POSSESSED BY CIRO

Chapter 12

~~Oriana~~

The morning after the study incident – because that was what it was going to be called in my head, the study incident – came with the specific kind of awkwardness that follows a moment two people chose not to talk about.

Nothing had happened.

That was still true.

But nothing had happened in a way that felt very loud about itself and I was finding it increasingly difficult to pretend otherwise.

I came downstairs, sat at the table, poured my tea.

Ciro looked up when I walked in, that same brief assessment moving across his face before he looked back down at his papers.

“You stayed in the study late,” he said.

“The book was good,” I said.

He made that sound. That low mm that managed to communicate an entire opinion without using actual words.

“Stop doing that,” I said.

“Doing what?”

“Acting like you know something.”

“Don’t I,” he said simply.

I picked up my tea and looked out the window and decided that was not a sentence worth responding to because anything I said back would only prove his point.

Rosa didn’t come that morning.

I hadn’t realised how much I had gotten used to her appearing until she didn’t. The house felt quieter without her and I sat in the library for most of the morning with a book open in my lap, watching the water outside and not really reading anything.

My mind kept going back to what she had said.

Waiting for you specifically. For a long time.

What did that mean. What did that actually mean.

I had turned it over about forty different ways since yesterday and I still didn’t have anything that satisfied me. Rosa wasn’t the type to say things carelessly. Everything she said had weight behind it, even the things that sounded like throwaway comments.

I closed the book.

Looked at the water.

At some point I was going to have to ask him directly.

The thought made something in my stomach tighten in a way I chose not to examine too closely.

I found him outside by accident.

I had gone out to get some air, walking the garden path the way I had started doing in the mornings, and I came around the far side near the canal wall and there he was.

Standing at the edge where the stone met the water, jacket off, hands in his pockets, just looking out at the canal like he was having a private conversation with it.

I almost turned back.

I kept walking instead.

I came and stood beside him, leaving a decent amount of space between us, and looked out at the water. A gondola moved past slowly, the gondolier calling out in that low musical way that felt like it belonged to a different century entirely.

For a while neither of us said anything.

It wasn’t uncomfortable. That was the strange part. Standing beside Ciro Conti in the morning quiet with the canal in front of us and the old walls of Sept Tour behind us and it just wasn’t uncomfortable.

That probably should have worried me more than it did.

“Rosa said something yesterday,” I said eventually.

He didn’t respond but I felt him listening.

“She said you had been waiting for me. Specifically.” I kept my eyes on the water. “For a long time.”

A beat.

“She talks too much,” he said.

“Ciro.”

He was quiet for a moment. Then he turned and I turned and we were looking at each other properly, nothing between us but morning air and whatever this thing was that had been building since I woke up in his house.

“There was a girl,” he said. “A long time ago. She was sitting outside an orphanage on Via Brera.”

Something cold moved through me slowly.

“She gave me a lollipop,” he continued. His voice was even but something underneath it wasn’t.

“Strawberry. She said everyone deserved a sweeter day.” The corner of his mouth moved. “She cried when she thought I didn’t want it. Then she smiled like the whole day had gotten better the moment I took it.”

My mouth had gone dry.

Because I remembered.

I remembered it clearly actually, in the way you remembered the small moments that felt important without being able to explain why. A boy on the bench outside the gate. Older than me. Sitting like he had the weight of something enormous pressing down on him. I had been seven years old and I had wanted to fix it the only way I knew how at seven years old.

I had given him my last strawberry lollipop and run away before he could say no.

“That was you,” I said.

It came out barely above a whisper.

“That was me,” Ciro said.

I stared at him.

Thirteen years old to my seven. A boy I had thought about in passing over the years in that vague soft way you thought about moments that stuck for no reason you couldn't name.

And he had remembered. All of it. All this time.

“You’ve known who I was this whole time,” I said slowly. “Before the alley. Before everything.”

“Yes.”

The word sat between us plain and without apology.

Something was cracking open in my chest in a way I hadn’t prepared for.

Not anger exactly. Something more complicated than anger. Something that had anger in it but also something else sitting right beside it that I didn’t have a name for yet.

“So none of this was accidental,” I said carefully.

“Not all of it,” he said. “But not the way you’re thinking either.”

“Then explain it to me,” I said.

“Because from where I’m standing it looks like I have been–”

“I spent years keeping you away from my world,” he said. Quiet but firm. “I knew who you were. I watched from a distance to make sure you stayed safe. Away from all of this.” His jaw tightened. “You were never supposed to be in that alley Oriana.”

“But I was,” I said.

“But you were,” he said. “And I couldn’t–” he stopped. Something moving across his face that he pulled back before it could fully surface. “I couldn’t let you go. Not after finally having you close.”

The canal moved. Somewhere behind us a bird called out and went quiet.

I looked at this man – this impossible, infuriating, dangerous man and felt the ground shifting underneath me in a way that had nothing to do with the water the city was built on.

The anger was still there. Real and solid and not going anywhere. He had still taken my choice away. Had still threatened everyone I loved. Had still turned my entire life upside down without asking me if I was okay with any of it.

But this. This was something I hadn’t known to brace for.

A boy on a bench with sad eyes.

My last strawberry lollipop.

Seventeen years ago.

“I need to think,” I said quietly.

“I know,” he said.

He didn’t say anything else after that.

Didn’t push or fill the silence with more. Just stood beside me while the canal did its slow quiet thing and Venice moved around us like it always had, completely unbothered by the fact that everything had just shifted.

I stood there for a long time.

And for the first time since I had signed that contract I wasn’t counting the seconds until I could be somewhere else.

That frightened me more than anything he had ever said to me.