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A hard swallow travelled a long way down Enzo’s throat. “The walking should help matters. It doesn’t look as though anything was pulled entirely out of joint, but… if I may?” he added, raising a hand to Fiore’s shoulder.
Fiore nodded again. He wanted Enzo’s touch more than anything—even if it were only a chirurgical necessity.
Enzo’s fingertips gently but firmly plumbed the depths of his aching joints. “Does it hurt when you walk, also?”
“Yes.” Fiore furrowed his brow in confusion. “Not so bad as now, but…”
“You’re almost due for another dose,” Enzo reminded him. “That might be why you’re feeling the worst of it now.”
Fiore shrugged and winced again. “I wouldn’t know.”
“There are some exercises to restrengthen your muscles, once you’re not so exhausted.” Enzo still sounded so hopeful that he would recover. “Those should help as well.”
Fiore wished he were better at disguising his exhaustion. He wanted to regain his strength at once. At the same time, he couldn’t imagine doing anything more demanding than rolling his head across the pillow to face the window.
Another small smile, painful and sweet, tugged at the corner of Enzo’s lips. “Could you eat something, d’you think?”
“Drink it, you mean.” The words fell from Fiore’s mouth with more bitterness than he felt.
Yet Enzo continued smiling even as he conceded, “For now, yes.”
Fiore withheld a sigh and replaced it with a nod.
~
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
The first few days passed in an anodyne haze.
Enzo remained beside him all the while, for which Fiore rejoiced. Apart from the chirurgeons, however, he saw no one save Enzo. Not even Carlotta, whose shadowy presence Fiore had come to expect as a matter of course. Whatever servants brought his meals remained on the opposite side of the imposing door. Fiore heard nothing but whispers between them and Enzo before Enzo returned to him bearing a well-laden tray.
There was no sign of Enzo’s family, either—which gave Fiore some small relief. It was all very well for a man to swear he’d defy his family on behalf of his lover, but in Fiore’s experience it rarely came to pass. Recollections of Serafina’s humiliation remained ever at the forefront of his mind.
But shortly after waking on the third day he heard more than whispers beyond the door. As Enzo dismissed whoever took away the breakfast tray, Fiore caught another voice altogether; a pitiful whine. And for once not from his own throat.
Fiore bolted upright at the sound—wincing as the sudden movement pulled against his multitude of injuries—and caught a glimpse of a dark shadow through the crack in the door. It slunk at waist-height to Enzo and, unless Fiore much mistook it, had a tail.
Enzo shut the door on servant and shadow alike.
“Is that Vittorio?” Fiore asked.
“Yes,” Enzo admitted after a moment’s hesitation.
“…Can he come in?” Fiore enquired.
Still Enzo hesitated. “There is the concern of contamination.”
“How could I contaminate him?”
A wan smile graced Enzo’s scarred lips. “I mean that he might contaminate you. Your wounds are yet open and deep besides.”
Fiore appreciated Enzo’s evident reluctance to remind him even of this obvious fact. And yet. “He visited you in your sickbed when your own wounds were hardly less so.”
Enzo conceded the point with raised brows and a tilt of his head. But something else obviously troubled him. “…He did also just kill a man.”
Fiore blinked. Vittorio had jaws fit to shatter bones, true enough, but he’d displayed nothing except gentle patience in Fiore’s presence. “Who?”
Enzo worried his lip. “One of your captors.”
