"It's a stubborn sign. Those are different things." Leone hangs up.
I sit in the booth for another minute. Carmelo waits without impatience because Carmelo doesn't experience impatience. He experiences presence, and the presence right now is two men in a restaurant booth who just offered the enemy a handshake over the bodies of trafficked children, and the handshake is going to work because some crimes are too ugly for rivalry to survive.
I drive back to the compound. It's late and Savannah's light is off. I stop outside her door, the way I did the other night, and I listen for the nothing behind the wood.
I press my palm flat against the door and hold it there for a few seconds.
Then I go to my room and I sit on my bed and I think about Renzo Ferrara. A man who knew my father and looked at me with honesty and said his sons have his eyes. I don't know what to do with that because nobody has ever told me anything good about my father and the kindness of it from an enemy at a negotiation table is the last thing I expected tonight.
Carmelo was right. He'll say yes.
And when he does, the war changes shape. Two families who've been tearing each other apart for years, turning in the same direction for the first time, aimed at a man named Kreiss who thought he was invisible and is about to find out how fucking wrong he was.
Chapter Ten: Savannah
Thecallcomesatsix in the evening.
Ferrara said yes.
The compound reacts the way compounds react to good news during wartime, which is to say everyone gets louder for about twenty minutes and then cracks open a bottle of whiskey. Leone calls a briefing and plans are drawn. The joint operation at the marina will deploy within the week, Bonaccorso and Castillo teams coordinated for the first time.
I sit in the briefing because I have a chair now and nobody questions it. I listen to Leone lay out the operational structure and Alexandra walk through the financial intercept strategy and Claudio explain how the Vidal extraction will work. Carmelo doesn't speak. He sharpens a knife in the corner, which I've come to understand is his version of active listening.
Emilio sits beside me with his knee bouncing and his energy at full strength because the Castillo meeting went well and the alliance is forming. He's alive with excitement. Talking, gesturing, interrupting Leone to suggest tactical adjustments that Leone considers and sometimes accepts, and the whole time his leg is bouncing, and his hands are moving and his body is throwing off heat. Here I am, sitting next to all of that trying to pay attention to the briefing while my body pays attention to something else entirely.
I've been thinking about him since the gym. Since the corridor during the Castillo attack. Since the night he was gone and the compound was quiet and I lay in bed staring at the ceiling and admitted to myself, in the dark where nobody could hear it, that I wanted him. Not in the abstract, not in the someday-maybe-if-things-were-different way. I wanted him in the specific, immediate, physical way that makes your skin feel too tight and your breath come short and your mind run scenarios that have nothing to do with survival and everything to do with the sounds a man makes when he's inside you.
I've been fucking wet for three days and if he doesn’t fuck me soon, I might drown in my own pussy juice.
The briefing finally ends at nine. Soldiers file out. Leone and Alexandra disappear toward the private wing to check on Aurelio. Claudio and Charlotte leave together, his hand on the small of her back, her head tilted toward him, in that cute nauseating way couple walk together.
Emilio lingers. He's standing by the map on the wall, pretending to study it, but his eyes keep finding me across the room. I'm inthe chair, legs crossed, bottle cap in my fingers, watching him pretend not to watch me.
"You going to stare at that map all night or are you going to walk me to your room?" I ask.
He turns. The grin starts and I watch it build across his face, the slow version, the one that starts in his eyes and works its way down. "You want me to walk you to your room."
"I didn’t stutter. I want you to walk me toyourroom."
The grin stops building. His whole body goes still, which is rare enough that I notice it the way you notice when music cuts out mid-song. The bouncing stops. The restless energy pauses. He looks at me and his eyes are dark and the question in them is real.
"Uh..."
"Don't make me say it twice, Emilio."
He crosses the room in four steps. His hand finds the back of my neck, and he pulls me up out of the chair and his mouth is on mine before I'm fully standing. I grab the front of his shirt and pull him in. The kiss is not gentle and not patient and not anything except two people who have been circling each other for days and are fucking done with it.
His tongue is in my mouth, and my hands are on his chest and he walks me backward toward the door, one arm around my waist, the other hand still on my neck, his fingers in my hair, gripping at the root. He kicks the door open with his heel and we're in the corridor. His mouth doesn't leave mine and I don't care who sees because I am past the point of caring about anything except getting this man into a room with a door that locks. Even one that doesn’t.
I don’t give a fuck.
We make it to his room. He gets the door open one-handed, which is impressive, and kicks it shut behind us, which is louder than it needs to be and neither of us gives a shit.
His room is a mess. Clothes on the chair, coffee cups on the nightstand, a punching bag in the corner that I want to ask about and won't because questions require a mouth that isn't currently occupied.
He pulls back long enough to look at me. Both hands on my face, thumbs on my cheekbones, his breathing ragged.
"How hard?" he asks.
