Aria's POV
They find Nico at two in the morning.
Marco comes into the security room where I have been sitting for four hours and says two words and I feel every muscle in my body release something it has been holding since I read Sofia's message.
"He's safe."
I press both hands over my face and breathe.
Dante walks in thirty seconds behind Marco.
He looks at me across the room and I look at him and neither of us says anything because nothing needs to be said. He crosses to where I am sitting and crouches in front of my chair and takes my hands down from my face and holds them in both of his and looks at me.
"He is on his way here now," he says.
"Was he hurt?"
"No. Shaken. Angry." Something moves in his expression.
"Very angry."
"That is Nico," I say.
His thumb moves across my knuckles slowly and I look down at his hands around mine and feel something settle in my chest that has been unsettled since the moment I walked into this palazzo.
"Thank you," I say quietly.
He does not say you are welcome.
He just holds my hands and looks at my face and the security room is quiet around us and for one moment the danger and the fear and the cold marble floors all fall away and there is just this.
His hands.
Mine.
The warmth between them.
Three days pass.
Nico stays.
He does not like it. He makes that very clear every morning at breakfast in the specific way Nico makes things clear which is loudly and with accompanying hand gestures. But he stays because I ask him to and because even Nico in his stubbornness understands that the garage in Trastevere is not safe right now.
He and Dante circle each other like two dogs deciding whether to fight or not.
Then on the second evening I find them in the kitchen at midnight going over the palazzo security layout together and something in my chest does something warm and complicated.
Sofia calls every morning.
I tell her pieces. Not everything. Enough.
Elena becomes the sister I never had. She brings coffee to my room in the mornings and sits in the armchair by the window and talks while I try to remember what normal feels like.
And Dante.
Dante is everywhere.
In the hallways when I walk them. At the table when I eat.
His eyes finding mine across rooms before he finds anything else. His hand at my back when we move through the house together. Small touches that mean nothing and everything at the same time. The brush of his fingers against my wrist when he hands me something.
The way he stands beside me at the window looking at the garden and says nothing because with him silence is never empty.
Every time he is close my body does the thing it has been doing since the first morning in my apartment.
It forgets every reason this is a bad idea.
I am running out of reasons anyway.
On the fourth day he tells me he has a meeting in the city.
"I want you to come," he says.
We are in the hallway outside my room and it is morning and he is in a suit that fits him the way suits fit men who were built for them and I am in my second day of the same jeans and I feel the distance between our worlds like a physical thing.
"Why?" I ask.
"Because I am not leaving you here without me." His eyes hold mine. "And because I want you there."
I look at him for a moment.
"I do not have anything to wear to a meeting," I say.
He almost smiles.
Two hours later a bag arrives at my room.
Inside it is a dress the color of deep wine. Simple. Fitted. The kind of thing that costs more than my weekly wage and fits like it was made for a body exactly like mine.
There is no note.
There does not need to be.
The car is black with tinted windows and a partition between the front and the back that seals completely when Dante presses a button without looking at it.
The driver does not react.
The privacy screen rises.
I look at it.
I look at him.
"Necessary?" I say.
"Always," he says.
He is looking at me in the dress.
He has been looking at me in the dress since I came downstairs. Not obviously. Dante does not do anything obviously. But I feel his eyes move over me every time I am not watching and I feel it the same way I feel everything he does.
Everywhere.
The car moves through Rome and the city passes outside the dark windows and inside the car it is warm and quiet and he is right beside me and the partition is up and the world outside does not exist right now.
"You are staring," I say.
"I know," he says. He does not stop.
"Dante."
"Aria." He turns toward me slightly. His knee presses against mine. "You are wearing the dress I chose for you and you are sitting close enough to touch and you expect me not to look."
My breath does something unsteady.
"You should be thinking about your meeting," I say.
"I am thinking about several things simultaneously," he says.
His hand moves to my knee.
Not urgently. Just rests there. Warm and heavy through the fabric of the dress and I look down at it and look back up at his face and his eyes are dark and patient and completely focused on me.
"We are almost at the building," I say.
"We have twelve minutes," he says.
"Dante—"
"Tell me to stop," he says quietly.
I think about all the reasons I should.
Then his hand moves slowly up my knee and the warmth of his palm against my leg makes every thought I had dissolve completely.
I do not tell him to stop.
He leans in and his mouth finds my jaw first. Soft. Then my cheek. Then the corner of my mouth. And when I turn my face he kisses me properly and it is like the first time in the guest room but more certain now. Like we have both stopped pretending.
I kiss him back.
My hand goes to his chest and I feel him breathe. His fingers slide under the hem of my dress and move along my thigh and I make a sound against his mouth that I did not plan and he pulls me closer and his mouth is warm and unhurried and I forget where we are and where we are going and everything else.
The car slows.
He pulls back.
His forehead against mine. Both of us breathing unevenly. His hand still warm on my thigh.
"We are here," the driver says through the speaker.
Dante looks at me.
His eyes are dark and his hair is slightly undone because my hands were in it and he looks at me like I am the only thing in this entire city that matters.
"Later," he says. Low and certain.
It is a promise.
I press my lips together and try to look like a woman who has not just been kissed senseless in the back of a car.
Dante straightens his jacket.
He is perfectly composed in four seconds.
I hate him for that.
Two days after the meeting he leaves.
Marco tells me before Dante does which should make me feel nothing but does not feel like nothing at all.
"Three days," Marco says. "Naples."
I nod.
I do not ask questions.
I found Dante in his office that evening. The door is open. He is at his desk and he looks up when I appear in the doorway and something moves through his expression that he does not manage completely.
"You are leaving tomorrow," I say.
"Yes."
"Naples."
"Yes."
I lean against the doorframe and look at him.
"Come back," I say.
He looks at me for a long moment.
"That was always the plan," he says.
"I know." I hold his gaze. "Come back anyway."
Three days turns into five.
Five turns into six.
I learn the palazzo's rhythms. I have coffee with Elena every morning. I walk the garden with Nico every afternoon and he tells me things about the house that he has figured out by watching and I listen and file everything away.
At night I lie in the enormous bed in the east wing and stare at the ceiling and think about dark eyes and warm hands and a voice that says my name like it already belongs to him.
My phone has a message on the second night.
Unknown number.
One line.
Enjoying the palazzo, Aria?
He is not as loyal as you think.
Ask him about the woman in Naples.
I stare at it.
My chest goes cold.
Then I hear something.
Footsteps in the corridor.
Familiar footsteps.
I am out of bed before I decide to move.
I open the door.
He is standing in the hallway.
The suit jacket is gone. Shirt open at the collar. Dark circles under his eyes that tell me six days in Naples cost him more than he will say. He looks like a man who has been running on nothing but focus and black coffee and sheer refusal to stop.
He looks at me in the doorway.
And everything on his face that has been controlled and managed and locked behind all the other things just opens.
He crosses the hallway in three steps.
His hands find my face and he kisses me before I can say his name. Deep and certain and with six days of missing in it that I feel in every part of me. I grab the front of his shirt and pull him through the door and he kicks it shut behind him and the room goes dark and warm and his hands are in my hair and his mouth is on my throat and I tilt my head back and think about the message on my phone.
I think about asking.
Then his arms go around me and he pulls me in like he has been thinking about exactly this for six days and my hands go to his chest and I feel his heart and I let the question go.
For now.
We move toward the window where the moonlight comes through the curtains and turns the room silver and he looks at me the way that man in the dark alley four days ago never could have looked at me because four days ago he was a stranger.
He is not a stranger anymore.
"I came back," he says against my hair.
"I know," I say.
And the city outside the window keeps moving and in here there is only this. His arms. The moonlight. The way he holds me like he is not planning to let go.
The message sits on my phone across the room.
Waiting.