My heart is in my throat.
The glass at my feet is catching the last of the afternoon light. Whiskey has soaked darker circles into the hardwood around the shards, and there are a few drops of something else near the door, a tighter red.
Antonio is gone. His men are gone. It’s been maybe thirty seconds since the elevator took them, and it feels longer than that, and it also feels like no time has passed at all.
Raffaele is three feet away from me.
I’m aware of the window at my back. The space between my shoulder blades and the glass. The fact that I could press myself into it if I wanted an extra inch of distance.
“I should clean this up,” I swallow. “Things can get messy in this line of work. I understand.”
He doesn’t answer.
I crouch down before I can second-guess it. I reach for the silver tray that rolled against the leg of the coffee table. The first shard goes onto the tray, then the next. My hands are shaking a little. Not much. I’m hoping he doesn’t see.
“Are you hurt.”
Not a question, the way he says it. Closer to an instruction.
“I’m fine.” I keep my eyes on the floor. “It’s nothing.”
His shoe slides into my field of vision. Black, polished, just off-center of where I was about to reach next.
“Do you understand what that was about.”
“Respect,” I say. “Putting Martinez back in his place.”
“No.”
I wait.
“That was the end of the workday.”
He takes half a step back. Just enough to make room for me to stand, if I want to. The tray is in my hands, and the glass on it clinks softly as I shift my weight. I reach for one more piece—the biggest one, tucked halfway under the chair—because I don’t know what else to do with my body.
I bend.
There’s a second when I’m folded over, the tray balanced on one hand, the back of my blouse riding up a little against my skirt, and I know—Iknowbefore it happens—that this is the moment.
His hand closes around my upper arm.
He turns me. The tray slips from my fingers, and everything I just picked up goes back onto the floor in a sharper second scatter, and I don’t even watch it fall because he has straightened me up and I am suddenly very close to him.
“And the beginning of something else.”
This was supposed to have been a one-time thing.
That’s the sentence. That’s the one I’ve been holding like a talisman since five AM. It was a mistake. A lapse. We agreed. The cufflinks. The coffee he poured and didn’t hand me. The not-looking in the elevator. All of it was supposed to meanonce.All of it was supposed to meannever again.
He kisses me.
There’s nothing careful in it. Nothing of the cold man from this morning. His mouth is open against mine before I’ve figured out where to put my hands, his breath coming faster than I’ve ever heard it, and I can feel the shape of every hour he spent today not touching me coming out of him all at once.
I don’t move away.
A part of me has been clenched all day—a fist just under the ribs, waiting. It lets go the moment his mouth is on mine, and I hate how much that relief is its own kind of giving up. I kiss him back before I’ve decided to. My hands have come up and landed on the lapels of his jacket, and one of them is fisting the fabric.
He drives me backward.
