We stood like that, hands linked, watching snow fall on a world that didn't know we existed. No kiss. No grand declaration. Just two people being honest about the terrifying thing growing between them.
He squeezed my fingers once, then let go. "Get some sleep, Valentina. Tomorrow's another long day."
But as I returned to my room, I felt his gaze following me.
And I knew sleep would be impossible.
Morning training had become our routine. Alessio positioned himself behind me, hands on my hips, adjusting my stance for the target practice.
"Feet wider. Weight forward."
His touch was careful, professional, but I felt the heat of his palms through my clothes. The way his breath ghosted across my neck when he leaned close to check my sight line.
I fired. Hit the tree trunk, missing the center by inches.
"Better," he murmured. "Again."
We spent mornings like that—him teaching me to shoot, to think tactically, to survive. I taught him about Renaissance art during lunch, my photographic memory reciting facts about paintings he'd never cared about until I made them interesting.
"Caravaggio used prostitutes as models for his Madonnas," I said one afternoon, showing him images on my phone. "The church was scandalized, but he insisted real women—womenwho'd suffered—understood divinity better than virgins ever could."
"He sounds like he understood hypocrisy."
"He understood that beauty and darkness could coexist. That grace could come from unlikely places." I met his eyes. "That monsters could create magnificent things."
Something shifted in his expression. "Are you calling me a monster, principessa?"
"I'm saying you're more complicated than you think. And that maybe creating something beautiful is still possible. Even for us."
The afternoons brought strategy sessions, planning the gala infiltration with meticulous detail. The evenings brought something softer.
The nightmare woke me gasping: Marco's hands around my throat, Richard's voice promising I'd never escape, the wedding dress turning red with blood.
I stumbled to the kitchen for water and found Alessio already there, staring into the darkness.
"You too?" he asked without turning.
"Marco. Richard. All of it replaying." I moved beside him, accepted the glass of water he poured without asking. "Does it ever stop?"
"The nightmares?" He glanced at me. "No. But they get quieter. Less frequent. Twenty years later, and I still dream about Eva's death. But I also dream about her laugh now. Her terrible singing. The good parts survive if you let them."
We stood in comfortable silence, shoulders touching.
"I dream about my mother sometimes," I admitted. "Before she left. Her reading to me in Italian, making pizzelle at Christmas. Then I wake up and remember she chose to leave me with him."
"Maybe she didn't have a choice." Alessio turned to face me fully. "Marco's the kind of man who'd make someone choose between leaving alone or staying and dying. Your mother might have left to save you both."
The possibility—that she'd loved me enough to leave—cracked something open.
"I never thought about it that way."
"Because Marco wanted you to believe she abandoned you. Made you easier to control if you thought you'd already been left once." His hand found my face, thumb brushing away tears I hadn't realized were falling. "But you're not abandoned, Valentina. Not anymore."
"Promise?"
"Promise." He pulled me into his arms, and I let myself believe him.
We stayed like that until the sky started to lighten, wrapped in each other and the quiet understanding that we were building something neither of us had ever had before.
