The Devil wears his name

Chapter 5 - Something Like Trust

The weeks after the office found a new rhythm neither of them acknowledged out loud. Breakfast at seven stopped being a strict, silent obligation and became something closer to a habit Elena found herself looking forward to, Damian reading through reports across the table, occasionally sliding a piece of information toward her without explanation, trusting her to understand why it mattered.

"Bellandi surfaced," he said one morning, sliding a folder across the table between the coffee and the toast neither of them had touched yet. "A property outside the city, registered under a name that traces back to him through two shell companies. My people confirmed it yesterday."

Elena scanned the file, her pulse picking up. "You want to go there."

"I want to go there. I don't particularly want to bring you."

"That's not your decision to make."

"It's exactly my decision to make. If this goes wrong, if Bellandi's employer has him watched, walking in with both heirs of the two families he's spent a decade manipulating is a gift I'm not willing to hand them." Damian's voice stayed level, but something protective had crept into it that she hadn't heard from him before, careful in a way that felt different than his usual calculation. "I'll go. You'll stay here, safe, and I'll bring back whatever he knows."

"And if something happens to you? What exactly am I supposed to do with a truce that only one of us survived to keep?"

Something flickered across his face at that, quiet surprise, like her concern had caught him off guard in a way none of her earlier hostility ever had. "Since when do you care what happens to me?"

Elena hadn't fully examined the answer to that question herself, not carefully, not honestly, and hearing it asked directly made her realize how much had shifted in the weeks since the wedding. "Since you started being honest with me instead of just controlling what I was allowed to know. I don't know what to call that yet. I know it's not nothing."

The kitchen went quiet, early morning light catching the careful, unguarded look on Damian's face, the same rawness she'd glimpsed once before in the hallway and once again over the desk full of evidence, a version of him that existed only in the small, private moments between them.

"I'll take two men," he said finally, voice rougher than usual. "And I'll call you the moment I have him talking. That's the compromise I'm willing to make."

"That's not much of a compromise."

"It's the only one I've got." He stood, crossing the kitchen to where she sat, and for a moment neither of them moved, the distance between them smaller than it had been since the wedding night car ride. "Elena. If something does go wrong, I need you to know the last four years weren't just about proving something to my family. I wanted the truth for Marco. I think, somewhere along the way, I started wanting it for Nico too, which isn't something I expected to feel about a man I never met."

The admission landed somewhere soft and unguarded in her chest, and Elena found herself reaching up before she'd fully decided to, fingers brushing his jaw the way he'd touched hers once in a hotel bar in a story she'd never actually lived but somehow felt she had, all the careful distance between enemy and husband collapsing into something neither of them had a name for yet.

"Come back," she said quietly. "Not for the truce. For this."

Something shifted behind his eyes, raw and unguarded in a way she'd never seen from the man the whole city called the Devil, and when he leaned down and kissed her, slow and certain, it carried none of the performance of the wedding day, none of the transaction either of them had built this marriage on. It felt, terrifyingly, like the truth.

"I'll come back," he murmured against her mouth. "I intend to have several very good reasons to."

He left within the hour, two cars pulling out of the estate's gate with a careful, quiet urgency that made Elena's stomach twist despite every reassurance he'd given her. She spent the day pacing the halls she'd only recently started to think of as home, Carmela bringing her tea she didn't drink, the hours crawling by with a slowness that felt deliberately cruel.

The call came just after dark.

"We have him," Damian said, his voice tight, controlled, something urgent underneath it that made Elena's grip on the phone tighten. "Bellandi. He's talking. Elena, it's worse than we thought. The employer, the one funding all of this, it's not an outside player like I assumed."

"Then who?"

Damian's silence stretched long enough that dread pooled cold and heavy in her stomach before he finally answered.

"It's someone inside one of our own families," he said. "Someone who's been sitting at both our dinner tables for years, feeding this war exactly enough to keep it burning without ever letting either side win. Elena, I need you to be careful tonight. If they realize we're close, and I think they might already, you're not safe in that house alone."

The line went quiet, replaced a second later by the distinct, unmistakable sound of a door being forced somewhere in the estate behind her, and Elena rose from the chair with her heart hammering, the phone still pressed to her ear, Damian's voice sharp and urgent asking her name, asking if she was still there, asking her to answer him.

She didn't get the chance to.