Enrico stood there with the phone still in his hand, jaw set, shoulders squared.Rain threaded down the window behind him.
“Whose past?”I pressed.“Yours or mine?”
His eyes lifted to mine, and there it was—the flicker of fury he couldn’t cage and the guilt he kept scraping at with bare hands.“Both.”
I wanted to step closer and shake him until secrets fell out.I wanted to run back upstairs and bar the door and pretend my world hadn’t shifted.Instead, I did the harder thing: I stayed.
“You’re shutting me out again.”
He exhaled, slow, as if forcing air through a blade.“If I give you everything, I put you in more danger.”
“And if you give me nothing, you place me in a cage.”My voice didn’t rise.It didn’t need to.“I asked you for honesty.Not comfort.Not protection dressed up as mercy.”
His mouth curved without warmth; not a smile—an admission.“Protection has never been a mercy in my world.”
There it was.The truth behind his teeth.
I took a step and then another, until the desk cut the space.“Tell me about the voice.”
He sat the device down, screen facedown like a body.“A man who should be dead.A name my father used to say like a curse—Gallo.And not just him.”
My pulse stuttered.How’s the wife?She reminds me of her mother.The chill of it had not left my bones.
“He mentioned my mother.”I forced my throat open around the sentence.“Why?”
Enrico’s eyes sharpened.“Because men like him reach for whatever cuts deepest.They say your mother’s name, or they say they knew her—anything to plant rot.Don’t let him.”
“So he’s lying?”
“I don’t know yet, but I know what he wants.He wants me to be reckless.He wants you to be afraid.”
“When you found us,” I whispered, “I saw two versions of you.I need to know which one I’m married to.”
His mouth softened at the memory, then hardened again.“Both,” he said.“And neither.I’m the man who will stop this.”
“And what doesstoplook like?”
“Death.”
The way he said it—bare, unarmored—tugged something loose in my chest.I hated that the truth could be a comfort and a wound in the same breath.
“I’m tired of being brave,” I admitted.“Just for tonight.”
He rounded the desk and stopped in front of me, close enough that the heat off him found my skin and settled there like a claim.“Say the word and I will ruin every plan I made for the night.I will keep you awake until the morning light is a mercy and the only thing you can think about is the shape of my hands.”
The breath left me in a sigh that wasn’t surrender so much as recognition.I stepped closer until the cotton of his shirt brushed my stomach, until the faint touch of his stubble lifted goosebumps along my throat.“Don’t promise what you can’t deliver.”
His smile finally reached his eyes.“I never do.”
When he kissed me, it wasn’t gentle.It was careful.His mouth tasted like rain and something darker.His hand slid to the nape of my neck, thumb finding the hinge of my jaw, guiding rather than taking.Heat unfurled low in my body, not the panicked tremor of nights ago.
“Tell me if I hurt you,” he murmured against my lips.
“You won’t.”
The room fell away.The storm outside became a metronome for a song only audible to me.He lifted me to the edge of the desk and the wood was cool beneath my thighs, a straight line under the curved chaos of us.His mouth trailed to my throat—slow, deliberate.When he reached the stitches, he stopped, breath warm as he hovered.He didn’t have to ask.I nodded, and he pressed his lips above the line, reverent, a benediction he didn’t believe he deserved to give.
I tugged at his tie and he let me strip it away, the silk whispering over my wrists.The power between us pivoted, as easy and inevitable as a door swinging on a well-oiled hinge.
