Whoever they are, they’ve made their first mistake.
They thought they could take us with eighteen men.
They thought wrong.
Chapter Six: Alexandra
Fourdayssincetheattack, and the compound moves like a body healing from surgery. Slow, deliberate, stitched together with paranoia and caffeine.
I know this because I've been watching. From Leone's quarters, which are apparently my quarters now too, I have a partial view of the courtyard through a narrow window that doesn't open. Every morning, I press my face to the glass and watch the changes. New guards on the perimeter. Construction crews patching the east fence. A burned-out SUV being towed from the courtyard, its frame still black and skeletal.
Leone's room is nothing like the guest suite they kept me in before. No burgundy, no crystal, no orchids. a bed, a desk, a weapons case bolted to the wall, and a chair by the window that I've claimed as mine. The sheets smell like him. I hate that I notice. I hate that I bury my face in the pillow when he's gone and breathe him in like some lovesick teenager.
I am not lovesick. I am a prisoner who happens to sleep in her captor's bed while he takes the chair.
Every night. The chair.
He won't sleep in the bed with me. I've offered, casually, practically, arguing that the chair is going to destroy his back and he needs real rest if he's going to keep running a war. And every night he shakes his head, sits down, stretches those long legs out, and closes his eyes like the conversation is over.
It drives me insane.
Not because I want him next to me. Not like that. But because the refusal tells me more than a confession would. He won't get in the bed because he doesn't trust himself. And that means he's thought about it. That means somewhere behind those dead-dark eyes and that locked jaw, Leone Costa has imagined lying beside me, and the idea scares him enough to choose a chair.
I find that dangerous. And hot as fuck. I shouldn’t, but I do.
The first two nights in his room, I barely slept. Not because I was scared. I've moved past scared into muddier territory, some swamp between acceptance and defiance. I didn't sleep because I could hear him breathing. Three feet away, in that stupid chair, his breath slow and measured even in sleep. Controlled even unconscious.
Who does that? Who regulates their breathing while they dream?
The third night, his breathing stuttered. Changed. Got shallow and fast, and I heard my name. Low, almost a whisper, pulled from some deep place he'd never show me while awake.
Alexandra.
I lay in the dark with my eyes wide open and my heart trying to crack through my ribs.
He doesn't know he said it. I'm sure of that. By morning, he was up before me, dressed and armored and gone, leaving coffee on the desk and a new stack of documents for me to analyze. Business as usual. Like the night never happened. Like my name hadn't been on his lips in the dark.
I drank the coffee and pretended I didn't hear it, too.
This morning, I'm at the desk reviewing a new stack of documents he left before dawn. Financial records this time. Bank transfers, shell corporations, account numbers that trace through six different countries before dead-ending in places I can't pronounce. The third player. The shadow bankrolling the Castillo’s.
I've been at it for three hours, and my eyes are burning, and the numbers are starting to swim. I push back from the desk and stretch, cracking my neck, rolling my shoulders. My body aches from sleeping in a real bed after weeks of tension. The deep ache that comes from finally relaxing muscles you didn't know you were clenching.
I need a break. I need air. I need something other than four walls and a locked door and the ghost of Leone's cologne clinging to everything I touch.
I knock on the door. The guard outside, not Axe Body Spray this time, a new guy with a jaw like a shovel, opens it a crack.
"I need to move," I say. "Walk. Stretch. Anything for fucks sake. I'm losing my mind in here."
Shovel Jaw stares at me like I asked to borrow his gun. "I'll check with—"
"Check with Leone, I know. Tell him if he doesn't let me out of this room, I'm going to start breaking things, and his weapons case looks expensive."
The guard disappears. Ten minutes later, Leone materializes in the doorway.
He's been up all night again. I can tell by the way he holds himself. Still rigid, still controlled, but there's a looseness around his eyes, a slight delay in his reactions. He's running on fumes and stubbornness.
"You want to walk," he says. Not a question.
