Peace.
Not safety. Not security. I know better than to confuse the two. But peace. The silence of a mind that has finally, after years of grinding noise, found someone worth being still for.
She shifts against me, her leg sliding over mine, and I tighten my arm around her. She fits against me in a way that feels engineered. Like someone designed her dimensions to fill the exact space I've been hollowing out for twenty years.
"You're not going back to the chair," she murmurs against my skin.
"No."
"Good." She presses a kiss to my chest, right over my heart. "That chair was ugly anyway."
I almost laugh. The sound catches in my throat, foreign and strange, and she tilts her head up to look at me. Her eyes are soft. Satisfied. Dangerous in a way that has nothing to do with weapons or war.
"This changes things," I say.
"I know."
"If Aurelio finds out..."
"I know that too."
"And you're not scared?"
She props herself up on her elbow, looking down at me. Her hair falls around her face, and I reach up to push it back, tucking it behind her ear the way I did in the corridor. The way that started all of this.
"I stopped being scared of you weeks ago," she says. "Now I'm only scared of what happens if someone takes this away."
I pull her down against me, wrapping both arms around her, pressing my mouth to the top of her head.
"No one takes this away," I say. "Not Aurelio. Not the Castillo’s. Not whoever is hiding behind those bank accounts. No one."
She settles against me. Her breathing evens out. Her body goes heavy and warm, melting into mine.
I lie in the dark, holding a woman I swore I'd never let myself want, and listen to the compound breathe around us. Soldiers on patrol. Engines idling in the courtyard. The distant murmur of a world that wants to tear us apart.
Claudio was right. The middle ground was killing me.
But this isn't middle ground. This is a cliff edge, and I've finally stepped off it, and the fall feels nothing like I expected.
It feels like landing.
I tighten my arms around her and close my eyes.
Chapter Eight: Alexandra
Iwakeupwarm.
Not the artificial warmth of expensive sheets or overworked heating systems. Real warmth. The kind that radiates from skin pressed against skin, from an arm heavy across my waist, from breath stirring the hair at the back of my neck in slow, even intervals.
Leone is still asleep.
I know this because his grip on me is loose. Awake, he holds everything with precision. Tools, weapons, people. But right now his arm drapes over me like it forgot to be careful, his fingers curled against my stomach, his knee wedged between mine. His chest is flush against my back, and I can feel his heartbeat, slow and deep, thumping against my shoulder blade.
I don't move.
I barely breathe.
Because if I move, he'll wake up. And if he wakes up, the mask goes back on. The soldier reassembles himself from the wreckage of the man who fell asleep holding me, and we go back to pretending that last night didn't crack the world open.
