The thought of it lands low in my body, sharper than it should be. Less like strategy and more like something I don’t name.
His office.
Alessandro is in there. I can sense him, the way a room holds weight even through closed doors. Light cuts beneath the threshold in a clean, controlled line. No movement. No sound.
That’s worse. Noise can be read. Silence has to be entered.
I don’t knock. Knocking implies permission. If I’m going to test, then I need to go all in. Even if my heart is pounding.
It’s not fear making it pound.
I open the door and step inside. He’s at his desk, exactly where I expected him to be. Jacket off. Shirt sleeves rolled with precision that suggests intention, not comfort. Papers arranged in front of him in a structure I don’t understand yet.
My gaze catches on his forearms before I can stop it. Controlled. Still. Dangerous in a way that has nothing to do with violence.
He looks up.
“You’ve learned the house,” he says with a cocked brow.
I close the door behind me. The click sounds louder than it should. Final.
“I’m learning it,” I say.
His gaze shifts briefly to the handle, noting the closed space, the decision. Then back to me. “At this hour?”
“Is there a better one for trespassing?”
“You’re not trespassing.” A pause. “You’re being observed.”
“That’s comforting.”
“It’s not meant to be.”
I take a few steps into the room, slow enough to register as deliberate, not cautious. The air is different in here. Sharper, lessforgiving. This is where decisions happen. Where men become outcomes.
I swallow hard. “You knew?”
“Yes.”
“About the offer?”
“Yes.”
“And you let it happen.”
“I did.”
I stop a few feet from his desk. “Why?”
He studies me. Not like a man studying a woman, but like a man assessing a variable he hasn’t decided how to categorize yet.
Yet, his gaze lingers a second too long to be entirely clinical.
“You were given a choice,” he says.
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only one you require.”
