hair.
“I’ve missed you, Mina.”
He’s missed me? He thinks he has a right to miss me after terrifying me so completely when I was just eighteen years old?
My confusion crystallizes into fury.
How dare he.
How dare he sit there and ask me to stroke his hair like we’re still children, like he didn’t destroy everything good between us. How dare he cheapen those sweet memories, twisting my freely given affection into something he can purchase along with a massage at his fancy hotel.
How dare he make me feel like a whore he can pay to pretend she cares about him.
I wipe my hands on the towel with sharp, jerky movements.
“You bought this hotel.” My voice trembles with rage. “You bought my job. You walked in here knowing I’d have to serve you, touch you, smile at you, because that’s what people like me have to do for people like you.”
I throw the towel onto a chair. The words are pouring out of me now, days of worry and sleepless nights boiling over into rage that he’s spoiling the last good memory we had together.
“You have everything. You’ve always had everything, even when we were children, and now you’re using all your power to remind me that I have none.”
Cristiano’s hands are braced on either side of his body on the table. He gazes deep into my eyes, their golden brightness unsettling in the dim room.
“I have everything a man could want in this city.” He gazes at me for a long time from beneath his lashes. “But I don’t have you, Mina.”
He says it so simply, like it excuses everything. Like I’m supposed to feel sorry for the poor lonely don who can buy anything except the woman he wants.
I won’t. I refuse.
“We’re done here.”
I walk out of the room as fast as my legs can carry me. I don’t know if he calls after me. I can’t hear anything over the blood roaring in my ears.
I make it to the break room just in time before my legs give out, and I have to lean against the wall, pressing my hand to my mouth to keep from sobbing.
My whole body is shaking. I walked out. I looked Don Cristiano Montoni in the eye, and I walked out.
He can buy this hotel. He can buy my time and my hands and my professional smile. But he can’t buy me.
Three days later, I’m still reeling from what I did.
I’ve replayed the moment with Cristiano in the treatment room a hundred times. The way he looked at me when he asked, Would you stroke my hair? Like I was the only person in the world who could give him what he needed.
I’ve imagined doing it. Reaching out and running my fingers through those golden curls, just to see if they still feel the same. On another day, in a more vulnerable moment, I might have done it.
That’s what terrifies me most. How easily he can make me forget why I should be afraid. Cristiano has learned to weaponize his vulnerability. He knows exactly how to look at me, exactly what to say, exactly when to seem soft and broken and in need of comfort.
I’ve been away for so long. It would make me feel like I’ve come home, Mina.
The words had sounded so sincere.
I think about the way he circled me when I was eighteen.
The motorcycle that always seemed to appear on my route home.
The so-called coincidences at the pizza parlor.
The slow, patient accumulation of his presence in my life until I couldn’t remember what it felt like to exist without him watching me.
He’s doing it again. The hotel. The massage.
The request to stroke his hair that seemed so innocent, and I know, I know, that if I’d done it, there would have been another request tomorrow.
And another the day after. Each one slightly more intimate than the last. Each one feeling impossible to refuse because I’d already said yes to everything before.
That’s how he builds the cage. Not with bars and locks, but with a thousand tiny yeses that I don’t even notice until I’m trapped inside.
Now I’m waiting for the consequences, because there must be consequences for refusing a man as powerful as Cristiano. I expect Gloria to pull me aside with a tight-lipped expression and tell me I’m fired for walking out on the owner of the hotel.
But when Gloria found me in the break room afterward, she was smiling. “Mina. Mr. Montoni expressed nothing but gratitude for your massage. He specifically mentioned your professionalism and skill and praised the spa as an asset to his hotel. I think you’ve secured our position here. Well done.”
“I—” My voice came out strained. “Really?”
Gloria’s smile faltered slightly. “Are you all right? You look upset.”
“Yes, of course.” I forced my mouth into something resembling a smile. “I was just worried.”
“I had complete faith in you.” She patted my shoulder before bustling off somewhere else. I stayed in the break room for a long time, trying to make sense of what had just happened.
Cristiano praised me. After I spoke sharply to him and stormed out, he told my boss I was professional and skilled. He protected my job.
I don’t know what to do with that.
I don’t know what to do with any of it.
Today, it’s a slow day, so I’m out in the main salon giving shoulder massages to women getting manicures. It’s not my usual work, but it keeps me busy and keeps my mind from circling back to amber eyes and scratch-mark tattoos and a deep, low voice murmuring, I don’t have you, Mina.
Every quiet moment, he’s there. The weight of him on the massage table. The heat of his skin under my palms.
I dig my thumbs into a client’s trapezius, and she sighs with pleasure.
“Oh, that’s the spot. You’re wonderful.”
I murmur something polite and keep working, but my thoughts are elsewhere.
What does he want from me? He has women throwing themselves at him, surely. So why is he so fixated on the housekeeper’s daughter he used to follow around as a boy?