I understand completely.
I step back. His hands fall away. We stand there for one more second that stretches out long and aching between us.
Then I turn and walk to the stairs on legs that don't feel entirely solid, and I climb them without looking back because if I look back I will not keep walking.
Behind me, I hear him exhale. Long and slow and completely controlled.
Like it costs him everything.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Rafael leaves at six in the morning, which is the only decent thing he's done since he got here.
The sky is pale grey bleeding into rose at the edges where the sun is just starting to push through, that particular early light that makes everything look washed out and temporary. I'm already on the porch when he comes out, coffee in my hand, watching the tree line the way I've been watching it since last night, when sleep stopped being something my body was interested in.
I hear him before I see him, his boots on the porch steps, his bag hitting the wood.
"Early," I say.
"Long drive." He drops into the chair beside me and stretches his legs out, looking out at the same tree line I've been staring at. "Also I figured if I stayed for breakfast I'd have to watch you twonot look at each other for another two hours and I don't have the patience."
I say nothing.
"The guy from yesterday," he says, no preamble, voice low. "I took care of it last night. Figured you had enough going on to handle that too."
I look at him. "You should've told me."
"I'm telling you now. It's handled. Clean." He meets my eyes. "You're welcome."
"Thank you."
He nods once, then leans back and looks out at the same tree line I've been staring at, and the silence between us is the comfortable kind, the kind that fifteen years of friendship builds without you noticing.
"If you do something stupid," he says eventually, still looking at the trees, "without talking to Matteo first — and I mean before anything happens, before you touch her, before you say a word to her — the probability of him killing you goes from maybe to definitely." He pauses. "You understand me?"
"Rafe—"
"I'm serious." He turns and looks at me directly, no smirk, no amusement, nothing but the weight of what he actually means. "Talk to him first. That's all I'm saying."
The door opens behind us.
Isabella appears in the doorway, hair loose and tangled from sleep, wearing my shirt again over the pajamas Rafael brought, her feet bare on the cold wood of the porch. She looks between us with those sharp eyes that don't miss anything, taking in Rafael's bag, the car keys in his hand.
"Am I interrupting?"
Rafael's expression shifts immediately, the serious look dissolving into something warm and easy. "No, Princess. Come here."
She steps out onto the porch and he stands, and there's a moment where she's small next to him and he looks at her with something almost brotherly, something uncomplicated that I watch with my coffee in my hand and my jaw tight for reasons I don't examine.
"Did you sleep well?"
She makes a sound that could generously be described as affirmative, pressing her lips together, and he laughs.
"That good, huh."
"Rafe." She stops, and something in her voice shifts, going quieter, more careful. "I'm sorry. About yesterday. When you touched my wrist and I—" She shakes her head. "I'm not scared of you. I want you to know that. It's not about you, I just can't always stop the?—"
"Hey." He cuts her off, not unkindly, and shakes his head once. "You don't have to explain anything to me. And you absolutely don't have to apologize." He says it simply and completely, no performance in it. "Not for a single second. Understood?"
