She nods, trying to convince herself this is normal, this is fine, this is just coffee with someone who helped her—not coffee with a man who's been watching her for months, not coffee with a killer.
"Goodnight, Francesca."
"Goodnight, Luca."
I wait until she's inside, until I hear her footsteps on the stairs, until I see the light turn on in her window. Then I turn and walk away, back toward Tribeca, back toward my empty penthouse and the photographs I'll look through later.
She's already mine.
The walk back takes longer than it should because I don't want to leave this neighborhood, don't want to put distance between us. But I force myself to move, one block at a time, until Hell's Kitchen gives way to the Village, then Chelsea, then the quiet streets of Tribeca where people like me live—people with money and secrets and too much empty space.
My penthouse is exactly how I left it—sterile, expensive, empty in all the ways that matter. Floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the city, furniture that costs more than most people's cars, abstract art on the walls that some decorator chose because it matched the color scheme. Everything in here is beautiful and means absolutely nothing. No family photos, no personal mementos, no evidence of who actually lives here.
I've never cared before.
Now, walking through the silence, I can't stop thinking about Francesca's tiny studio—the plants on her windowsill that she waters every Sunday morning, the photos of her family on her bookshelf, her parents and her dead brother smiling like he didn't know what was coming. The way she's turned a shoebox apartment into a home while I've got all this space and nothing.
Every inch of her place is mapped in my head. I've been inside multiple times while she slept in the hospital break roomor pulled overtime shifts. I picked the lock—pathetically easy—and walked through her life. I touched her things, memorized the way she folds her clothes, the brand of shampoo in her shower, the crack in her bathroom tile.
I want her here, in my space, making it something other than cold and empty.
I reach for the scotch—Macallan 50—and don't bother with the glass. I drink it straight from the bottle because I'm alone and I can and there's no one here to see L'Ombra drinking like a fucking animal.
Almost ten.
Observation, pattern, obsession—that's how I know everything about her. She's upstairs in that walk-up, probably still catching her breath from the climb. She'll hang her coat on the hook by the door.
Then she'll stand in her kitchen and think about what just happened. Think about me.
I take another pull of scotch and the burn feels good, grounding. I need it because every instinct I have is screaming at me to go back there. I could check the camera I installed above her building's entrance—make sure she locked the door behind her. But that's not enough. I want to pick that pathetic lock again and watch her sleep, see her in her space where she doesn't know I exist.
But I can't do it yet.
She has to miss me first.
My phone buzzes. Paulie:
All good. Wrist set. Thanks for the bonus.
I sent him extra for the broken bone. Fair is fair. I delete the message and resist the urge to throw the phone across the roombecause what I want isn't in my phone, it's across the city in an apartment I can't visit right now.
I pull out the burner instead.
Hundreds of photos of Francesca Mancini. Close to a thousand now, my obsession cataloged and saved and always in my pocket. Photos of her walking to work with coffee in her hand, hair still wet from the shower. Sitting in the park on her lunch break, face tilted toward weak winter sun. Standing in line at the bodega, counting change for eggs because she's broke and knows eggs can be used in a variety of ways.
Every mundane moment of her life, stolen and kept.
I scroll through them and heat coils low in my gut, possessive and hungry. She's mine in these photos—mine to watch, mine to study, mine to learn. And now she's mine in real life too, she just hasn't figured it out yet.
I stop on one from a couple weeks ago. She's walking down her street and she's looking over her shoulder, right at the camera, right at me. Her face is uneasy, suspicious.
She felt me watching even then.
I'm hard just looking at the photo, at the wariness written across her face, at the way her instincts were screaming at her that something was wrong. And she was right. Something was very wrong. I was wrong, am wrong, will always be wrong for her.
Doesn't matter. She's mine anyway.
The photos aren't enough now. They've kept me going for months but something changed when I touched her, when I felt her hand in mine, alive and real, when I smelled lavender and antiseptic on her skin and heard my name in her voice.
