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His enemy was awake. Eyes puffy from sleep, she was sitting up on the bed with the sheets covering her breasts, examining something in her hand.
She glanced up at him and gave a pensive smile that made his heart feel funny. “I fell asleep.”
Exhaling the funny feeling away, he nodded. “What are you looking at?”
She pinched the object between her thumb and forefinger, and held it up. “The bullet I shot at the pillow.”
He perched beside her. “Can I see?”
“Sure.” She dropped it into his open hand.
He examined it closely. The same cream colour as her gun, it was half the size of a normal bullet but every bit as deadly.
“You made this, too?”
“Guilty,” she affirmed.
“It’s a work of art. The gun too. And all made with a 3D printer?” He held the bullet up so the last of the afternoon light shone on it. “Just remarkable.” He looked back at her with curiosity. “Did you really design it yourself?”
She gave a sudden flash of her perfect teeth. “Yes. The entire concept came as a result of my tiny brain.”
“If you had a man-sized brain, you’d be lethal,” he quipped, and as his words evaporated into the air, their gazes held and a silence he’d never felt before fell between them.
“Careful, Esposito,” she warned lightly, breaking it. “Making jokes goes against your brand.”
“You think I’m humourless?”
“I did.”
“Did?”
There was sadness in her eyes. “Now I’m starting to think there’s a whole lot more to you than what you let the world see.”
His heart caught again.
No one looked beyond the persona in their world. Who you projected yourself as was who you were, a state of affairs that had always worked to his advantage. Mattia had always projected himself as Lorenzo’s eldest son and heir, and so had been treated accordingly by everyone outside his family.
Maybe he was a mystery to himself, but the last person he should allow to try to look through his layers was Elvira. That they were so chemically drawn to each other didn’t change anything. It couldn’t. They were still enemies.
“There really isn’t,” he assured her. “There’s little more to me than ice-cold calculation and a brooding face, just as there’s little more to you than a pretty face.”
Her beautiful face broke out in a genuine smile, although the sadness remained in her eyes before she blinked it away.
“Although,” he added a beat later, “Your tiny female brain worked amazingly well in creating that gun. It’s entirely plastic?”
“The whole thing, gun and bullets.”
“You could make a fortune if you decided to mass-produce them.”
“Who says I haven’t?”
“Have you?”
She grinned and shook her head. “I made one for Renata, but that’s it. There are enough guns in the world, and enough of them are already fingerprint-activated.”
“Maybe your next design could save the world.”
Her smile faded. “The only thing I want to save is what’s left of my family.”
