There's a difference.
When I slip, when I mention details about her work schedule, her late-night subway rides, things she never told me, I watch her go very still.
"I didn't tell you any of that," she says quietly.
I smile. "No. You didn't."
I don't explain. Don't backtrack. Just let her sit with the knowledge that I know more than I should, that I've been watching, that she's not as invisible as she thinks.
She should run.
She doesn't.
We talk for hours. The afternoon sun fades, shadows lengthen across MacDougal Street, and still she sits across from me, engaged, curious, cautious but not fleeing.
She wants to know what I am. Who I am.
She's brave, my Francesca... or foolish... maybe both.
When we finally leave the café, I walk her home. She lets me, even though she knows the way, even though she's walked these streets a thousand times alone.
But now she's not alone.
She's mine.
I keep close as we walk, closer than last night. When someone jostles past her on the sidewalk, my hand goes to the small of her back—protective, possessive—and I don't move it away.
She doesn't ask me to.
Outside her building, she tilts her face up. Waiting. The air between us crackles with tension, with want, with the inevitability of what's coming.
I just look at her for a long moment, then step back.
She's not ready yet.
And that's how I ended up here.
I move without sound back through her apartment, noting the tea she left on the counter, still full and cold. She made it but never drank it. Distracted. Thinking about me, probably. About the things I said at coffee, the details I shouldn't know.
She should be thinking about me.
I'm all she should be thinking about.
I let myself out the way I came in, securing the lock behind me. The hallway is empty, quiet except for the muffled sounds of the building at night. I take the stairs, muscle memory guiding me down four flights without light.
Outside, the street is quiet. A few cars pass, headlights cutting through the night, but no one pays attention to a man in black walking with purpose. I'm a shadow, blending into the night, invisible.
L'Ombra.
I've been a shadow in her life for months, watching unseen, waiting for the moment to make myself known. That moment is here. Soon she'll know everything. Soon she'll understand that there's no escaping me, no running, no going back to the life she had before I decided she was mine.
I reach my car—black SUV, tinted windows, parked two blocks away where she wouldn't see it—and slide into the driver's seat. The engine purrs to life, and I sit for a moment, thinking about the night.
I pull away from the curb and head toward Tribeca, toward my penthouse, toward the planning I need to do for the hours ahead.
The drive is short, the streets quiet at this hour. I park in my building's garage and take the elevator to the top floor, to the sterile space I call home. It has floor-to-ceiling windows, designer furniture, everything clean and impersonal and empty.
It's nothing like Francesca's apartment.
