Then, very quietly, he asked, “Did you mean what you said this morning?”
I blinked, surprised that was the first thing out of his mouth. “About what?”
“In class.” He held my gaze. “About morality. About what people tell themselves in order to live with what they’ve done.”
I felt my palms getting clammy. “Is that really so important?”
His face didn’t change, but something in his eyes did. Something darker, exposed and most of all wary.
“More than you know.”
He didn’t need to say anything else for me to understand. It wasn’t much, but it was enough.
The expensive clothes. The bodyguard-friend. The private plane. The way people reacted to him. The way he spoke about power like he had held it in his bare hands and found it heavier than expected.
Fear moved through me. I didn’t think he would hurt me, but I was suddenly terrified of hearing a thing that would make it impossible to keep pretending I didn’t already know.
“It was a seminar,” I replied, a little too evasively, but the unwavering look in his eyes only made me more uncomfortable.
He took a step toward me.
I took one back.
He let out a quiet sigh at the gesture. “It’s important.”
“Why?”
His gaze didn’t waver. “Because your answer will tell me whether, after the conversation we’re about to have, I’ll ever see you again. And if the answer is no, then I’d like to spend the last minutes I have with you memorizing your face.”
How was a woman supposed to not fall for a man like him?
“Pietro…”
“It’s a simple question.”
“No,” I said softly. “It isn’t.”
I exhaled and dropped onto the sofa without grace, not caring about posture or poise or any of the other useless little things.
“Because yes,” I said after a moment. “To some extent, I do mean it. I understand that context matters. That people justify things differently depending on how they were raised, what they were taught, what kind of world shaped them. I know what Adam did to me was wrong, and I also know he doesn’t think of it that way.”
I looked down at my hands.
“I’m writing a thesis on power and the corruption of power, so yes, I believe all of that. I believe morality is more complicated than people like to admit.” I swallowed. “But whether I can separate a crime from the person committing it…”
I lifted my eyes to his.
“Whether I can do that with Pietro Benetti is another question entirely.”
He nodded once. I knew it wasn’t the answer he had hoped for. And yet he still came closer.
Not to sit beside me on the sofa, though. Instead, he perched on one of the stools by the kitchen island, leaving enough space between us that I knew he was doing it on purpose.
“You already know, don’t you?”
I could have denied it. In truth, I knew nothing for certain. But he knew me better than that already, and I respected him too much to insult him with a lie.
“I suspect,” I said quietly. “I’m bracing.”
