Page 36 of The Devils in the Details

“He grabbed my arms. Fingers. Here.” I gestured to the marks, which were darkening nicely. “Then the collar. Fabric tore. You can see the... yeah.”

I touched the torn edge of my shirt. The cotton hung open at the throat, exposing more collarbone than the manufacturer had intended, and the tear was clean—a straight rip along the seam where Theo’s grip had found the weakest point and applied enthusiastic leverage.

“I used the Caesar bust. Marble. Ornamental. Very effective as an impromptu cranial adjustment tool. Would recommend. Five stars. The sound it made was...” I paused. Searched for the right word. “Therapeutic.”

Ari’s jaw was tight. I could feel it against my temple—the tension of muscle under skin, the way his breathing had changed, slower now, more controlled, the kind of control that cost him something and he was paying it anyway.

“I never got to my switchblade,” I added. “It’s in the laptop bag. If I had, we’d be having a different conversation in a different location. Probably involving a tarp. And paperwork. So. Silver linings.”

His arm tightened around my waist. Once. Brief. The pressure of a man who had just processed several sentences simultaneously and did not like the arithmetic on any of them.

“The bust was Julius Caesar,” I said. “I consider the symbolism appropriate. Man overreaches. Man gets stabbed. Classical narrative structure. Very satisfying closure.”

Ari did not laugh. His chest moved—once, a half-breath that might have been the structural cousin of a laugh in a different timeline—but his face, what I could see of it from my angle, stayed set in that controlled cold that I was starting to recognize.

Then his hand pressed my head to his shoulder. Not guiding. Not suggesting. Pressing, as if this was the correct response and he was now implementing that decision without negotiation.

I let him.

This is worth noting because I don’t let most people. Letting is complicated. Letting requires trust, and trust is a currency I spend carefully, in small denominations, with extensive documentation.

Yet when Ari’s hand found the back of my head and pressed me against the solid warmth of his shoulder, my body made the decision before my brain caught up, and the decision was yes.

The adrenaline crashed.

I felt it happen—the suddenness of a system that had been running at triple capacity deciding, all at once, that it was done. My muscles went. Not collapse, exactly. Surrender. The kind of surrender that happens when something has been holding itself together through sheer force of will and the force has finally, mercifully, found its limit.

Ari was warm. Solid. His shoulder under my cheek carried the scent of cedar and coffee and something underneath it that was just him, just skin, the clean base note of a man who did not wear cologne because he did not need to.

My bare feet dangled. Turquoise sparkles catching the low light from the desk lamp, toes pointed toward the floor because my legs were not long enough to reach it from the height of Ari’s lap.

My torn collar hung open. The red marks on my arms throbbed gently, a dull percussion keeping time with my heartbeat, which was gradually slowing to something that resembled a normal human rhythm rather than the interpretive dance it had been performing for the last twenty minutes.

The door opened. Soft. A single knock that had happened approximately half a second before the door itself moved, which was Leon’s courtesy—the knock as notification rather than request.

A blanket appeared. Heavy. Wool, maybe, or something thick enough to mimic it, the kind of blanket that had weight and presence and the smell of something that had been stored in cedar and forgotten about until someone needed it.

Leon set it on the edge of the desk. Did not look at me. Did not look at Ari. Looked at the space approximately six inches to the left of both of us, which was his version of professional discretion and also considerably more tact than the situation deserved.

The door closed. The latch caught.

Ari reached for the blanket. One-handed. His other arm stayed around my waist, and the coordination of a man retrieving an object without disrupting the person in his lap was something my nervous system filed under “highly relevant data” without consulting my better judgment.

He shook the blanket open and then the weight of it settled around my shoulders—heavy, warm, the kind of warmth that seeped into muscles that had been holding tension for longer than they were designed to.

His hands tucked the edges. Around my back, under my knees where the bare skin of my legs was doing its thing—radiating cold, because bare feet on hardwood for twenty minutes in a climate-controlled palazzo adds up to a thermal deficit that no amount of adrenaline can fully offset.

His fingers brushed my ankles as he arranged the blanket, and the contact registered somewhere below my sternum.

My eyes closed.

I did not decide to close them. They closed on their own, like something that had reached the end of its operational budget and was now implementing power-saving measures.

The darkness behind my eyelids was warm and textured and considerably more appealing than the alternative, which was keeping them open and continuing to process a world that had, in the span of forty-five minutes, introduced several new variables that my brain was not currently equipped to handle.

My face was in the curve of Ari’s neck. His skin was warm against my forehead. His pulse was steady under my cheek, and I could feel it—a man who was sitting very still and thinking very hard about things he had not yet said out loud.

My hand found the edge of his shirt and my fingers closed around it without my conscious input. The grip was tight. White-knuckled. The grip of a man who was asleep and did not know he was doing it, except I was not asleep, I was awake, I was very awake, and my hand had nevertheless decided that Ari’s shirt was structurally significant and required securing.