Chapter 6
Serafina
Iwoke up in someone else’s life.
The sheets smelled like cedar and something clean underneath—not cologne, not detergent, but the echo of a body that had slept here enough times to leave itself in the fabric. His body. His sheets. His pillow under my head, dented in the shape of a skull that wasn’t mine.
For thirty seconds, I didn’t move.
This is the part I won’t forgive myself for.
Thirty seconds of lying still with my face pressed into Marco Caruso’s pillow, breathing him in like a woman who had earned this—like I belonged in these sheets, in this warmth, in this clean cedar scent that was settling into my skin and my hair and the cotton of his T-shirt and making everything smell like his.
Thirty seconds of something I didn’t have a name for and didn’t want to find one.
Something that felt, in the early gray light of a Chicago dawn, dangerously close to comfort.
Then my brain came online and I sat up so fast the headboard cracked against the wall.
My god.
I was wearing his T-shirt. Gray, soft, the collar stretched wide enough to expose my left shoulder.
It smelled like him. Everything smelled like him.
My legs were bare from mid-thigh down—the sweatpants had ridden up in the night, bunched around my knees, and I pulled them down with the urgent modesty of someone who had just remembered that a man was sleeping twelve feet away on the other side of a wall.
The ruined Bialetti sat on the nightstand.
I’d put it there. At three in the morning, after the coffee, after the kitchen, after the silence that said everything and the words that said more.
I’d carried it into the bedroom and set it beside the lamp the way you’d set a glass of water—automatically, without thinking, because whatever part of my brain handled nightstand logistics had decided that my dead grandmother’s scorched coffee pot belonged within arm’s reach while I slept.
I touched the blackened aluminum. The handle had melted into a shape that looked like a question mark. Fitting.
I got up.
The suite was quiet. I padded barefoot through the hallway, past the kitchen where two ceramic cups sat unwashed on the counter, dark rings of coffee at their bottoms like the records of a conversation I was still trying to translate.
Past the couch where a blanket was folded—not thrown, folded, the corners aligned—and a pillow still bore the impression of his head.
He was nowhere to be seen.
“Come on, Sera, get up.”
The bathroom.
His shampoo lingered in the air like a ghost with good taste—something herbal, faintly green, the kind of product that came in a dark bottle with a label designed by someone who understood that men would pay for simplicity. The heated mirror gave me back a woman I didn’t recognize.
Hair loose. Tangled. Falling past my shoulders in the waves that happened when I didn’t pull it back—the natural state I hadn’t shown anyone outside my bedroom in Monreale since I was nineteen.
No makeup. My grandmother’s gold chain catching the bathroom light against skin that was bare and exposed and wearing another man’s clothing in another man’s space in another man’s country.
I looked like someone who had been undone.
Like a knot that had been holding something in place and was now loosened, the tension redistributed, the shape changed.
The woman in the mirror had the same face I’d carried through airports and boardrooms and the back room at Marchetti’s, but something was different.
Softer. Less defended. The woman in the mirror looked like she’d slept well in a bed that wasn’t hers, and the fact that she had—that I had—made my stomach do something complicated and unpleasant.
But I wasn’t that soft. I still had to be safe.
I swept the suite.
I checked the smoke detector in the bedroom: standard, no modification, the battery compartment clean.
The desk lamp: solid base, no cavity. The electrical outlets: factory standard, no secondary wiring.
The bathroom vent: dust on the grille, undisturbed.
I ran my fingers along the window frames, checked behind the headboard, examined the nightstand drawer—empty except for a pen, a phone charger, and a paperback novel with a cracked spine.
Nothing.
No cameras. No microphones. No transmitters concealed in the fixtures or the furniture or the carefully chosen toiletries.
Either Marco Caruso had access to surveillance technology sophisticated enough to evade a manual sweep—possible, but expensive and unnecessary for a guest he’d invited himself—or this suite was clean.
He hadn’t bugged his own home.
I stood in the middle of his bedroom with my hands at my sides and processed the implication.
Finding a device would have been simple.
Expected. Manageable. I would have cataloged it, adjusted my behavior, used the knowledge as leverage.
The playbook for surveillance was one I’d memorized before I could drive.
There was no playbook for this.
Ugh. I felt something. For him.
The way he’d run in last night to save me. The way his skin had gleamed as the water from the sprinklers had wet him.
It felt good to think of him. It felt dangerous.
I should contact a hotel. The thought arrived crisp and professional and absolutely correct.
A hotel would restore the distance. The protocol.
The clean separation between evaluation and whatever this was—this barefoot, cedar-scented, T-shirt-wearing dissolution of every boundary I’d constructed between myself and the youngest Caruso brother.
I’d do it later. After coffee. After I’d retrieved my things from downstairs. After I’d dressed in something that wasn’t his.
I would.
The sound came from somewhere deep in the suite.
Rhythmic. Heavy. The particular thud of something solid hitting something solid—not a crash, not an alarm, but a pattern. Impact, pause, impact. The kind of sound that lived in the body before the ears processed it, felt in the sternum and the back of the jaw.
My pulse spiked before my brain caught up.
Last night’s alarm was still in my nervous system—the shriek of the sprinkler system, the water under the door, the chemical smell of scorched aluminum. My body didn‘t wait for analysis. My body was already moving, bare feet on hardwood, toward the sound.
I found a door I hadn’t noticed. At the end of the hallway, past the bathroom, set into the wall at an angle that made it disappear when you weren’t looking for it.
It was ajar. Light leaked through the gap—not the warm amber of the suite’s lamps but something harsher, whiter, the flat illumination of a space built for function.
I pushed it open.
My jaw dropped.
A home gym. Small. Brutally minimal. No mirrors. No music. No television. Nothing decorative, nothing performative, nothing that existed for any reason other than the work itself.
Nothing except him. Alone.
Shirtless.
His back was to me and I saw it first—the shape of him stripped of everything I’d been using to categorize him for a week.
The tailored shirts, the rolled sleeves, the carefully calibrated presentation of a man who understood that clothes were a language and dressed in fluent persuasion.
All of it was gone. What was left was his body.
And oh my god what a body.
He was lean the way a cable is lean—not bulky, not built for show, but dense with the kind of muscle that comes from use rather than intention.
His shoulders were broader than his shirts suggested, the deltoids defined, the traps pulling a clean line from his neck to the point of each shoulder.
His back—God, his back. The scapulae moved under his skin like machinery as he drove his fist into the bag, the muscles along his spine contracting and releasing in a rhythm that was almost beautiful and entirely violent.
Sweat followed the channel of his spine, gathering in the hollow at the base, catching the overhead light.
He hit the bag again. The chain rattled.
His body rotated into the strike—hips, core, shoulder, arm—a kinetic chain that started in his feet and ended at his knuckles and contained, in its execution, none of the warmth or ease or charm I’d been studying all week.
This was unpretty. This was the thing underneath the thing.
His hands were wrapped in black cotton, the fabric dark with sweat, and he hit the bag like he was trying to reach something on the other side of it.
Something he was trying to burn out.
He turned into the next combination—a hook, a cross, a movement that brought his body around by forty-five degrees—and I saw the rest.
The scar first. A thin line across his ribs on the left side, old, healed to a pale ridge that stood out against his olive skin.
Small, but real. The kind of mark that came from something sharp and deliberate—not an accident, not a childhood fall.
A cut. Someone had cut him, or something had, and he’d healed from it and kept it hidden under the shirts and the charm and the reputation of the brother who didn’t wear the family’s violence on his skin.
Then the tattoo.
Small. I’d been told—I‘d read—no visible tattoos. And it wasn’t visible, not when he was dressed, not when the shirts covered his ribs and the performance covered everything else.
A few words in Latin, inked in a fine, precise script that curved along the lower edge of his ribcage, following the line of bone.
I was too far away to read it. Close enough to know it was there, and that it existed in the same category as the scar—a private thing, a hidden thing, a piece of Marco Caruso that the world hadn’t been invited to see.
I forgot how to breathe.