THE DON’S CAPTIVE

9

Chapter 9

He came back at eleven.

I heard the front door and then voices, low and urgent, and then silence. I was in my room, sitting on the edge of the bed fully dressed, because I had known since I watched that car pull away this morning that sleep was not happening tonight.

His footsteps in the hallway were different. Faster than usual. Less controlled.

My door opened without a knock.

He looked at me across the room and something in his face was undone in a way I had not seen before. Not cracked at the edges like this morning. Broken open. His tie was gone, his top button undone, and there was a tension in his jaw that looked like it had been there for hours and was only barely contained.

“What happened to Lucia,” I said. My voice came out steady. I do not know how.

He crossed the room and sat beside me on the bed and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and said, “Someone went to the hospital today. Asked questions about her. About you. About your connection to me.”

The floor tilted slightly under me. “What kind of questions.”

“Your name. How long she had been a patient. Whether you had visited recently.” He paused. “They had a photograph of you. Taken outside this house.”

I pressed my hands flat on my thighs and breathed. “Is she safe.”

“Yes. I moved two men to the hospital within an hour of the call. She is safe.” He turned his head and looked at me. “She does not know why. I told the staff it was a private security arrangement, routine.”

“She will not believe that.”

“No,” he said. “She probably will not.”

I stared at the wall across from me and thought about Lucia in that hospital bed, sick and sharp and entirely too perceptive, with men outside her door she had not asked for. I thought about how frightened she would be when she called me and I did not answer and had not answered for days.

The anger came then. Real and hot and clean.

“Who,” I said.

“A rival. Someone who has been watching my movements and found a soft place to press.” His voice was controlled but something underneath it was not. “This is my fault. I should have moved her sooner.”

I turned and looked at him. “You moved her at all. You put men on her door. You called me the moment you knew.”

“Aria.”

“You are not going to sit here and take responsibility for someone else deciding to use a sick girl as leverage,” I said. “That is on them. Not you.”

He looked at me for a long moment. His eyes moved over my face with an intensity that felt like touch.

“You should be furious with me,” he said quietly. “This happened because of your connection to me. Because I kept you here.”

“I know why it happened,” I said. “Being furious with you does not protect her.”

Something in his expression shifted. Deeper than the earlier rawness, deeper than this morning’s almost smile. Something that had no name I could put to it yet but that I felt land in my chest with a weight that was not entirely unpleasant.

His hand found mine on the bed between us.

He did not say anything. He just held it. His thumb moving slowly across my knuckles the way it had on my knee at that dinner table, deliberate and warm.

“I will handle this,” he said. “She will be safe. I give you my word.”

Coming from any other man in any other circumstance the words would have meant nothing. Coming from him, in this room, after everything I had learned about what his word actually cost him, they meant everything.

“I know,” I said.

We sat like that in the quiet for a moment. His hand around mine. The house settled around us.

Then I turned toward him and he turned toward me and the space between us was nothing, it had been nothing for days, and when I reached up and touched his jaw he went very still the way he always did when something surprised him past his ability to manage it.

“Aria.” His voice was low. Warning and wanting at once.

“You said it could not happen again,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Do you still mean that.”

A long beat. His eyes on mine, dark and entirely honest in the way they only got when his guard was fully down.

“No,” he said. “I do not still mean that.”

I kissed him.

He made a sound low in his throat and his hands were on me immediately, one at my waist pulling me in, one cupping the back of my head, and he kissed me back with a thoroughness that made last night in the car feel like a preview.

He laid me back against the bed and looked down at me and I watched him take me in, the length of me, and the look on his face was something I felt in every part of my body at once.

“Tell me to stop and I stop,” he said. “Say the word and I stop. No question.”

“I will not say the word,” I said.

His mouth found my neck and I stopped thinking in complete sentences.

He undressed me slowly, which was not what I expected from him and was somehow more undoing than urgency would have been. Each piece of clothing removed with deliberate patience, his eyes tracking every inch of skin like he was cataloguing something precious. When I reached for his shirt he let me take it off him, let me look, and what I found underneath all that tailored control was warm and solid and real.

“You are looking at me like that again,” he said, his voice rough.

“Like what.”

“Like you are trying to figure me out.”

“I am always trying to figure you out.”

He lowered himself over me and his mouth came to my ear and he said, “Then let me give you something concrete to work with.”

What followed was not what I expected from the coldest man I had ever met. He was thorough in a way that felt personal. Attentive in a way that had nothing to do with performance and everything to do with paying attention to exactly what I needed and then providing it with a precision that left me with no defenses whatsoever.

He learned me like a language he intended to speak fluently.

And when I finally broke apart in his arms, his name on my lips, his mouth at my throat, his hands holding me like something he had decided he was keeping, the sound I made was entirely honest and entirely his and he knew it.

Afterward he pulled me against his chest and his hand stroked my hair in the dark, slow and steady, and neither of us spoke for a long time.

“You are not leaving tonight,” he said eventually. Not a question.

“No,” I said. “I am not.”

His arm tightened. His breathing settled.

I lay against his chest and listened to his heartbeat slow and thought about Lucia safe in her room with guards outside her door and thought about the photograph someone had taken of me outside this house and thought about the look on his face when he had walked through my door tonight, broken open and making no effort to hide it.

And I understood something that rearranged the entire map I had been building since the alley.

He had come to my room tonight before he came to me.

He had sat on that bed and told me about Lucia before anything else. Before the need that had been in his face since the door opened. Before everything that came after.

Because she mattered to me. So she mattered to him.

That was not management.

That was not an arrangement.

I closed my eyes and pressed my hand flat against his chest and felt his heartbeat steady under my palm.

In the morning he would pull the armor back on. He would be controlled and careful and would probably spend half the day pretending last night had a simpler explanation than the real one.

But I had felt his hands shake when he held me.

I had heard what his voice sounded like when it had nowhere left to hide.

And I was beginning to understand that Dante Romano was not a man who had chosen to be cold.

He was a man who had been broken into it.

The question keeping me awake, long after his breathing had deepened into sleep, was simple and enormous and terrifying.

What happened to the person who started putting him back together?

What did he do when he realized he needed them?

I was still awake when his phone lit up on the nightstand.

A message. One line, visible on the screen before it dimmed.

Four words that turned everything cold.

We have the girl.