Chapter Eleven: Beyond The Walls
663 Words
Gabriella came back down.
She was dressed now — last night’s burgundy gown exchanged for the clothes she had arrived in, her dark hair pulled back, her composure restored to something close to its usual standard. She had her bag over one shoulder and the careful expression of someone who had decided, somewhere between the bedroom and the staircase, exactly how they were going to play this.
Enzo was in the doorway of the kitchen, coffee in hand, watching the grounds through the glass.
“The car is outside,” he said without turning.
Gabriella stopped beside him. Close — the distance of someone making a point.
“Last night was—”
“Last night was last night,” he said. Still looking at the grounds. Still even. “Jeremy will take you wherever you need to go.”
She was quiet for a moment.
“You brought her to the Gala,” she said.
Now he turned. Slowly, the way he did everything.
His green eyes met hers and they were — as they always were — completely unreadable.
“Goodbye Gabriella,” he said.
She held his gaze for three seconds. Then she picked up her bag, walked down the hallway, and let herself out of the front door.
The villa settled around the sound of it closing.
The morning after that was quiet and entirely his.
He sat back down at the kitchen table and finished his coffee. Outside, two of the security team crossed the grounds on their rotation. A cleaner moved through the east corridor with the careful attention that everything in this house received. The villa breathed around him — steady, familiar, entirely his.
Martha sat down across from him — the only person in this villa, who could sit across from him without any particular awareness of who he was or what that meant. She had known him before any of it. Before the suits and the empire and the green eyes that rooms arranged themselves around. She had known him when he was a baby and then a boy and then a young man who had inherited a world he hadn’t asked for and carried it anyway.
She looked at him now the way she had always looked at him.
Like he was hers. Like nothing that had happened since would ever entirely change that.
“You’re alright?” she asked.
“Always.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
He looked at her across the table.
“I’m alright Martha,” he said. Quieter this time.
She nodded once. Satisfied. And got up to tend to something on the stove that didn’t need tending.
He was in his study by ten.
The room was large and dark walled and organised with the same precision as everything else he controlled — documents in their place, nothing unnecessary, a desk that faced the window so that when he looked up from his work he looked out at the grounds and the gates and the walls and all the careful machinery of a life he had inherited and chosen to keep.
He opened his laptop. Reviewed the week ahead. Made three calls that needed to be made before Monday and handled each one with the clean efficiency of someone for whom problems were simply things that had not yet been resolved.
He was midway through the fourth document when he stopped.
He wasn’t sure why.
He looked at the window. At the grounds. At the grey Sunday morning light falling across the stone.
And for a reason he didn’t examine and wouldn’t have been able to explain, a pair of golden eyes came to mind. Blonde hair against green satin. A voice that filled silences without apparent awareness that silences were meant to be left alone.
Miss Evans. Jeremy will drop you off. See you Monday.
Monday.
He looked back at his document.
He turned his pen once between his fingers.
And returned to work.
- Writer
