His hand stills on my waist. I feel the shift in his breathing. The subtle tension that runs through him before he deliberately relaxes.
When I risk a glance at his face, he’s smiling. Not smug. Not gloating. Something softer, almost tender. Like I’ve given him a gift I didn’t know I was offering.
“There you are,” he murmurs. So quiet I almost don’t hear it.
My body is a traitor.
I let him feed me in silence. Let his hand rest on my stomach. Let myself lean back against his chest when my spine gives out from sitting straight for too long.
It’s tactical, I tell myself. I’m just pretending to soften, just waiting for him to slip.
That’s what I tell myself.
After dinner, he walks me to my wing like he always does, hand hovering at my elbow. Not touching, just present.
He says goodnight and leaves me at my door. I should go in. Shower. Sleep. Plot his murder like a normal captive. Instead, I wait until his footsteps fade down the corridor. Count to sixty. Then slip back out.
The house is quieter at night. My guard is thankfully elsewhere, probably having a well-deserved break.
I follow the low light down a side corridor I haven’t explored yet. The walls here are older, the stone less restored. Paintings line the hallway, smaller than the ones in the main rooms. More personal.
A door stands slightly ajar. Warm light spills through the gap.
I push it open.
The gallery is… intimate. Soft lamps casting pools of gold across polished wood floors. Gilt frames holding old masters, icons, devotional paintings. The air smells like wood polish and a faint incense, like it’s a chapel.
I’m about to step back when I see him.
Elio stands in front of a Renaissance Madonna. Mother and child, gold halo, blue robes that remind me of the angel wing in my cathedral. The painting is beautiful. Fifteenth century, Florentine school maybe, the kind of piece museums would kill for.
He doesn’t notice me.
His shoulders are relaxed in a way I’ve never seen. The rigid control he wears like armor is gone, stripped away. His face is open. Raw.
The expression I catch on him is not hunger. Not calculation. Not the patient predator I’ve been studying for days.
It’s grief.
His eyes shine in the low light. Dark and wet at the edges. His hand hovers at his chest, pressing against his sternum like something inside aches.
The Madonna gazes past him. Serene and unreachable. Her painted eyes hold the same tenderness they’ve held for five hundred years.
He stares at her like she’s the only person who was ever kind to him.
My hate stutters.
I wanted him to be simple. A sociopath in a beautiful suit. Monsters are easier to catalogue when they’re cleanly inhuman, when you can map their damage without getting lost in the complexity underneath. But this is a man in pain. A man standing alone in a private chapel, grieving something I don’t understand, looking at a painted mother like she holds answers he’ll never get.
Who did you lose?
The question rises before I can stop it. I bite it back. Swallow it down. Asking makes it real. Asking means caring, and I don’t. I can’t.
He senses me finally and turns.
The shutters slam down with frightening speed. In the space of a breath, he goes from raw to controlled, from open to locked. The predator returns. The mask slides back into place.
But I saw what was underneath.
