Chapter 25
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Valentino
"Is that what you believe?" Amanda's voice drops low, the kind of quiet that cuts deeper than screaming. "You believe I cried because Elio is in jail?"
I don't answer.
She laughs. One short, bitter exhale that has nothing to do with humor.
"You're a coward, Valentino." Her voice rises all at once. The words hit square in the chest. I've been called worse. None of it ever sounded like that coming from her. "You are a goddamn coward."
Her eyes are wet and furious, and she's shaking.
"I love you." She throws it at me like a grenade.
"I love you. Only you. I have loved you since I was a stupid fifteen-year-old girl standing in Vittoria's kitchen, watching you walk through the door like you owned the whole world.
You looked at me once and called me a bambina, and I thought about it for six months. "
I open my mouth.
"Don't." She raises a hand, palm out, trembling.
"You don't get to talk right now. You had your turn and you used it to tell me not to touch you, so now you stand there and listen.
" I close my mouth, feeling properly chastised.
"I told myself it was stupid. A crush. Something I'd grow out of.
" She wipes her cheek with the back of her wrist, hard, angry at the tears for existing.
"And I grew up. I dated other men. I slept with other men.
I smiled at other men, and none of it made you disappear.
You were always there. In every room I walked into, I looked for you first. Every time I visited Vittoria, I checked whether you'd be in Chicago.
And when you weren't, I pretended I didn't care. When you were, I pretended harder."
Her breathing is ragged. "You want to know why I cried in that car?
You really want to know?" She doesn't wait for my answer.
"I cried because I'm so fucking stupid that I let people treat me like I don't matter.
I cried because my whole life I confused attention with care.
Someone looks at me and I think that means something.
Someone touches me and I think that means they chose me.
And it never does. It just means I was there. "
Her voice cracks. "Elio looked at me, and I thought that was enough.
My mother sends a thumbs-up emoji, and I tell myself that counts as love because the alternative is admitting the woman who gave birth to me finds me less interesting than her flight connection.
" She drags both hands through her hair, gripping at the roots.
"I don't know how people actually love each other, Valentino.
Nobody taught me. I watched it on screens and read about it in books, then tried to make myself into someone people would want to keep. "
Her voice goes quiet again. Devastated and precise. "And then I get one chance. One opportunity with the only man I have ever loved, and that man grabs me by the throat in a car and tells me not to touch him."
She steps back. Her chin lifts. Wet face, steady gaze.
"So fuck you, Valentino Conti."
She turns.
My heart has lodged itself in my throat. My brain is trying hard to process, but it's two steps behind. I rip my hand through my hair, feeling like a fool.
Years. I've spent years watching from a distance because I thought she was off-limits. I'm the one who kept her at arm's length, believing it was for the best, never noticing she was watching me too.
Then I have her. Her mouth. Her body. Her mind. All willingly given. She come apart for me.
And I acted like a jealous boy instead of a man and pushed her away. Again.
She's two steps away now. Each step taking her farther from me.
Fuck it.
My hand closes around her wrist before the thought finishes forming. I pull her back, and she spins, fury and hurt in her eyes, ready to tear into me again. I swallow the words with my mouth.
My free hand finds the back of her neck, and her body collides with mine. She makes a sound against my lips. Her fingers twist into the front of my shirt.
I walk her backward. Her spine hits the wall, and I press into her, one hand braced beside her head, the other still gripping her wrist. She bites my lower lip. The sting shoots straight through me, bright and sharp.
I lift her, and her legs wrap around my waist. The wall holds her weight while my hands find her thighs, her hips, the warm skin where her hoodie rides up.
She pulls back an inch, breathing hard, her eyes searching mine.
"If you tell me this is a mistake," she whispers, "I will break your nose."
"It's not a mistake." My voice comes out rough, scraped raw, something I barely recognize. "You're not a mistake."
"Then stop running from me."
"I'm not running. Not anymore." I press my forehead against hers.
Our breathing tangles together in the narrow space between us.
I close my eyes. "I don't know how to do this," I tell her.
"I know how to protect people. I know how to kill people.
I don't know how to hear someone say they love me and not start looking for the door. "
Her thumb traces along my jaw. The pad of her finger catches on stubble, and I feel it in every nerve ending I own.
"I'm not asking you to know," she says. "I'm asking you to stay."
I kiss her again. Slower this time. Her fingers slide from my shirt to the back of my neck, nails dragging lightly across skin.
Someone clears their throat.
The sound carries the unmistakable weight of a man who has walked into a room, assessed what he's seeing, and decided to announce himself rather than retreat. Which means Luca Farro has more nerve than sense tonight.
Amanda's legs tighten around my waist. Her fingers freeze on the back of my neck. I don't move immediately because there's a stubborn part of me that refuses to retreat just because we have an audience, but the operational half of my brain wins the argument.
I pull back from Amanda. Her lips are swollen. Her cheeks are flushed and tear-streaked. My hands slide from her thighs to her hips, steadying her as I lower her to the floor. Her feet touch the tile and she sways once before finding her balance.
I turn around.
Luca stands in the kitchen doorway, arms folded, wearing the expression of a man with plenty to say and enough sense not to say it. His green eyes move from me to Amanda and back to me with the calm, unhurried precision of someone cataloguing a crime scene.
"Better have a reason," I say.
He doesn't blink. Doesn't shift his weight. Luca never wastes movement. It's one of the things that makes him lethal and, in moments like this, profoundly irritating.
Amanda steps around me before Luca can respond. She pushes her hair back from her face with both hands, and walks toward the hallway.
"I'm taking a bath," she announces.
"Wardrobe in the second bedroom," I tell her. "Fabio stocked clothes. Should be your size."
Amanda pauses in the hallway. Her back is to me. She nods once and disappears around the corner.
I count three breaths before I face Luca.
"Our men are spread across Trastevere's perimeter," he says. "Fabio's at the north entrance. Two on the bridge. One at the market square. The building across the street has a clean sightline to both exits, so I put Loretto there with comms."
I nod. Good coverage. Luca builds perimeters the way architects build cathedrals. With obsessive attention to angles and an absolute refusal to leave gaps.
"I need to know the next steps," he tells me. "Whether we're holding here or preparing to move. Whether Bruno's sending reinforcements or pulling us back. The men need rotation schedules, and I can't build those without knowing the operational timeline."
All reasonable. All necessary. All things that could've waited another ten goddamn minutes.
I walk toward him. Luca doesn't retreat, because Luca doesn't retreat from anything, which is both his greatest asset and the quality most likely to get his teeth rearranged tonight.
I stop close enough that he has to tilt his chin up to maintain eye contact.
He's tall, but I've got two inches on him and right now I'm using every single one of them.
"You're the best man I have," I tell him. The words come out quiet.
Luca's expression doesn't change. His eyes hold mine with that pale, unnerving green that makes most people look away first.
"When I'm with her," I say, and the emphasis lands on her like a hand on a table, "you make the decisions. You run the perimeter. You handle the rotations, the comms, the men. You handle whatever Bruno sends. You handle everything that doesn't require me standing here answering your questions."
A muscle in his jaw tightens.
"And you don't interrupt me." I lean closer. "Because the next time you clear your throat while I'm occupied, Luca, you'll get my fist instead. Right across that pretty face."
The silence stretches for exactly two beats.
Then something happens that I've seen maybe four times in six years of working with this man.
The corner of Luca's mouth moves. Luca doesn't smile the way other people smile.
It's more like a tectonic shift. One millimeter of movement that transforms his entire face from stone monument to something almost, distantly, human.
He raises both hands, palms out. Surrender.
"Capisco," he says.
His hands drop. The almost-smile vanishes, tucked back beneath the operational mask so quickly I could've imagined it.
"I'll build the rotation schedule," he says, already turning toward the kitchen counter where he's spread a hand-drawn map of the surrounding streets. "Bruno's next call is in ninety minutes. I'll take it unless you want to."
"Take it." I scrub a hand over my face. "Tell him we're holding position. I'll brief him in the morning."
Amanda
The water drums against my shoulders and I tip my head back, letting it stream down my neck, my chest, pooling in the hollow of my collarbones before sliding lower.
I press my palms flat against the tile wall and breathe.
The thing about confessing a decade-old obsession to a man who kills people for a living is that there's no dignified recovery.
You can't unsay I've loved you since I was fifteen.
You can't take it back with a laugh and a just kidding and a redirect to something safe. I handed him every card I've ever held.
The bathroom door opens, and Valentino stands in the doorway.
The shower has a glass partition but it hides nothing.
Not a damn thing. He knows this. His gaze starts at my face and stays there for exactly two seconds, long enough to give me the chance to tell him to leave.
I don't. His eyes drop to my throat. The water running between my breasts in thin, shining lines.
Lower.
My throat has dried up despite standing under a stream of hot water, and all I can manage is to stare back at him while my pulse beats so hard I can feel it in my teeth.
He reaches for the hem of his shirt and pulls it over his head.
Oh.
Oh.
The tattoos hit me first. Sprawling across both pectorals, dark ink against olive skin. From here, through the fogged glass and the steam, they look almost like flowers. Elaborate, layered petals spreading from his sternum outward, curving along the hard lines of his chest.
But as my eyes adjust through the water streaming down the glass, I realize they're not flowers at all.
They're ornamental, geometric, something between sacred architecture and armor.
Heavy black linework with intricate shading that follows the contours of muscle beneath.
The kind of tattoo that takes dozens of hours in a chair.
Broad shoulders that taper into a hard waist, thick arms. A scar runs along his left side, pale and old, disappearing into the waistband of his pants.
His hands go to his belt.
The buckle clicks. The leather slides free. He holds my gaze the entire time, and the slow, unhurried way he unfastens the button, draws down the zipper makes me want to scream at him to hurry up.
His pants drop to the tile floor. He steps out of them.
I press my back against the cool tile. Water runs down my stomach and between my thighs, and I let my hand follow it, fingers trailing along the same path, fully aware that he's tracking every movement. My bottom lip catches between my teeth.
He hooks his thumbs into the waistband of his briefs and pushes them down.
I forget how to breathe.
He's—God. Thick, hard, heavy against his own thigh, bigger than I expected, and I expected a lot because I've been pressed up against this man enough times to have a working theory.
He stands there in the steam like something carved from darker stone than the rest of the world is made of, completely confident, completely unbothered by the fact that I'm staring with my lips parted.
I curl my fingers toward him. Come here.
He crosses the bathroom and opens the glass partition.
He steps into the shower, and I put both hands flat against his chest. I drag my hands outward along the patterns, feeling the hard plane of muscle underneath shift as his breathing changes. His heart slams against my right palm. Steady and brutal.
"You didn't knock," I say.
"You didn't lock the door," he says.
I slide my hands up to his shoulders, rising onto my toes, and press my mouth to his. A sound escapes me that I couldn't stop if my life depended on it. He swallows it. His tongue strokes against mine. One hand slides up the wet curve of my spine while the other grips my ass hard.
I bite his lower lip and feel his fingers dig into my hip bone, a sharp reflexive squeeze that sends a bolt of heat straight through my center.
I kiss down his jaw. His throat. I drag my tongue along the tendon there, feeling the vibration of the low sound he makes.
My knees bend. I kiss the center of his chest, the edge of the tattoo where ink meets unmarked skin, the flat plane of his stomach where the muscles tighten under my mouth.
Water streams down his body and into my eyes.
I blink it away and keep going, pressing my lips to the cut of his hip, the trail of dark hair below his navel.
His hand finds the back of my head. His fingers thread through my wet hair and hold, and when I look up at him from my knees the expression on his face guts me.
He looks wrecked. Jaw locked, nostrils flared, eyes black, burning and fixed on me. Water runs down his face and drips from his chin. His chest heaves with each breath, and the hand in my hair trembles. Trembles.
I wrap one hand around the base of him. He's thick and impossibly hard and the sound he makes when I tighten my grip is guttural, ripped from somewhere deep in his chest.
"Amanda." My name in his mouth is like a prayer and a warning in the same breath.
I hold his gaze and lower my mouth to him.