Page 44 of The Devils in the Details

“I’m also keeping the switchblade on the nightstand.”

A pause. Ari’s thumb moved against my ribs, once, a small circle that registered somewhere below my sternum. “I would expect nothing less.”

I reached for the caramel on the nightstand. Gold foil, slightly crumpled, the crumple of something that had been handled by large, careful hands and placed exactly where it was supposed to be.

I unwrapped it. Slow. The foil caught the light, warm gold against the pale stripes coming through the shutters.

I broke it in half. Held one piece out to Ari.

He took it.

This surprised me more than anything else that had happened this morning, and that was saying something, because the list of surprising things that had happened this morning included waking up in Ari’s bed, having spectacular sex with Ari’s cock inside me, and being informed that I no longer had an apartment because Ari Romano had decided, unilaterally, that I lived here now.

He put the caramel in his mouth. His jaw worked once, the muscles shifting under skin.

We lay there sharing the caramel in silence. The early light moved across the bed, the stripes shifting as the sun climbed, and Ari’s hand pressed slightly warmer against my side.

I ate my half. Sweet. Salty. Like a series of catastrophic decisions and committing to every one of them.

Ari’s breathing was steady against my shoulder, and the weight of him was something my body had already decided was correct, which was either the most alarming thing that had ever happened to me or the only thing that had ever made complete sense, and the line between those was getting thinner by the second.

I looked at him. Really looked. The scar on his cheekbone, pale in the morning light. The line of his jaw, set with the certainty of a man who did not apologize for the space he occupied. The black eyes that were watching me with a warmth that had no business being as direct as it was.

I was done for.

Completely. Irrevocably. The kind of done for that came with no reverse gear and no off-ramp and the distinct, terrible realization that I did not, in fact, want either of those things.

I didn’t say it. Didn’t need to. The caramel was doing the talking, and the arm across my ribs was doing the talking, and the way Ari was looking at me was doing several paragraphs of talking without requiring a single word from either of us.

His thumb moved against my side again. Another circle. Slower this time, like he was writing something on my skin that he expected me to read later, when my brain was working at full capacity and I had the vocabulary to process it.

I closed my eyes. The gold light pressed warm against my eyelids, and somewhere in the palazzo, the day was properly starting.

Something had started that I was not going to do anything about, because doing something about it would require moving, and moving was currently several levels down on the list of priorities, and the list of priorities was currently dominated by a single item that looked suspiciously like stay right here.

I stayed right here.

Chapter Eleven

~ Aristoteles ~

The coffee on my desk had gone cold. I hadn’t touched it in forty minutes, which was its own kind of waste, but the view from the study window was doing something useful with the early light and I needed useful more than I needed caffeine.

A month. Four weeks. Thirty-one days, if you were counting, and I wasn’t, but the compound knew. The wide-plank floors knew, creaking under bare feet that hadn’t been here a month ago.

I’d watched him work. From doorways, mostly. Coffee in hand, jaw loose in a way my face wasn’t designed for, the looseness of a man watching someone else solve a problem he’d been carrying for years.

The library table. That was Zephyr’s territory now. Leather-bound spines and faded tapestries and a five-foot-five blond with his laptop open and dossiers fanned out in a pattern that made sense to him and would look like abstract art to anyone else.

Caramel wrappers accumulated at the edge of the keyboard — gold foil, crumpled, the debris of a mind that moved too fast to bother with waste disposal.

The glow of his screen in the dark library was its own kind of light. Blue-white, steady, casting his face in the shadows of someone who was reading numbers and seeing the story they told.

His fingers moved fast over the keys, the rhythm bursts and pauses, and every time he found something he leaned forward, his bare feet curling against the rungs of the chair, and the sound he made was low and satisfied, the sound of a man who considered other people’s secrets genuinely entertaining.

He cross-referenced employee contact logs against financial records with the focus of someone dismantling a clock and enjoying every spring that came loose.

Emails fired off in rapid succession, each one precise, each one landing in someone’s inbox with the weight of a man who had the receipts and wasn’t afraid to use them.