POSSESSED BY CIRO

Chapter 7

~~Oriana~~

I didn’t want to open my eyes.

That strange, heavy place between sleep and waking where your brain hasn’t fully loaded yet -I stayed there as long as I could, chasing it, holding onto it. Because the moment consciousness came back fully, everything else came with it.

And it did.

Like a wall of water.

The contract. The clock counting down. Cassie’s face behind that blindfold. The scratch of the pen on paper. The rose on the windowsill that I hadn’t asked for and didn’t know what to do with.

I stared at the ceiling.

The room was dim, early light barely pushing through the gap in the heavy curtains. Somewhere outside, water moved –that low, constant sound that Venice never fully switched off, like the city breathed through its canals.

Under different circumstances I might have found it peaceful.

Right now it just reminded me that I was very far from anything familiar.

I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes and lay there for a while, not moving. Just feeling the weight of it. All of it.

Yesterday I had been a lawyer with a court case and a best friend who couldn’t stay out of trouble for a single afternoon. Yesterday my biggest problem had been a two hour wait at a police station.

That felt like another life now.

I sat up slowly, pushing my hair off my face. My eyes were dry but tender, the way they always felt after crying. My body was stiff. I swung my legs off the bed and just sat on the edge for a moment, elbows on my knees, looking at the floor.

You made the right choice. His voice from last night drifted back.

Don’t, I had said. Don’t pretend this was a choice.

I still meant that. Every word of it.

But lying here feeling sorry for myself wasn’t going to get me anywhere. I had learned that lesson young — back in the orphanage when I was seven and a girl twice my size had taken my only good shoes and I had cried about it for a full afternoon before Matron sat beside me on the steps and said, very gently, tears are for after, my girl. First you think.

Matron.

I exhaled slowly through my nose.

She was safe now. He had kept his word on that much. The clock had stopped and that had to mean something, even if I wasn’t ready to give him credit for anything yet.

I got up and went to the bathroom.

The face looking back at me in the mirror wasn't mine–

Just kidding.

It was mine but it looked like it had been through something. Puffy eyes, tension sitting deep around my mouth, a kind of flatness in my expression that I didn’t usually carry.

I turned the cold tap on and splashed my face twice, three times, until I felt slightly more like a person.

I gripped the edge of the sink and looked at my own reflection.

You are Oriana Vitale. I said it to myself quietly, like a reminder. You have walked into rooms that didn’t want you and won. You have argued cases no one believed in and won.

You are not going to fall apart in this man’s bathroom.

I believed about sixty percent of that.

Sixty was enough to work with.

Nica knocked about twenty minutes later, soft and hesitant, like she already knew this morning was going to require more care than the last.

She came in with a tray and set it on the table without a word, arranging things with that quiet focus of hers. I watched her from where I sat on the edge of the bed, still in the clothes from last night because the ones laid out for me felt like putting on a costume and I wasn’t ready for that yet.

“Nica.”

“Yes?”

“How long have you worked here?”

She paused, hands still on the tray.

“Four years.”

I nodded slowly. “Is it- “ I stopped, reconsidered, then asked it anyway.

“Is it always like this here?”

She turned to look at me properly, and for a moment she seemed to be measuring something. How honest to be. How much I actually wanted to know versus how much I was just talking into the silence.

“It is what it is,” she said finally, carefully. Then, quieter, “But he has never brought anyone here before. Not like this.”

I didn’t respond to that. I wasn’t sure what to do with it.

She poured the tea and stepped back. “The master requests your presence downstairs. Whenever you are ready.”

There it was.

I looked at the tea. Then at the door.

Then at the rose still sitting red and unbothered on the windowsill.

“Okay,” I said quietly.

I changed slowly. I ate half of what was on the tray because my stomach was unsettled and forcing it felt wrong. I drank the tea to the bottom because I needed something warm in my hands, something ordinary to hold onto.

Then I stood up, smoothed down the front of the simple dress Nica had laid out, and walked to the door.

My hand rested on the handle for just a second.

Sixty percent, I reminded myself.

That’s enough.

The dining room was at the far end of a long corridor lined with dark wood panels and the kind of silence that felt intentional. My footsteps felt too loud against the floor. I walked slower than necessary, taking in the paintings on the walls –old and serious, men with hard faces, a city on water - and telling myself I was just looking, not stalling.

I was absolutely stalling.

I stopped outside the door, straightened my back, lifted my chin the way I did before entering a courtroom, and pushed it open.

He was already there.

Of course he was.

Seated at the head of a table that could have fit half a courtroom, a coffee in hand, papers spread in front of him. The morning light came in long and pale through the tall windows and caught the angles of his face in a way that almost made him look like the paintings in the hallway.

Almost.

He looked up when I walked in.

Neither of us said anything for a moment.

I crossed the room and pulled out the chair to his right because it was the only other place set and I wasn’t going to stand there deciding where to sit like this wasn’t already humiliating enough.

I sat down. Poured myself water from the jug on the table. Took a sip.

“You look tired,” he said.

“Good morning to you too,” I said flatly.

Something moved at the corner of his mouth. He went back to his papers.

I stared out the window at the grounds - all stone and water and walls - and felt the quiet press down on me. It wasn’t a comfortable quiet.

It was the kind that sat between two people who had too much to say and no safe place to put any of it.

A server appeared and set a plate in front of me. I looked at it. Looked away.

“Cassie calls at noon,” he said, without looking up.

My chest loosened just slightly.

“Thank you.”

He nodded once.

“There’s a gathering this evening.” He turned a page. “You’ll need to be present.”

I set my glass down. “What kind of gathering?”

“The kind that requires your presence beside me.”

I stared at the side of his face. “I’m going to need more than that.”

He looked at me then. That steady, unhurried look. “People will be watching. Some will be looking for weakness. You don’t show them any.”

“I’m a lawyer,” I said quietly. “I know how to hold a room.”

“This isn’t a courtroom.”

“No.” I held his gaze. “It’s worse. And I’m still here ain’t I?”

Something shifted behind his eyes. Quick and unreadable, gone before I could name it.

The doors swung open before either of us could say anything else, and a woman walked in like she had never once in her life waited for permission to enter any space.

Tall, dark haired, sharp eyed and wearing a grin that immediately made the room feel three degrees warmer. She looked like Ciro in the jaw and the cheekbones but everything else was entirely her own -loud where he was quiet, open where he was sealed shut.

She stopped and looked at me with open, unguarded curiosity.

“So you actually exist,” she said.

Despite everything. Despite the heavy morning and the tight chest and the exhaustion sitting bone deep in me - I felt the smallest pull at the corner of my mouth.

“So far,” I said.

She laughed like I had said something genuinely wonderful.

Dropped into the chair across from me without being invited and stole a piece of fruit from my plate like we had known each other for years.

“Rosa,” Ciro said. A warning in one word.

“I’m being completely normal,” she said cheerfully. Then to me, leaning forward on her elbows, “I’m Rosa. His sister. You’re going to need me tonight so it’s good we’re meeting now.”

I looked at her - this bright, dangerous, entirely unbothered woman - and felt something I hadn’t felt since I walked into this house.

Something that wasn’t quite comfort, but was at least in the same neighbourhood.

“Oriana,” I said.

“I know.” Her grin widened. “I’ve known about you longer than you’d think.”

I frowned slightly at that. Filed it away.

Across the table Ciro had gone very still in the way he did when he was paying attention to everything while pretending to pay attention to nothing.

I didn’t ask Rosa what she meant.

Not yet.

But I would.