You didn’t tell me about the job with Mara—” Her lips press together the second it’s out; she knows she’s just thrown her own secret a mirror. She shrugs. “Yes, I have my sources too. You wanted to wait until the optics was right or some such bullshit, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t tell you,” I say carefully, “because you have pride like glass—beautiful but sharp. And yes, I wanted to present it clean when it suited us both, not thrust it at you in a room full of sharks. But there’s the difference, I didn’t tell youyet. You didn’t tell me at all.”
She closes her eyes. A tear tracks; she swats it, furious with herself, then gives up and lets the next one fall. “Fine. So I handled it badly.”
“Yes.” I don’t soften it. If I do now, I’ll teach us the wrong thing. “You did.”
“I was trying to make amends for ten years ago,” she says, and her mouth twists around the confession. “For not being brave enough then. For letting other people decide who I was allowed to want. I thought—if I could just hold the monster off this one time—if I could keep you from bleeding for my father again?—”
“I still bleed when you lock the door and fight alone,” I say, and it lands because she swallows like it stings. Just as I attempt to swallow thewant, notlove. “Every time. Because you side with him, not me.”
Silence eats the room in bites. Amalfi breathes at the windows like a thing amused by human dramas. The empty box sits between us like a prop from the ugliest scene in a play we’ve been forced to stage.
“I’ll get it back,” she says, too fast. “I’ll—I have the courier log and the address. I can trace the?—”
“We’ll get it back,” I correct, because I can’t stop being the man who fixes. “But not tonight. And not at the price you just paid without me. But you’ll never wear it on your skin again. Harrison taints everything.”
Her mouth trembles. “So what now? You’re going to send me away. Call this a bust?”
A laugh barks out of me because even in this raging storm, it’s the very last thing I want. “I’m not sending you anywhere.” I look at the bed and the door to the small sitting room and choose the line that hurts us short to spare us long. “But I’m sleeping next door.”Before I do something I’ll regret…like drop to my fucking knees and plead for a love I’m beginning to doubt will ever be mine.
“Vasso.” My name comes out a rasp. She steps toward me once, twice, then stops as if the floor has turned to water and she’s not sure she deserves to swim. “Please don’t… make this the story.”
“The story,” I say, tasting the word as if I can change its flavor, “is that I will walk into every room with you and take the blows that are mine and half the ones that aren’t, but I won’t take the knife you hide behind your back and thank you for the surprise.”
Her shoulders fold, then square. “I hear you.”
“I hope so.” I snatch up a pillow. Stupid domestic choreography for a battlefield. At the door I pause. There’s a version of this night where I go back, where I say fine, where we paper it over and call the seams pretty words. That version ends the way my father’s first job ended: with someone else’s signature on a document that ruins us and a fixer smiling.
I open the door instead.
Behind me, the smallest sound—like a glass chiming and then cracking.
I turn.
Naomi’s hand is over her mouth and her eyes are wide and wet and furious with themselves. The first sob rips through her like it doesn’t care who hears. She catches it too late, as if catching matters.
“Don’t,” she says, and I’m not sure if she meansdon’t goordon’t watchordon’t make me ask.
I stand there in the frame and do none of the things I want. I let it be ugly. I let it be true. I let her cry without offering the easy arm and the easier promise, because if I do that now, we will drag this rot into every room we enter and call it furniture.
“I’ll be next door,” I say, and close the door on the sound of the sea and my wife breaking.
On the sofa in the small room I sit in the dark and let the anger drain until what’s left is the older thing I don’t like admitting: fear. Of patterns. Of driveways. Of the way love turns smart men into fools and fools into kings and then back again when they aren’t looking.
I text Mara:Contingency plan: if trust wobbles, Rome tomorrow. Prep counsel.
She replies a thumb and a dagger, which I appreciate more than a paragraph. I type a message to Naomi—delete it. Another—delete. In the end I send nothing.
When the sky is the color of midnight blue silk, I doze for stretches that feel like five minutes and wake with resolve where sleep should be.
Then I text my security sharks for an update on Harrison.
Their response mildly reassures:No moves made.
If that changes I’ll go to Rome for a rapid-fire counterstrike to steady the vote.
If not…we head to Milan, because nothing’s changed about the public war my beautiful wife and I’ve chosen.
