POSSESSED BY CIRO

Chapter 15

~~Oriana~~

I woke up and just stared at the ceiling for a while.

Not the anxious kind of staring from the past few days. This was different.

More like my brain was still trying to catch up with everything that had happened last night and hadn’t quite gotten there yet.

I turned onto my side.

The rose was still on the windowsill.

Still red. Still completely unbothered.

I had this strange urge to talk to it.

Which told me I had officially been in this house too long without proper human contact. Cassie would have laughed herself off the bed if she could see me right now, lying here processing my feelings about a mafia king like I had a single normal thought left in my head.

I pressed my face into the pillow.

The thing was – and I really did not want to be thinking this – last night had not gone the way I expected. I had gone into that study ready to be angry. Ready to stand on the other side of that desk and remind myself of every single reason why Ciro Conti was the villain of this particular story.

And then he had talked.

Not in the controlled clipped way he usually communicated. Actually talked. About his mother. About his father. About a boy who used to sit on a bench outside an orphanage because he needed somewhere to go and didn’t have anywhere.

I hadn’t expected that.

I hadn’t expected any of it.

I sat up, pushed my hair back and went to wash my face. Stood at the mirror for probably longer than necessary.

The problem with finding out that the person you have decided to hate is also a person – a real one with actual wounds and a history that explains if not excuses everything – is that it makes the hating considerably more complicated.

I still had every right to be angry.

That hadn’t changed.

But last night had added something else to the pile and I didn’t quite know where to put it yet.

Breakfast was strange.

Good strange. But strange.

Ciro was already there when I came down. Papers, coffee, the usual. He looked up when I walked in and I waited for that familiar tension to settle over the table the way it always did.

It didn’t really come.

I sat. Poured my tea. He went back to his papers. I looked out the window.

And that was it. Just breakfast. No charged silences. No careful words.

Just two people sitting at a table in the morning.

At some point he pinked a small plate toward me without looking up. Pastries. The ones Nica knew I liked.

I looked at the plate.

Looked at him.

He was still reading.

I took one and didn’t say anything and he didn’t say anything and somehow that felt like more than if either of us had made a production of it.

Rosa found me in the garden.

She appeared around the bend in the path holding two coffees, handed me one, and just started walking beside me like we had arranged this.

“You look better,” she said.

“Than what,” I said.

“Than yesterday when you looked like someone had dropped a building on you,” she said.

I almost choked on my coffee.

“He talked didn’t he,” she said.

“Yes,” I said.

“How much.”

I thought about it. “Enough.”

Rosa nodded. She didn’t push for details which I appreciated. She just walked beside me and let the silence sit for a bit before she said anything else.

“He’s never done that,” she said eventually. “With anyone. Just so you know.”

I didn’t respond.

“I’m not telling you that to pressure you into anything,” she added, and I believed her because Rosa didn’t do subtle manipulation, she was far too direct for that. “Just think you should know what it means when he does something he’s never done before.”

I stared at the path ahead.

“Rosa,” I said. “Be honest with me. Your brother – the things he does. The people he hurts. The way this world works.” I paused. “That doesn’t just go away because he had a hard childhood.”

“No,” she said immediately. No hesitation. “It doesn’t.”

“So how do you–” I stopped. Tried again. “How do you hold both things at the same time.”

She was quiet for a moment.

“I don’t always,” she said honestly.

“Some days it’s easier than others.” She glanced at me. “But I know who he is underneath all of it. And that person–” she stopped, something moving across her face, “–that person is worth the complicated.”

I didn’t say anything.

We walked the rest of the path without talking and it wasn’t uncomfortable. Just two people sitting inside a question that didn’t have a clean answer.

I was in the library after lunch when he appeared in the doorway.

Just stood there, one hand on the frame. Looking at me with that expression he got when he’d been thinking about something for a while and had finally decided to act on it.

“There’s something I want to show you,” he said.

I looked up. “What kind of something.”

“Outside,” he said.

I almost said no. Or at least I thought about saying no. My brain ran through about three sensible reasons why going anywhere with this man was not a straightforward decision.

“Okay,” I said anyway.

He looked mildly surprised.

Honestly so was I.

He took me through parts of Venice I hadn’t seen.

Not the parts on postcards. The other parts. Narrow streets where the buildings leaned so close together overhead they almost touched. Small bridges over canals that had no tourists on them. Corners that smelled like old stone and somebody’s cooking drifting out from a window above.

I kept waiting for him to explain where we were going.

He didn’t.

I kept waiting for it to feel strange, walking beside him through a city like two normal people.

It felt strange. But not in the way I expected.

We came out onto a small bridge eventually. Nothing remarkable about it from the outside. Old stone, green water below, buildings on both sides with washing lines strung between windows. A cat on a ledge watching us like we were mildly disappointing.

Ciro stopped in the middle of the bridge.

Leaned on the railing and looked at the water.

I stopped beside him.

“I used to come here,” he said.

“When I was young. When things got bad.”

I looked down at the water.

Green and still. Reflecting everything above it upside down.

“How young,” I said.

He thought about it. “Ten maybe. Eleven.”

I tried to picture that. A ten year old Ciro found this bridge and decided it was his. Sitting here with whatever he was carrying at ten years old which based on what he had told me last night was already considerably more than a child should have to carry.

“It’s a good bridge,” I said.

He looked at me.

“I mean it,” I said. “If you need somewhere to go this is a good place.”

Something crossed his face. Not the almost smile from before. Something quieter than that. More – I don’t know. Undefended.

He looked back at the water.

We stood there for a while. A gondola came slowly down the canal and passed underneath us and neither of us said anything until it was gone.

“Ciro,” I said eventually.

“Mm.”

I leaned my arms on the railing, looking down at the water because it was easier than looking at him while I said this.

“I’m still angry,” I said. “About how I got here. About the contract and Cassie and all of it. That’s not gone.”

“I know,” he said.

“But.” I stopped. Started again. “Last night. What you told me.” I shook my head slightly. “I didn’t expect that.”

He didn’t say anything.

“I don’t think you’re simple,” I said. “I wanted you to be. It would have been easier.” I laughed a little at that, short and dry. “You’re really not though.”

“No,” he said quietly. “I’m not.”

I finally looked at him.

He was already looking at me. That steady look of his. But something in it was different out here in the open afternoon light. Less guarded than usual. Like the bridge did something to him still even now. Let something down that stayed up everywhere else.

I held his gaze.

My heart was doing that thing.

I had stopped fighting the fact that it did that.

“Thank you for bringing me here,” I said.

He nodded. Just once.

And we stayed on that bridge longer than we probably needed to, shoulders close enough that I was aware of every inch of the space between them, the city moving quietly around us like it had been doing for centuries and would keep doing long after whatever this was between us had found its shape.

I still didn’t know what that shape was going to be.

But standing here I stopped feeling like I needed to know yet.

That was something.