I move again. My back hits the corner.
“You’re doing that on purpose.”
“Doing what?”
“Crowding me.”
“Am I?”
“You know you are.”
He doesn’t deny it. Doesn’t move away either. Just watches me with those dark eyes.
The elevator hums. The floors tick by in silence. Thirty-two. Thirty-three. Thirty-four.
Thirty-eight. Thirty-nine.
“What happens now?” I ask.
“I don’t know. But tomorrow, we figure out what to do about Nico.”
“And us?”
The word slips out.Us.Like, on some level, we’re connected.
He shrugs. “That depends.”
“On what?”
“On what you want.”
I don’t have an answer to that. Don’t trust myself to give one.
The elevator hums. Forty. Forty-one.
Forty-four. Forty-five.
The elevator dings. The doors slide open, allowing me to step deeper into Raffaele D’Amico’s world.
9
BEA
I’m in his penthouse.
I’ve been parked on his couch for ten minutes, completely frozen. Hands useless. Eyes restless. Brain running in circles with nowhere to land.
The place is absurd. Floor-to-ceiling windows laying the city out in front of me. Furniture that looks staged rather than lived in. Art that makes zero sense to me but screams money. Everything is sharp, polished, obsessively arranged like someone tried to engineer perfection and forgot to include anything human.
I’ve already done a full sweep—every corner, every surface—like if I stare hard enough, the place might give up something about him.
There’s one photo. Just one. Sitting off to the side. It’s of him, younger—late twenties maybe—next to an older man I recognize. Vincenzo. Neither of them smiling, not really, but the way they stand… There’s something there. Respect, it seems.
And that’s it. No family. No history. No warmth.
Just this carefully constructed emptiness.
What is he going to do to me?
