Chapter 6
1248 Words
It was an absurdly practical and lifeless room. The walls were all a dead shade of gray. There were no picture frames, no plush rugs covering the floor, nor any trace of human comfort. It looked like a soldier's closed quarters in the middle of a war. The air conditioning blew an icy wind that made the hairs on my arms stand up instantly.
In the geometric center of the room, there was a massive raw wood bed. The sheets were completely black, stretched with maniacal precision, without a single crease.
Three meters away from the edge of the bed, pushed against the opposite wall, was a black leather loveseat. Too short for a full-grown person to sleep on. Too narrow.
Dante was there.
He wore only black twill tactical pants. His large bare feet touched the wooden floor. He was shirtless.
The breath hitched and locked in the back of my throat. I stopped frozen near the door.
Dante's torso was a living map of extreme violence. Thick, jagged white scars ran across his upper ribs. The left side of his lateral muscle displayed a deep, sunken mark from an old gunshot. A long, straight cut went down, tearing the skin from his right collarbone to the middle of his hard chest.
He made no effort to show off his physical strength. Dante's posture was stiff, his shoulders slightly hunched forward, protective and defensive.
He was sitting on the edge of the massive mattress. In his large hands, he held the dismantled parts of a dark pistol. He was rubbing the metal barrel with a piece of cloth stained with black grease.
Click. Click.
The sound of cold metal echoed inside the closed room. He fit the gun parts together without looking at his own fingers. Alert and dangerous.
He didn't lift his face.
"You took a long time," Dante said. His voice came out hollow, scraping against the cold wind of the air conditioning.
"I don't have a clock in there."
"Lock the door."
I turned the heavy deadbolt from the inside. The metal click sealed our total isolation for the night.
I tip-toed over to the leather sofa. I tossed the thin pillow into one of the corners. The small piece of furniture was far enough away that neither he nor I could touch each other without taking at least two full steps. The invisible safety line of a paranoid man.
Dante slammed the ammunition magazine into the bottom of the gun.
Clack.
He lifted his head. His black eyes hit me. They measured my exact position in the room, checking if the space remained intact.
"Lie down," he ordered, without pointing or gesturing.
I sat down. I tucked my legs up against my body. The hard back of the sofa hurt my spine instantly. I threw the gray blanket over myself.
He laid the loaded gun on top of the black mattress next to him.
"Turn off the light."
I reached my left hand over to the small table next to the sofa. I pressed the button on the lamp.
Click.
The lights went out. The darkness devoured the room.
The pitch-black in there was brutal. Blind. A thick, insurmountable darkness. The silence swallowed any sound coming from outside the mansion. The air conditioning wind hissed constantly above my head.
I squeezed my eyes shut, burying my face in the musty-smelling pillow. I heard the blood rushing fast in my arteries. My pulse beat rhythmically in my neck.
Swishhh.
I heard the noise of Dante's heavy sheet being dragged. The sound of springs stretching. The dull thud of his broad body dropping onto his back on the dark mattress.
I kept my breathing controlled. I waited for the natural tension of the day to end. Exhausted, dangerous men fall asleep fast. The breathing changes rhythm, gets heavy in the chest, and flows out the mouth in a long, unbroken stream.
But Dante didn't change the rhythm of anything.
He pulled in air. Short. Tense. And let it out through his mouth with brutality.
Swishhh.
The mattress creaked. The sheet rasped loudly. Dante rolled his entire body to the right side of the bed.
Ten seconds of dense, electric silence.
Swishhh.
He rolled with more violence to the opposite side. The bed shook.
With every drag on the sheet, the violent energy inside that room increased. Dante Russo, the calculating monster of the Cosa Nostra, didn't know how to rest. His brain didn't shut down. His massive body rejected relaxation as if it were poison.
Time began to crawl in a tortuous way. Fifteen long minutes. Thirty agonizing minutes. A full hour marked only by the suffering of a caged insomnia.
My shoulders ached from the stiff position on the sofa. My neck was rigid.
But it wasn't the physical discomfort that held my attention. It was the alarm deep in my spine.
The Capo's breathing worsened. It grew shorter and more aggressive. He was in agony and I was to blame. Sharing the same air was destroying him from the inside.
Anxiety corroded my survival instinct. I needed to look.
I turned the back of my head slowly on the pillow. My skin dragged slowly against the cotton. I opened my eyelids toward the darkness.
My sight was now somewhat used to the extreme dark. A miserable sliver of light from the dead moon peeked past the edge of the blackout curtain.
I searched the gloomy, rectangular outline of the double bed in the center of the room. The top was completely smooth. Empty. The sheets pushed aside.
I lowered my gaze.
The breath locked painfully in the middle of my lungs. My heart jumped in my chest and hit my rib.
He wasn't sleeping. He was no longer trying to lie down.
Dante Russo was sitting on the edge of the bed, his boots resting on the floor, in the exact same posture as the minute I walked in there.
His left chest and the line of his back weakly and subtly reflected the light. His neck tense as steel. His head turned straight in my direction.
He was watching me.
He stared at the dark sofa against the wall and tracked every heartbeat of mine, locked up in his own paranoia, hostage to a deep-rooted fear of lying down and closing his eyes near another person, of letting go of absolute control, of becoming prey for even a second.
His large hand rested relaxed on the thigh of his stretched leg. And the fingers of that hand wrapped strongly and without hesitation around the grip of the gun.
He was guarding my life in the dark. But with his pistol ready in his hand.
I paralyzed completely. I was trapped in his eyes, hidden in the shadows.
Dante didn't need to turn on the light. He noticed that my head had turned. He read my panting breath right away.
His voice drifted down the emptiness of the room in a hoarse whisper. Rough. Intimidating enough to chill the tips of my fingers under the blanket.
"Turn to face the wall, Siena."
My name in his dry accent sounded like a final condemnation.
I pressed my lips shut. My throat wouldn't obey.
"Stop listening to my breathing while I'm in this bed," Dante growled in the constant pitch-black. The crack of leather as he squeezed his finger against the barrel was surgical. "Or I'll get up from here and make you stop breathing."
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