POSSESSED BY CIRO

Chapter 8

~~Oriana~~

I’ve known about you longer than you’d think.

Rosa’s words followed me all the way back upstairs.

I turned them over in my head while Nica helped me into the dress Rosa had picked –a deep blue thing, fitted and simple, the kind that didn’t try too hard but still made a statement.

I turned them over while Rosa sat on the edge of my bed talking at a speed that probably had its own weather system, pulling my hair back with hands that were surprisingly gentle for someone who moved through the world like a small controlled explosion.

I didn’t ask her what she meant. Not yet.

Partly because I had learned early that the best way to get real information out of someone was to let them forget you were listening.

And Rosa, for all her brightness, was still a Conti. She had grown up in the same house as Ciro. Whatever she knew, she would only tell me on her own terms.

But mostly I didn’t ask because I was still carrying the morning inside me like something fragile, and I wasn’t sure I had the capacity for another revelation before noon.

Cassie called at exactly twelve o’clock.

I was sitting by the window when the phone Nica had left on the bedside table rang.

I answered before the second ring.

“Oria.” Her voice came through and I felt something in my chest just –release. Like a fist that had been clenched since last night finally opening.

“Cassie.” My voice came out smaller than I intended.

“I’m okay,” she said quickly, and I could hear that she was saying it as much for herself as for me. “I’m okay, I’m at the hotel, I’m fine. Are you -are you okay? Where are you, what happened, I filed a report but then these men came and they said–”

“I know.” I pressed my fingers to my eyes. “I know. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t you dare apologize to me right now–”

“Cassie.”

She stopped.

“I’m safe.” The word felt strange in my mouth applied to this house, but it was the truest version of safe available to me right now. “I need you to listen to me carefully, okay? I need you to go home.”

Silence.

“Go home,” I said again, softer. “Back to our city. Don’t stay in Venice.”

“Oriana, I am not leaving you her–”

“Please.” And the please cracked slightly at the edges because I was tired and I meant it with everything I had. “The safest thing you can do for me right now is not be here. Go home, stay with someone, don’t be alone. Can you do that?”

A long pause. I could hear her breathing.

“I don’t like this,” she finally said.

“I know.”

“I really, really don’t like this.”

“I know Cassie.”

Another pause. Then quietly, “You’ll call me?”

“Every chance I get.”

She exhaled. “Fine. But Oriana-” her voice dipped, “you fight, okay? Whatever is happening there, you don’t just lie down and take it. You fight.”

Despite everything, despite the blue dress and the gathering tonight and Rosa’s unasked question still sitting at the back of my throat – I almost smiled.

“Have you ever known me not to?” I said.

She laughed, short and wet. “No. God no.”

We stayed on the line for another minute, not really saying anything, just existing in the same space through a phone screen the way you did when words weren’t enough and silence was the only honest thing left.

Then she hung up.

I sat with the phone in my lap for a while after.

Rosa reappeared at seven, announced by the sound of her heels in the corridor before the knock even came.

She looked me over when I opened the door, head tilting, expression moving through something I couldn’t quite read before settling into approval.

“Good,” she said simply. “You’ll do.”

“High praise,” I said.

She smirked and handed me a small box. Inside was a single piece of jewelry– “a thin gold bracelet, delicate and understated.

“It’s not a gift,” she said immediately, reading my expression. “Well it is, but it’s also practical. It has a tracker in it.”

I stared at her.

“Before you say anything–” she held up a hand, “–it’s not for him to watch you. It’s for me. So that if anything goes wrong tonight and you need pulling out of something, I know exactly where you are.” She said it matter of factly, like she was explaining where the spare key was kept.

“This world has more moving parts than you know yet. Consider it insurance.”

I looked at the bracelet for a moment.

Then I took it out of the box and put it on.

Rosa watched me do it with an expression I couldn’t fully name.

Something almost like respect.

“Let’s go,” she said.

The gathering was held in a part of the estate I hadn’t seen yet - a wing that opened into a wide room with high ceilings and low lighting and more people than I had been prepared for. Not a party exactly.

Something more restrained than that.

Controlled.

Men in dark suits standing in clusters, conversations that stopped a half second too long when new people entered. Women dressed beautifully who had eyes like they were always counting exits.

I understood immediately what Rosa had meant that morning.

They looked.

The moment I stepped through with Rosa just slightly ahead of me, I felt it –that collective shift in attention, subtle but unmistakable, like a room full of people who had all heard the same rumor and were now measuring the reality of it against what they’d been told.

I kept my chin up and my face neutral and reminded myself that I had walked into courtrooms full of people who wanted me to fail.

This was not so different.

Stare back, Rosa had said. Works every time.

So I did.

Ciro found me before I found him.

I became aware of him the way you became aware of a change in temperature -not all at once but in degrees, a shift in the air, a stillness that moved through the room like a current until I turned and there he was, crossing toward me with that unhurried certainty of a man who had never once questioned whether a room belonged to him.

He stopped beside me.

Close. Closer than necessary.

“You came,” he said quietly.

“I said I would,” I said, just as quietly.

He looked at me for a moment in that way he had –steady and thorough, like he was checking something off against something he already knew.

Then he turned to face the room and I understood without being told that I was meant to do the same.

Stand beside him. That was the arrangement.

I stood beside him.

The next hour was an exercise in restraint.

People approached - men mostly, some with women at their sides - and spoke to Ciro in the measured way you spoke to someone whose goodwill you needed.

They acknowledged me with varying degrees of warmth. Some nodded respectfully. One woman looked me up and down with a smile so thin it barely qualified as one.

An older man with silver hair and kind eyes shook my hand and said something in Italian that I caught maybe half of, but his tone was warm enough that I nodded and smiled and it seemed to land correctly.

And then there was the man I hadn’t expected.

He approached from the far side of the room, unhurried, a glass in hand, and everything about him was different from the people around him.

Where the others were measured he was easy.

Where they were watchful he seemed relaxed. He was handsome in a conventional, approachable way - the kind of face that made you feel immediately comfortable, which in a room like this probably should have been the first warning sign.

He smiled at me and it reached his eyes.

“You must be Oriana,” he said, in smooth accented English. “I’ve heard a great deal.”

Beside me, I felt Ciro go absolutely still.

Not visibly.

Not in any way the room would notice. But I noticed because I was standing close enough to feel it –that particular quality of stillness that wasn’t calm at all but something coiled and waiting underneath.

“I have the advantage then,” I said lightly, because I didn’t know this man yet and I had learned to be careful with people whose names I didn’t know.

The man smiled wider. “Damien,” he said. “Damien Black.”

And just like that, the temperature in my small corner of the room dropped several degrees.

I smiled back.

And made sure not to show a single thing on my face.