Chapter Ten
Nick
By the time I get Bianchi back to my room in the mansion down the end, it’s almost dawn. He’s quiet, too quiet, and his eyes are still red, his face still bruised from that asshole Gatti. His nose is swollen.
“I’ll get you an icepack for your face,” I tell him. “There’s a freezer in the kitchen downstairs. They’ll have frozen peas or some shit.”
“No,” he says at once, and turns to look at me from his undressing. He’s down to his underwear, and my cock gives an unwelcome twitch.Not the time. “Please don’t leave me alone again,” Carlo is saying. His eyes are wild and wide. I don’t think he’s even seen the room since we got in. We had tosneakpast the Boss’s room, like kids coming home late praying no one would hear us. My aim is to give us an alibi by confessing tomorrow morning, but I don’t want to drag the Boss into this more than I have to. So far, no one has seen us, and it’ll be easier to fudge the timeline if we keep it that way.
Obviously I’ll need to tell Luca what happened tonight. No question. He’s not going to be happy about it, but he needs to know. After Carlo settles I plan to go wake Luca up, hoping he’s not still occupied with Finch, but one look at Carlo now makes up my mind for me. The news can wait. Gatti will be just as dead in the daylight.
“I won’t leave you,” I promise him, and then I go over to him and put my arms around him like I can hug away the whole shitshow of this night. He’s shivering. I hope it’s not shock. It’s pretty cool in here; the AC keeps it an even temperature, and it’s too hot outside to turn it off. So I pull Carlo over to the bed, put him in it, then lock the door, strip off, and get in next to him, leaning up on my elbow to the lamp on the bedside table. I pause with my finger over the switch, then leave it on. It’s only a dim yellow glow, after all.
“We are so fucked,” Carlo mutters when I turn back to him, and then he snuggles into my arms like it’s natural. We fit together well. I wonder if he notices that, how his head cradles perfectly into the curl of my arm, how his legs fall apart to let one of mine tuck up between them.
“You keep saying that, but we’re not.”
“I keep saying it because it’s true.”
Normally this bickering might piss me off, but Carlo’s usually-warm toffee eyes are scared. It’s strange seeing him like this. Man has the kind of self-confidence most people call arrogance. I’ve seen him face down every kind of verbal assault before—but tonight was different. Might be the first time he’s ever felt at risk, physically.
I hug him tighter. “Trust me, Harvard. You’re safe.”
“How can you know that?”
“Because I’m a Morelli and we take care of our own.”
“But I’m only Morelli-adjacent, and if the Boss finds out—”
“I told you, I’ll talk to Luca about it myself. We’re tight. He’ll understand. Anyone came at Finch like that, he’d do the same.” Shit, I shouldn’t have said that. Sounds like I’m inlovewith Bianchi or something, as if our hookups are anything like the D’Amatos’ marriage. He’s looking at me closely, his eyebrows knitting together in that little frown he gets when his brain’s ticking over. So I go on fast: “Worse comes to worst, I’ll take the blame.”
At least that interrupts his thinking. “What? No,” he says. “No way. They’llkillyou, the Giulianos.”
“They might try. They’ve tried before. I’m still standing, but more than one Gee found his way into the ground thanks to me.”
His face is doubtful, but in the end he seems to accept it. I’m glad about that, because he’s probably right. Anyone finds out about this—anyone outside Luca—it’ll be open season on me. And I have more than one old Gee enemy out there just waiting for me to fuck up.
* * *
I don’t sleep,but Carlo does—in fits and starts, and with plenty of nightmares to make it feel like the darkness drags on past time. But at last it’s morning, late enough to make it seem like we slept in after a night of fun, and I wake him carefully, smoothing a hand over his face, checking the bruises in the morning light before he really knows what I’m doing. They’re not too bad. One of his nostrils is slightly crusted with dry blood, but a shower’ll fix it. There’s a mark on his cheek and his eyes, when they squint open, are still red. But maybe that’s just the lack of sleep, and it’ll be easy for others to think that, anyway.
As for me, the only issue I have is my hands. They’re blistered and aching from all the rowing I did last night.
“Fuck,” is the first thing Carlo mutters.
“Morning, sunshine.”
“Fuck. We are fu—”
I kiss him, because I don’t want him to spiral back into that, not this morning. This morning, we both need to act like we’re totally innocent, except for the unauthorized fucking we’ve been doing.
Maybe I also kissed him because I’ve been waiting all night to do it again, watching his lips puff and blow out little breaths in his sleep. After what happened last night, I’ll never be able to kiss him again. We’ll have to go our separate ways.
Too dangerous otherwise.
“You have morning breath,” he murmurs afterwards.
“So do you,” I say, stung, and then he smirks and pushes me over in the bed, rolling onto me. He kisses me again, hard and deep, and then folds his arms on my chest and rests his chin on them, looking into my face.
