I stay out there until the cold gets serious about it, and then I go back inside.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
RAFAEL
The bathroom was three days ago and I still can't sleep.
That's the part that irritates me most. Not the situation itself, not the marriage, not the particular complication of having a woman in my house who looks at me like she's trying to solve a problem she didn't agree to have. I've managed more complicated things than this without losing a night's rest. I've sat across tables from men who wanted me dead and eaten well afterward.
Three fucking days. And every time I close my eyes I'm back in that damned bathroom.
The water running down her skin when she stood up. The robe that did nothing to hide her nakedness. The way her hands came up to my chest like she didn't decide to do it, like her body just went ahead without consulting her. The sound she made whenI tilted my head down, barely a sound, just breath, just her lips parting and I felt it in my back teeth.
I walked out.
I walked out because I made a decision in that hallway on our wedding night that I would not take something she hadn't offered, and I stand by my decisions. That's not the problem. The problem is what it cost me.
What it’s costing me even now.
I was so hard walking back to my side of the suite I had to stand at the window for ten minutes with my hands braced on the frame, staring at the grounds, running numbers in my head like a man doing penance. Alliance figures. Shipment weights. Anything with edges to it, anything that wasn't the specific weight of her hands on my chest or the way her throat looked when her head went back.
It didn't work.
It’s not going to work now either.
I get up from the chair.
The study is the right place for this. The study has files, ledgers, the particular density of work that requires enough of the mind to crowd everything else out. I've used it that way before, inworse situations than this. I know it works. I pull on a shirt and go.
The desk is exactly as I left it. I stand behind it for a moment, hands on the back of the chair, and let the room do what it usually does — the familiar weight of it, the order, the sense that everything in here has a purpose and a place and nothing is complicated without reason. Then I sit down and open the top folder.
Need to fucking get some work done.
Alliance records. Matteo had forwarded the De Luca files earlier in the week, a full consolidated archive, the kind of due diligence that gets done after the contract is already signed, which is the kind of thing Matteo does when he wants me to know he's watching how this unfolds. The financial ledgers are first. I move through them methodically — holdings, transfers, the slow map of where the De Luca money actually lives versus where it's declared to live. Nothing surprising. Salvatore De Luca is careful in the way men are when they've been doing it long enough that the hiding is automatic.
Political correspondences next. Alliances, favors, a decades-long record of a man who collects obligations the way other men collect property. I read it the way I read everything––once, completely, committing what matters.
At the back of the folder there's a sealed dossier. Thinner than the rest. Personal, not operational. The kind of file that gets included because someone decided it was relevant.
I break the seal. And then I stare because right here is the picture of my new wife.
Gia De Luca. At age nineteen. Formal engagement to a man named Cosimo Arcuri. I know the name. Arcuri has been dead for five years. Older than her by twenty years. Old money, old violence, the kind of man whose reputation arrived in a room before he did and made people rearrange their seats.
The bastard was known for his possessiveness and violence.
I read the engagement contract first. Standard language on the surface, the usual transfer of considerations, but the specific clauses around her conduct, her movement, her contact with family, those aren't standard. Those are ownership documents dressed in legal language. I've seen enough of both to know the difference.
Fucking hell.
The witness statements are next. I read them slowly.
The wedding day. An ambush during the celebration, politically motivated, not personal, the statements are clear on this, multiple sources confirming the same sequence. Arcuri's enemies, a long-running dispute over territory that had nothing to do with Gia and everything to do with the man she'd been sold to. He died at the table. She was beside him.
The statements describe a nineteen-year-old girl sitting in the middle of a firefight she had no part in creating, at a wedding she had no real choice about attending, next to a man she'd spent the engagement period documenting bruises from.
That last part is in the medical report tucked behind the statements. Brief, clinical, the language of a doctor writing down what they saw without editorializing. I read it twice.
I close the file.
