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“Are you awake?” she whispered. Despite the deepness of her sleep, she felt wide awake.

The arm locked around her waist tightened. “I can’t sleep.”

“I didn’t think I’d be able to either.” Her throat closing, she tried to jest her way out of her growing melancholy. “It’s just as well I tricked you into becoming my lover, or you might have taken advantage of my sleepiness to cuff me back to the chair.”

“You tricked me, did you?” he said idly.

“Totally.” She kissed his chest. The hair on it tickled her lips. “I dazzled you with my amazing vagina.”

He laughed softly. “That’s got to be it. Or maybe it was me who tricked you with my amazing cock.”

“In fairness, it is pretty amazing.”

“Only pretty amazing?”

“For someone who doesn’t like sex, you certainly know how to use it.”

He laughed again, but the sound fell away quickly, and when he next spoke, his voice was sombre. “Can you imagine the consequences if we did conceive a child?”

She couldn’t let herself imagine it. “I’d have to tell everyone I went to an orgy or something and so don’t know who the father is.”

“I think your brother would forgive you more easily for that than the truth.”

“He’s never going to know, so there’s no point in speculating.” Thinking of what the morning would bring only made the sickness inside her grow stronger. “Have you ever been to an orgy?”

“What kind of question is that? Besides, you already know the answer.”

“I’m just trying to stop my mind fast-forwarding.”

Mattia understood that. All the hours Elvira had been sleeping, his mind had been darting between the past he was seeing with different eyes, the present he would have laughed at himself for enjoying only two days ago, and a future that could very well be extinguished for him before the sun next set.

“I guess I was wondering if you ever felt compelled to join in an orgy to prove yourself to him,” she added softly.

He breathed in slowly to counter the tightness her question evoked in him.

“I’m not trying to upset you.” Moving her face off his chest and detangling her limbs from his, she wriggled up the mattress until her head was on the pillow, facing him. “What you said earlier about despising your father, did you really mean it?”

Even in the dark, her silver eyes glowed, but the glow was as soft as her voice.

Nudging his face closer to hers, he put his hand on her hip. “When I was a kid, I hero-worshipped him. I thought he was the greatest man alive, a king, and I wanted to be just like him.”

“You knew what he was?”

“I knew he made money through selling drugs and giving people homes to live in, and that business owners paid him money to protect them. I didn’t always understand it, but I knew what I didn’t understand, if you get what I mean?”

“I think so. Kids are way more perceptive than adults give them credit for.”

“Sure. I didn’t need things spelt out for me, it was just my life. My father carrying a gun everywhere was normal. My mother never leaving the house without protection was normal.”

“Were you ever scared?”

He laughed bitterly. “No. I watched my father extort money, and kick the living shit out of dealers he thought were skimming off him and all kinds of other stuff he eventually paid other people to do for him so he could keep his hands clean, and I was completely indifferent to it. I felt nothing. You want to know the first time I felt fear?”

“Go on.”

“It was when I turned fourteen. My birthday present from him was a gun.”

“You hadn’t used a gun before then?”