IT'S COMPLICATED: THE MAFIA'S HEIRS

Chapter 17: Closer

Marco found me in the kitchen at noon.

I had been trying to eat something that was not toast, which had been my primary food group for the past week, and I was standing at the counter with a bowl of something warm watching the compound through the window, watching the new guards move through their new positions with the particular efficiency of people who had been briefed thoroughly and were taking their assignment seriously.

Everything looked different today. Same walls, same gate, same glass and concrete house. But the air inside it had a different quality, tighter and more deliberate, like the compound itself had drawn a breath and not yet let it out.

Marco sat at the island without being invited, which was new, and looked at me with the expression that had become familiar over the past weeks, the expression of a man who had more information than he was required to share and was deciding, in this particular instance, to share some of it.

"You want to tell me something?" I asked.

"I want to tell you something," he agreed.

I turned from the window and sat across from him and waited.

"Luca has not slept properly since the night you arrived," Marco said. Not as a preamble to something else. Just as a fact being placed on the table. "I have known him for eleven years and I have seen him in situations that would not allow most people to function and he has always slept. It is one of the ways he manages what he carries." He paused. "He has not done it since you got here."

I looked at him. "Because of the threat?"

"The threat existed before you arrived," Marco said. "He slept through worse threats than this one." He held my gaze in the direct way he held everyone's gaze, without apology or softening. "He does not sleep because he checks on you. Multiple times a night. I have seen him do it. He stands outside your door and listens and then goes back to whatever he was doing." Another pause. "He would be angry at me for telling you this."

"Then why are you telling me?" I asked.

Marco was quiet for a moment. "Because you are carrying his children and living in his house and navigating his world and I think you deserve to know that the man you are doing all of that alongside is not sleeping because he is standing outside your door making sure you are okay." He said it simply. "I think that is information relevant to your situation."

I looked at the bowl in front of me. At the steam rising from it in the morning light.

"Thank you," I said quietly.

"Don't tell him I told you," Marco said, and stood, and left the kitchen with the efficiency of someone who had completed a task and was moving on to the next one.

I sat with what he had said for a long time after that.

Luca came to find me at three in the afternoon. He appeared in the doorway of the sitting room where I had been attempting to make progress on my thesis and sat across from me and folded his hands on his knees in the way he did when he had something to say that he had been thinking about for a while.

"I want you to move into my room," he said.

I looked at him.

"Not as..." he stopped. Started again. "It is a request. What I mean is that the security breach changes things. Having you in a separate room means a separate point of vulnerability. Having you with me means one door. One location I am responsible for." He held my gaze steadily. "It is the safest arrangement given what we now know."

I looked at him for a long moment. At the careful way he had constructed that explanation, leading with security and practicality because those were the terms he was most comfortable offering, and underneath them the other thing, the thing Marco had just told me, the thing that lived in the space between what Luca said and what he meant.

"All right," I said.

Something settled in his expression. "All right."

"I'll move my things this evening," I said.

He helped me move at seven. It did not take long because I did not have many things, and we moved the duffel bag together down the hall to his room, which was larger than mine and had the same blackout curtains but also had more evidence of habitation, books on the nightstand, a jacket over the chair, the particular lived-in quality of a room that belonged to someone rather than waiting for them.

His room smelled like him. I noticed that immediately and said nothing about it.

He set my duffel on the chair beside his jacket and we stood in the room together in the quiet and the air between us had the quality it had been developing for weeks, layered and full of things said and unsaid.

"Tell me how it started," I said.

He looked at me. "What?"

"Us. Four months ago, before all these started." I sat on the edge of the bed and looked at him. "We have never actually talked about it. I want to know your version."

He was quiet for a moment. Then he pulled the chair out and sat in it and the room settled around us into the particular intimacy of two people in a space late in the evening with nowhere else to be.

"You were at a gallery opening," he said. "A charity event. I don't remember whose." He paused. "You were standing in front of a painting that everyone else in the room had walked past without looking at, and you were looking at it like it was saying something specific to you. I watched you do that for four minutes before I came over."

I remembered. A large abstract piece, dark blues and greys, something violent and beautiful about it that had stopped me mid-circuit of the room. "You said something about the painting," I said.

"I said it looked like a decision being made," he said. "You said it looked like one being regretted." He held my gaze. "And then you looked at me and I understood that you had no idea who I was, which was unusual enough that I stayed."

I smiled at that. At the specific detail of Luca Wolfe being drawn to someone precisely because they did not recognise him. "And then?"

"And then we talked for an hour," he said. "About the painting and then about other things. You told me you were studying literature because you believed stories were the most honest thing people produced, that you could know more about a person from what they chose to read than from anything they chose to say about themselves." Something moved across his face. "I had not thought about anything that way before. I found myself wanting to think about it."

We had exchanged numbers that night. He had texted two days later, just a book title, no explanation. I had read it in three days and texted back two words about it. He had responded immediately.

That was how it had started. Books and texts and then coffee that became dinner that became evenings that became the slow inevitable thing that neither of us had named because naming it would have required deciding what it was.

"The first night you stayed," I said. "Do you remember what you said before you fell asleep?"

He looked at me. Something in his expression shifted. "I said I had not slept properly in two years," he said quietly. "And that I had not noticed until then."

"And then you were asleep in four minutes," I said.

"Yes."

The room was quiet around us and I looked at him and thought about four months of something without a name, about the specific texture of those nights, the way he had existed in the dark of my dorm room like someone who had been looking for somewhere to put down something heavy and had not expected to find it there, with me, in a room decorated with a thesis draft and a stolen hoodie and a plant I kept forgetting to water.

We had been careful with each other in those months in the way of people who understand that what they are doing has a cost they haven't fully calculated yet. He had never stayed past morning. I had never asked him to. We had not discussed what it was because discussing it would have meant deciding, and neither of us had been ready to decide.

And then two pink lines had decided for us.

"I thought about you after that first night cuz it was my first time," I said. "I thought you would disappear. You had that quality about you, like someone who moved through spaces and left them exactly as he found them."

"I tried to," he said. "I came back anyway."

"Why?"

He held my gaze. "Because you were the only place I had slept properly in two years," he said. "And I am a practical man."

I laughed. Actually laughed, easy and unguarded, and I watched something happen in his face when I did it, something that opened briefly and was warmer than anything I had seen from him in all the weeks since the dorm hallway.

He stood from the chair. Crossed the room and stood in front of me where I sat on the edge of the bed and looked down at me with that expression, the one underneath everything, the one I had found the name for in the study.

"I need you to know something," he said quietly.

"Tell me," I said.

"Whatever happens with the Ferrano family. Whatever my father does or does not do. Whatever the next weeks look like." He held my gaze with a steadiness that felt like a promise. "Nothing that exists outside this room changes what I said to you in the study. Nothing makes it less true. Nothing makes it conditional." He paused. "I need you to know that."

I looked up at him. At the certainty of him, the absolute unwavering quality of it, and I thought about Marco standing outside my door at night and the photograph in his pocket alongside the ultrasound image and the way he had sat beside me at dinner and said I don't have anything to add and I felt something in my chest that was not adjacent to love anymore.

It was love. I knew that now. I had probably known it longer than I had been willing to say.

He leaned down and kissed me.

Gently. Carefully. The way he did everything that mattered, with complete attention and without hurry, his hand coming up to the side of my face the way my hand had gone to his in the study, and I kissed him back and it was nothing like the versions I had imagined because I had not imagined it like this, not this quiet and this certain and this much like something that had always been going to happen eventually.

He pulled back and looked at me. His hand still on my face.

I stared at him.

Because it was real. Completely, undeniably real, and I had kissed him back and somewhere in my chest the thing I had been standing at the edge of for weeks had just become something I was standing inside of, and I did not have a single word for any of it.

He saw it on my face. The shock and the certainty and everything in between. He did not look away. He leaned toward me again, closing the small distance between us, his eyes on mine, and I felt my breath stop in preparation for whatever came next.

My phone rang.

On the nightstand. Loud in the quiet of the room. Both of us went completely still.

I looked at the screen.

Bryan.

I looked at Luca. He looked at the phone. Then at me. Something moved across his face that was not hurt exactly but lived in the neighbourhood of it, something he controlled immediately and completely, and he straightened up and stepped back and created space between us without being asked, without making it into something, without any of the things a smaller man might have done.

"Take it," he said quietly. He walked to the door. Paused with his hand on the frame. "I will be downstairs."

Then he was gone.

I sat on the edge of his bed in his room with his hand still warm on my face and Bryan's name on my screen and the sound of Luca's footsteps going down the stairs, and I did not know how to be one person in two places at once.

I picked up the phone.

"Bryan," I said.

His voice came through warm and familiar and safe, the voice that had been the soundtrack of six years of my life, the voice that knew all of my oldest versions.

"Hey Nat," he said. "I just wanted to hear your voice."

I closed my eyes.

And I sat in Luca's room with Luca's kiss still on my lips and Bryan's voice in my ear and I thought that complicated was not a strong enough word for any of this.

It never had been.