POSSESSED BY CIRO

Chapter 13

~~Oriana~~

Thinking, it turned out, was harder than it sounded.

I had gone back inside after a while, walked up to my room, sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the wall. Which was not exactly productive but it was all I had for the first twenty minutes or so.

“A boy on a bench”.

I kept coming back to that.

I was been seven years old and he had been thirteen and I hadn’t known his name or anything about him except that he looked sad in a way that made my chest hurt. So I had done the only thing that made sense to my seven year old brain. I had given him the lollipop matron had given to me that morning for finishing all my porridge and I had run away before he could refuse it because I already knew from experience that people refused things less when you didn’t give them the chance.

I had thought about that boy maybe three or four times over the years. In the passing way you thought about small moments. Nothing significant.

Just a memory that surfaced occasionally and then went back under.

And that boy had been Ciro.

And he had grown up into – this. Into the thing the whole city whispered about. Into the man who could make a police officer hand over a phone without a word and have a bomb stopped with a two second phone call.

Into the man sitting at the head of my breakfast table every morning.

I laid back on the bed and pressed my arm over my eyes.

I didn’t know what to do with this information. That was the honest truth of it. Because on one hand none of it changed what he had done. The contract was still real. The countdown clock had still happened.

The fact that he had apparently spent years keeping tabs on me from a distance was – honestly that was its own complicated thing that I hadn’t even gotten to yet.

But on the other hand.

I cried when I thought I didn’t want it.

Then I smiled like the whole day had gotten better.

He had remembered that.

Specifically. After seventeen years.

I moved my arm off my eyes and looked at the ceiling.

I was so confused.

Rosa came in the afternoon.

She didn’t knock, because Rosa never knocked, she just opened the door and walked in and stopped when she saw me still lying on the bed.

“It’s three in the afternoon,” Rosa said.

“I am aware,” Oriana said.

Rosa closed the door behind her and came to sit at the foot of the bed, pulling her legs up, looking at me with that sharp assessing look that saw everything.

“He told you,” she said.

It wasn’t a question.

“About the orphanage,” I said. “The bench. Yes.”

Rosa nodded slowly.

“How long have you known,” I asked.

“Always,” Rosa said simply. “He used to talk about the little sunshine girl from Via Brera. When we were young. Before things got–” she paused, choosing her words, “–before things got complicated.”

Something moved across her face.

“She was the one good memory from a time that didn’t have many of them.”

I sat up slowly.

Looked at Rosa.

“He called her little sunshine,” Rosa said. A small smile. “You. He called you little sunshine.”

I didn’t say anything.

Because what was there to say to that.

I pressed my fingers to my mouth and looked at the window and felt that cracking feeling in my chest from this morning come back, wider now, something genuinely trying to push through it.

“Rosa,” I said carefully. “What happened to them. Your parents.”

Rosa was quiet for a long moment.

“That,” she said finally, “is his story to tell. Not mine.” She met my eyes.

“But I will tell you this. Whatever you think you know about why he is the way he is – you’re probably missing the part that matters most.”

I looked at her.

“Give him the chance to show you that part,” Rosa said quietly. “That’s all.”

Then she unfolded herself from the bed, straightened her jacket and walked back out the same way she came in.

The door clicked shut.

I sat in the quiet of the room for a long time after.

I went to find him.

I didn’t plan it. I wasn’t ready, I hadn’t sorted through half of what I was feeling, I had no idea what I was going to say when I got there. But I got up, washed my face, walked out of my room and down the corridor and stopped outside the study.

The door was open.

Ciro was at his desk. He had put his jacket back on at some point. Papers in front of him, pen in hand, brows drawn together slightly the way they did when he was reading something that needed more thought.

He looked up when I appeared in the doorway.

Neither of us said anything for a second.

“Can I come in,” I said.

He set the pen down. “You don’t have to ask.”

I walked in.

I didn’t sit in the armchair this time.

I came closer, stopping in front of the desk, and stood there with my hands loose at my sides feeling considerably less composed than I would have liked.

“Little sunshine,” I said.

Something shifted in his face.

Immediate and unguarded, there before he could pull it back. The first time I had seen something that raw on him and it was gone quickly but I had seen it.

“Rosa,” he said flatly.

“She didn’t tell me much,” I said. “Just that.”

He leaned back in his chair, looking up at me, and for a moment he just looked like a person. Not the thing the city feared. Not the composed untouchable version he wore in every room I had seen him in. Just a person sitting with something old and private that someone had just called by name.

“I was thirteen,” he said. “It had been a bad day. Worse than usual.” He said it plainly, no drama in it. “And this tiny girl appeared out of nowhere and started crying because she thought I didn’t want her lollipop.”

Despite everything. Despite the confusion and the anger and the cracking feeling in my chest that still hadn’t settled. I felt my mouth pull slightly.

“She was very committed to that lollipop,” I said.

“She was,” he said. And there it was – that almost smile. The real one, not the sharp barely-there corner twitch I had seen before. Something warmer than that, sitting briefly on his face like it wasn’t sure it was allowed to be there.

I looked at him.

This man who had upended everything. Who had been a sad boy on a bench once. Who had apparently carried a memory of a seven year old girl with a strawberry lollipop for seventeen years like it was something worth keeping.

“You should have left me alone,” I said quietly. Not angry. Just honest.

“I know,” he said. Just as quietly.

“You should have let me walk past that alley and go back to my hotel and my life.”

“I know,” he said again.

“But you didn’t.”

“No,” he said. “I didn’t.”

The lamp on the desk threw warm light across the space between us.

Outside the water moved. The city did its indifferent beautiful thing.

I stood there looking at him for a moment longer than I probably should have.

Then I pulled out the chair across from the desk and sat down.

Ciro looked at me. Something quiet and careful in his eyes.

“Tell me about the bad day,” I said.

He was still for a second.

“You don’t want to hear that,” he said.

“Oriana asked didn’t she,” I said.

Then caught myself. “I asked.”

A long pause.

Then Ciro reached for his glass, leaned back in his chair, and for the first time since I had met him he started to talk. Really talk. Not the clipped controlled sentences I had gotten used to. Something slower and less guarded than that.

And I sat across from him in the warm light of the study and listened