POSSESSED BY CIRO

Chapter 10

~~Oriana~~

“Four days.”

That was how long I had been inside Sept Tour without losing my mind completely.

I wasn’t sure if that said something good about my resilience or something concerning how quickly a person could start adjusting to circumstances they never asked for.

Probably both.

The house had a rhythm. I had spent the first day just listening to it - the way it woke up before the sun did, the distant sounds of movement downstairs before I even opened my eyes, the smell of coffee that drifted up through the corridors every morning like clockwork. By the third day I had stopped flinching at the sound of boots on the ground floor or voices speaking rapid Italian somewhere below my room.

I was adapting.

I hated that I was adapting.

Breakfast was the one part of the day that had its own specific kind of tension.

It was just the two of us every morning at that long table. Ciro at the head, papers and coffee. I to his right, tea and the quiet effort of pretending to be unbothered by the fact that I was having breakfast with a man who had dismantled my entire life with a contract and a countdown clock.

He didn’t crowd me. Didn’t hover or make pointed remarks about the fact that I was there because I had no choice. He just - existed. In that large, unhurried, completely unreadable way of his.

Which was almost worse.

On the third morning I looked up from my plate and caught him watching me.

Not subtly either. Just – watching.

Elbow on the table, coffee cup halfway to his mouth, eyes on my face with that particular patience of his that never seemed to have an end point.

“What,” I said flatly.

“Nothing,” he said.

“Then stop staring.”

The corner of his mouth moved. Just barely. He went back to his papers.

I went back to my breakfast.

My ears were warm and i refused to acknowledge that.

On the fourth morning the table was set for one.

I stood in the doorway looking at it.

Nica appeared. “The master left early. He said to tell you the grounds are yours today.” She paused, clearly recalling the exact words. “And not to do anything he would find irritating.”

I looked at her.

Then I laughed.

Actually laughed, short and surprised, the first real one since all of this started. It felt strange coming out, like a muscle I hadn’t used in a while.

Nica smiled quietly and disappeared back toward the kitchen.

I ate my breakfast alone and for the first time in four days my shoulders sat somewhere near their normal position instead of up around my ears.

I spent most of the morning outside.

The grounds of Sept Tour were something else when you actually had time to look at them. Stone paths, old trees, the canal running along the far edge catching the morning light. The kind of place that had existed long enough to feel settled in itself, unbothered by whatever went on inside the walls beside it.

I walked slowly, hands in my pockets, letting my brain do what it hadn’t had room to do since I got here.

Think properly.

I thought about Cassie first, who had called the day before sounding less panicked and more furious which was honestly a relief. Furious was Cassie’s natural habitat.

Panicked was not.

I thought about Matron, whose silence sat in a specific tender spot in my chest that I kept pressing against without meaning to.

I thought about work. About the cases sitting on my desk back home.

About the life I had been living a week ago that now felt like it belonged to a completely different person.

And then I thought about Ciro.

Specifically about two nights ago when I had come out of my room for water and found him standing at the window at the end of the corridor.

Just standing there in the dark looking out at the water, jacket off, sleeves pushed up, looking – for the first time since I had met him, he looked like someone who carried something heavy and occasionally had to put it down somewhere private.

He had turned when he heard me.

We looked at each other.

Neither of us had said a word.

And I had gone back to my room and laid awake for an hour afterward and I was still annoyed at myself about that.

Ciro came back in the evening.

I felt the house shift before I even heard him – that specific change in atmosphere that happened when he walked through the front doors, like the building itself adjusted. I was in the small sitting room off the main corridor, legs tucked under me on the sofa, a book open in my lap that I had been staring at more than reading.

Footsteps on the stairs.

They stopped outside the sitting room.

The door opened.

Ciro stood in the frame still in his jacket, eyes finding me immediately the way they always did, like locating me in a room was just something that happened automatically.

“You’re still up,” he said.

“I live here apparently,” I said without looking up from my book.

A pause.

Then he walked in.

He didn’t sit across the room. He sat at the other end of the same sofa.

Not close. There was a full cushion between them. But not across the room either, and the sitting room wasn’t large so the effect was — present. I became immediately aware of the warmth of him, the faint dark clean smell of his cologne, the way he settled into the sofa like a man who was tired but wouldn’t admit it.

I read the same sentence three times and got nothing from it.

He reached up and loosened the top button of his shirt.

I turned a page I hadn’t finished.

“How was your day,” he said.

I glanced over. He was looking straight ahead, head tipped back slightly against the sofa.

“Fine,” I said. “The grounds are nice.”

“Mm.”

Silence.

Not an uncomfortable one exactly.

More like the kind that sits between two people who have things to say and haven’t decided yet whether to say them.

I closed my book.

I looked at the side of his face.

The jaw. The line of his throat above that loosened collar. The way his hands rested on his thighs, still and large and unhurried.

“Can I ask you something,” I said.

“You’re going to regardless,” he said.

Fair enough.

“Why did you stay celibate,” I said.

The question landed in the room and sat there.

Ciro didn’t move. Didn’t tense up or shift or do any of the things a person did when a question caught them off guard. He just went very still in that way of his and the silence stretched for long enough that Oriana thought he might not answer at all.

“Because nothing before was worth it,” he said.

His voice was quiet. Not soft exactly – Ciro’s voice was never really soft but lower than usual. Like something he was saying more to the room than to me.

I sat with that for a moment.

The lamp on the side table threw warm light across the space between us. Outside, Venice was doing its usual thing - water and distant sounds and that particular night-time quiet of a city built on something old.

“And now,” I said.

I hadn’t planned to say it. It just came out.

Ciro turned his head and looked at me.

And there it was – that look. The one that did something to the air in whatever room it happened in. Slow and direct and carrying the full, unhurried weight of a man who had apparently decided some time ago exactly how he felt and had simply been waiting.

My stomach did something I chose not to examine.

“Oriana already knows the answer to that,” he said.

Low. Even. The kind of voice that didn’t need to be loud to fill a room.

The cushion between us suddenly felt very thin.

I was aware of every single point of almost-contact – the few inches between my knee and his, the small distance between our arms on the back of the sofa. Nothing was touching. Nothing had come close to touching.

But the awareness of it was loud enough to be its own thing entirely.

“The contract says–” I started.

“You are safe,” he said simply. “I said I would give you time.”

“I know that.”

“Then why do you look like you're deciding whether to run,” he said.

I opened my mouth.

Closed it.

Because that was annoyingly, embarrassingly, exactly what was happening.

I stood up.

“Goodnight,” I said, and my voice came out steady and I was grateful for that at least.

I crossed to the door.

“Oriana.”

I stopped. Didn’t turn around.

“Sleep well,” he said.

Quiet. Completely unbothered. Like he had all the time in the world and absolutely no doubt about how things were eventually going to go.

I walked out.

Up the stairs.

Into my room and straight to the window, pressing my fingers against the cool glass and looking out at the water.

My heart was going faster than it had any right to.

I pressed my forehead against the glass and stood there breathing for a moment.

Nothing before was worth it.

Outside Venice glittered on like it always did, completely indifferent.

I stood there a long time before I finally moved away from the window.

I was in trouble.

Real, genuine trouble.

And the worst part – the part that kept me staring at the ceiling long after I had climbed into bed was that the trouble had dark eyes and a quiet voice and had not laid a single finger on me yet.