I snap my head up. Matteo stands perfectly still in the doorframe. He is fresh from the shower. Water drips from his dark hair, trailing down the sharp silver at his temples. The thick gold medallion rests flat against his sternum.
He does not look angry. He looks devastatingly empty.
I do not drop the file. I do not step back. I square my shoulders, holding his gaze across the length of the room. "You left the door open."
"The alarms override the locks." He steps fully into the office. His boots make no sound on the floorboards. The sheer size of him eclipses the light from the hallway. He stops on the opposite side of the desk. He looks down at the open folder. He looks at the heavy silver cross in my hand.
He does not reach for it. He stares at it.
"Carlo's cross," he murmurs. The gravel in his voice is thick. "He was wearing it when he went to the warehouse meeting. The police gave it to me at the morgue in a little plastic evidence bag. It still had blood in the grooves."
My stomach drops. A cold stone of pure grief settles in my gut. "Matteo."
"I was twenty-four." He lifts his eyes to mine. The darkness in them is absolute. There is no feral possessiveness right now. No primal dominance. Just a gaping, bleeding wound that has never healed. "The phone rang at one in the morning. A contact. An anonymous tip. They said Carlo went to a meeting in the South Side and things went sideways. They gave me a cross street. They didn't tell me he was dead."
He pauses. The muscles in his jaw feather as he clenches his teeth.
"It was raining," he continues, his voice flattening out into a monotonous recitation. He has replayed this memory a million times. "Driving rain. Wipers couldn't keep up. I parked two blocks away and ran. I turned the corner into the alley. The cops weren't there yet. Just garbage cans and broken pallets. And him."
I cannot speak. Any words I could offer would be cheap, meaningless platitudes. I just stand there, holding the silver cross, anchoring him to the present while he bleeds out in the past.
"He was on his back," Matteo says, his gaze drifting away from my face, fixing on a spot on the wall behind me. "The water was rushing down the slope of the asphalt, washing the blood away into the storm drain. I dropped to my knees. I grabbed his coat. I yelled at him to get up. I thought... I don't know what I thought. He was Carlo Costa. He was invincible. You don't execute a boss and dump him in an alley like trash."
His massive chest rises in a sharp, jagged inhale.
"I sat in the mud with him until the sirens started. The cops pulled me off him. The next morning, Turi drove me to thecounty morgue. Dominic was dealing with identifying Igor and his wife. I had to do Carlo. White tile. Stainless steel tables. The smell of bleach and formaldehyde. They pulled back the sheet."
He blinks. The spell breaks. He looks back at me, the emptiness replaced by a heavy, suffocating exhaustion.
"Since that morning," Matteo says softly, "my mind has been a battlefield. There is no quiet. Every siren, every screeching tire, every phone call in the middle of the night. It's a constant, endless loop of threat assessment. Retaliation. Logistics. Blood for blood. Twenty years of screaming."
He leans his heavy palms against the edge of the mahogany desk. The wood groans under his weight.
"I couldn't sleep," he confesses, the admission raw and grating in the silent room. "If I closed my eyes, I was back in the alley. The rain. The mud. So I started going to the kitchen. My grandmother taught me how to bake when I was a kid. Flour. Water. Yeast. Action and reaction. It requires absolute focus. You have to measure precisely. You have to work the dough with your hands until the gluten structures align. You have to wait for the rise."
He looks down at his hands. The knuckles are bruised and scraped from the brutal recoil of his weapon during the gunfight downstairs.
"It was the only time the noise stopped," he says. "The only time the noise shut down." I baked bread for twenty years just to buy myself two hours of silence a night."
The pieces click into place, locking tight. My chest aches with the full weight of his admission. He is handing me the darkest,most broken part of his soul. He is trusting me with the ruin underneath the armor.
He looks up at me again. The dark, brooding eyes sharpen, locking onto mine with an intensity that steals the air from my lungs.
"And then I brought you here."
The air in the office suddenly feels too thick to breathe. The distance between us across the desk is a physical agony.
"Clara," he rumbles, my name a prayer on his lips. "Earlier tonight. Standing in my kitchen, swinging a baseball bat at my head, smelling like chalkboard dust and fresh linen. You opened your mouth and sassed me. And the room went silent."
I swallow hard. The cold stone in my gut melts into a rush of intense, overwhelming heat.
"The noise stopped," he repeats, pushing off the desk and walking slowly around the edge. He moves like a predator, focused on his prey. "For the first time in twenty years, I didn't need the flour. I didn't need the dough. I needed to look at you. I needed you in my space."
He steps directly in front of me. The heat rolling off his damp skin envelops me. He is so massive he blocks out the monitors, the blueprints, the stolen logs. He blocks out the entire brutal world.
"Matteo," I whisper, my voice shaking.
He reaches out. His massive, scarred hand wraps gently around my wrist. He guides my hand up, pressing the oxidized silver cross flat against the center of his chest, right over the heavy thud of his heart.
