Romano's Obsession

Chapter Five: Wednesday

MATTEO

I sent her dinner.

I am not going to examine why.

It is eight in the evening and I am at my desk with Marco's latest intelligence report open in front of me and a glass of

something I have not touched at my right hand and the absolute refusal to think about a pair of ocean eyes telling me "I hate you" like they were daring me to do something about it.

She meant it.

She also could not look away.

I know the difference. I have spent thirteen years reading people,reading rooms, reading intentions, reading the precise moment a man decides he is going to reach for his weapon before his hand even moves. Reading people is how I have stayed alive and kept this empire standing.

I know what I saw in her eyes when she said it.

I know what she does not want to know yet.

"The tray went up," Rosa's voice from the doorway. I don't look up. "She ate everything."

"Good."

"You never send dinner to guests rooms."

"She is not a guest."

"No," Rosa says, in the tone she has been using on me since I was nine years old. "She is something else entirely, isn't she."

I say nothing.

Rosa leaves.

I pick up Marco's report and read the same paragraph for the fourth time and retain absolutely nothing from it.

Wednesday. Palermo. Fabrizio.

I force my mind there. To the debt carved into my chest for thirteen years. The coastal property. The eight men. The sequence of what needs to happen.

I do not think about red hair and ocean eyes and "I hate you" delivered in a shaking voice that refused even then to completely break.

I do not think about any of it.

I open the next report.

I do not sleep for a very long time.

---

LUCIA

He leaves before I wake up.

I know the moment I step into the corridor and feel the house. It sounds the same. Looks the same. But something is different in the quality of the air something missing that I didn't realise had become familiar until it was gone.

Luca confirms it at noon. Palermo. Two days. Maybe three.

I say "I won't need anything" and mean it completely.

By evening I am not so sure.

It starts small. Ridiculous things. I walk past the study and my eyes go to the door without my permission. I sit in the kitchen with Rosa and find myself listening for footsteps that don't come. I pick up my textbook and read four pages before realising I have been staring at the corridor entrance for the last ten minutes waiting for a shadow that isn't there.

*Stop it.*

I close the book and go to the window.

The grounds are quiet and grey in the late afternoon light. Empty. The fountain murmurs to itself in the drive. The cypress trees stand perfectly still.

I tell myself what I am feeling is simply the disorientation of captivity. The human mind latches onto patterns onto consistent presences when it is isolated. It is basic psychology. Textbook. It means nothing.

I tell myself that three times.

On the third time I almost laugh at myself.

---

The first night without him is the strangest.

I don't sleep well. I tell myself it is the unfamiliar bed except the bed has not been unfamiliar for five days now. I tell myself it is anxiety about my situation except my situation has not changed since this morning.

I lie in the dark and stare at the ceiling and listen to a house that feels subtly, inexplicably wrong.

Nobody stops outside my door.

That is the thing I notice most. That specific silence the one I spent the first three nights dreading is tonight the thing keeping me awake. The absence of those footsteps. The absence of that hand against the wood. The absence of a presence so overwhelming that even a closed door between us felt like barely enough distance.

I press my fingers to my eyes.

You are losing your mind, Lucia.

---

The second day is worse.

I wake up and for one disorienting second I am listening for him before I am even fully conscious. Rosa brings breakfast and I find myself asking without meaning to "Has he called?"

Rosa looks at me with those knowing eyes.

"He doesn't call,"she says simply. "He comes back."

I nod and look at my espresso and say nothing else.

But the question sits with me all day like something I cannot put down. I carry it through the library and the grounds and the long slow afternoon. I carry it into the evening when the house goes quiet and Luca disappears into meetings and I am completely alone with it.

By nightfall I have stopped pretending I don't know what it is.

I miss him.

Not the idea of him. Not the authority or the danger or the overwhelming physical force of him in a room. I miss the specific way he looks at me like I am simultaneously the most inconvenient and the most compelling thing he has ever encountered. I miss the barely-there ghost of something that crosses his mouth when I say something that surprises him. I miss the weight of his footsteps outside my door at two in the morning.

I miss someone I am supposed to hate.

That realisation sits in my chest quiet and devastating all evening.

---

It is past midnight when I finally hear it.

A car below. Voices brief and low. The front doors opening.

Then footsteps on the stairs.

His footsteps.

I lie completely still in the dark with my heart doing something completely unreasonable and my eyes wide open staring at the ceiling.

He is back.

The footsteps slow outside my door.

Stop.

The silence is the longest and thinnest I have ever lived inside. I stop breathing. I stop thinking. I just lie there and feel the particular electricity of him standing on the other side of that door, the warmth of it reaching me through the wood somehow.

A hand presses against the door.

Still. Heavy. There.

One second. Three. Five.

It lifts.

The footsteps begin moving away

And then they stop again.

Silence.

Then slowly so slowly my heart nearly stops completely

My door handle moves.

---