Chapter Eight
Isabella
I follow him onto the balcony despite the risk.
A window-washer rig sits parked on the maintenance track for the weekend, locked with a company code and a willingness to be sued.
He takes tools from his pocket that no man carries for fun.
He opens the lock and looks at me. I climb in first because if a woman asks for a life, she has to be willing to hang it over a street.
If I die tonight, it will not be because I followed a man. It will be because I chose him and chose myself in the same breath.
Luigi watches me like he understands the difference. His mouth tightens once. Approval, fear, pride. All of it caged behind control.
The wind lifts my hair. The height presses against my ribs.
I hesitate.
It isn’t fear of falling. It is the older fear. The one my father taught me with stories, with rules, with blood. You do not trust a Moretti when your life depends on it. You do not follow one into the open. You do not choose the enemy when there is still time to choose safety.
Luigi doesn’t touch me.
He waits.
That restraint matters more than the open drop below.
“They are coming,” he says quietly. “If you say stop, we stop.”
I regard him. The man my house taught me to hate. The man who wrapped his jacket around me without asking. The man who helped me escape death.
I nod once.
The rig shivers under us. The cables sing a thin metal note that my bones don’t love.
I grip the rail and set my feet where the grating feels cleanest. Luigi moves the control and we drop two floors with the whisper of a line agreeing that we can pass.
He sets the rig against the glass of the unit below and nods at me through the dim light.
“Kick plate,” he says. “Right of the frame. Older model. They cheaped the install.”
I brace. I work the thin bar under the rubber lip and pry. The glass pops free a finger’s width. Not enough. He leans his weight beside me and the plate gives with a sigh. The window slides.
I slip through first and catch fabric on a hook. I swallow the sound and free it. He follows me and draws the glass tight as a seal. The room we enter belongs to no one tonight. Holiday unit. White furniture. A bowl of wooden fruit.
The condo above wakes as we move. A door slams. The men we left find the balcony and the night and the rig gone. One swears. The other calls someone and the tone he uses tells me he is used to bad news. Luigi touches my wrist. We don’t wait to hear the answer.
We travel down fire stairs that hold the aroma of lemon cleaner.
Two floors down. We pause and listen at each landing.
Voices rise through the well. Not to us yet.
Floor thirty-eight. He checks the hall camera and the sight line to the service lift.
Clear. We cross and slip into the corridor and angle for the elevator that freight uses, the one with a door dented by a careless dolly long ago.
The panel shows power. He hits the call. The doors grind apart like old teeth. Inside, the lights look tired. He steps in and I step after and he hits B for the loading dock because lobbies kill people like me. The elevator answers with a jerk.
My breath comes fast. Not afraid. Focused.
The bag bumps my hip and I keep my hand on it as if the drives need my pulse to keep theirs.
The box light says floor thirty-seven. Thirty-six.
I let the numbers become a count. Luigi looks at me and I see the question he will not ask in a room like this. I answer with my mouth.
“Yes,” I say, and he hears everything that lives under the word.
Yes to the risk. Yes to the plan. Yes to the fact that we are no longer pretending this is only strategy.
His eyes meet mine and I see the answer he doesn’t say out loud.
Yes.
The doors open to a concrete corridor more honest than the ones above. We move past the locked cages where restaurants keep flour and wine. A rolling gate waits. He pulls the chain and the door rattles up. Cold air from the dock licks my ankles.
Outside, a single truck idles with no driver in sight. A courier service logo peels at the edges. I don’t trust coincidence, but I don’t have time to entertain another option. He checks the cab. Empty. Keys dangle from the ignition like a choice.
“Gift,” he says.
“Marker,” I correct. “We will pay it back with interest.”
We climb in. He drives like he does everything. Controlled. Dangerous only when the road asks for it. I watch the mirror until the tower shrinks to a toy and then I watch the bag in my lap because if I look at his hands I’ll forget how to breathe.
We don’t go back to the restaurant. Eyes will be there now. We cut toward the river where warehouses sit in rows like teeth under a gum. He noses the truck into the shadow of a loading bay and kills the engine. The quiet comes down like a curtain.
My hands shake then. Only for a moment. Adrenaline is a storm and storms pass. He sees it and doesn’t mistake it for weakness. He takes the wrist that trembles and sets my palm to his chest. His heart is steady and hard. Heat presses into my skin. I breathe and the shiver leaves.
“Feel it,” he says. “Still steady.”
It is.
Mine steadies with it.
The silence between us stretches, heavy with what we crossed and what we chose.
“We’re supposed to be enemies,” I say. “Not just rivals. Not optics. Real enemies.”
“I know,” he answers.
“You could’ve taken the drive and left me,” I say. “You did not.”
“I didn’t,” he agrees.
“You could have used me,” I continue. “My name. My position.”
“I chose you,” he says, the words simple and irrevocable. “The rest is logistics.”
Something in my chest cracks open. Not painfully. Honestly.
Luigi reaches behind the seat and pulls a small field kit. He hands me a wipe, and I clean the blade and the line of red that sits faint along my knuckles. He watches my hands as if they are telling him a story he wants to remember.
He wipes a smear of blood at the corner of his mouth with his thumb. I reach for him anyway. One small touch to his jaw. He catches my wrist gently and presses his mouth to the inside of it, the place my pulse gives me away.
I lean forward and kiss his mouth. There is no urgency. It's certain.
His hands come up slowly, framing my face like he is still asking permission even after everything. I open to him because I want to be known by this man and still stand afterward.
The kiss feels like a blessing and a warning.
When we pull apart, he rests his forehead against mine.
“This isn’t a truce,” I say.
“No,” he agrees. “This is alignment.”
“And when our houses come for us?” I ask.
The city lights reflect in the windshield like a thousand watching eyes.
“Then they learn,” he says calmly. “That we don’t belong to them anymore.”
I look away.
“Talk to me,” he says.
“The scar on your shoulder?” I ask. “Tell me.”
“Your brother didn’t die by my hand,” he says again. “I was there to pull him out. The first shot took my shoulder and spun me. The second took his heart.”
“You were sent to collect him alive?”
He nods. “A third crew crashed the meet. The kill was the second shooter. Not Moretti.”
“Who?”
“Different barrel. Different man,” he says, making a reference.
“The polished voice on the recording. The one behind Adrian?”
“Perhaps. I’ve been thinking of a name since our first listen. They wanted me wearing the blood. The men in the tower were sent by someone.”
“Their orders read like a subcontract. Ghost number. Not Adrian’s language.”
“Polished voice,” he says.
“Yes,” I say. “The wires will match the week he called for the port. Slush offshore in the Canaries. You can detect the lawyer in the routing.”
He smiles without pleasure.
The shaking is gone. What replaces it is a need. It is about proof. I am alive. He is alive. We’re in a square of darkness that feels like privacy. The bag rests between my knees and the night leans in. I take the breath I have been saving, and I move to crawl into his lap.
He shifts the seat back and drags me across the gap like the cab was built for this.
It isn’t graceful. It isn’t meant to be. He catches me by the hips, and his mouth meets mine. Copper sits on my tongue. He’s been punched more than a few times tonight. We both make the same sound. Relief over pain.
He kisses me like the cove all over again, careful and hungry, only now there is no water to hold us up. There’s only him and the soft noise the truck makes when we move against it.
I grind against him. His breath hitches and I think, yes, this, this is mine. It unknots something below my ribs. He presses closer. His palm slides to my backside, and I feel the hardness of him strain against my wet panties.
“I don’t have protection.”
“Oh,” I say, getting his meaning.
“You decide,” he says.
That somehow wrecks me more than his touch. I want to take everything right now, him raw, because adrenaline makes hunger feel like truth. But I also want us alive more than I want relief. And alive means I have to be smart.
I rest my forehead against his and breathe.
“Not yet,” I whisper.
His eyes darken, but he nods immediately. No argument. No sulk. No punishment.
“Good,” he says, and it is praise again. Not for denial. For discipline. For choosing tomorrow. “We aren’t safe yet. And your father already wants to kill me.”
I laugh. “Imagine. Us having a baby.”
“A Moretti and a Valentine,” he chuckles at the implication.
I draw back enough to view him. His eyes have that darkness that reads like depth, not like danger. We only just met, and the thought of us together like that seems impossible, if we were to even want such a thing.
I’m surprised when his hand slips between my thighs, into my wetness. Pleasantly so.
“I’m not punishing you for choosing smart,” he says.
His fingers enter me hard, just like I need.
It steals the air from my lungs.