Chapter 40: Go Back Inside Cara Mia

POV: EVE

Three days after Mike left, Eve had started to believe things might actually be okay.

Not perfect. Not simple. But okay.

Mike had stayed for dinner that first night....had eaten Dimitri’s pasta in near silence, had answered Eve’s careful questions about London in short sentences, had looked between the two of them approximately forty times with an expression she couldn’t fully decode. But he’d stayed. And when he’d left two hours later, he’d hugged her at the elevator....long and tight, his chin on top of her head the way he’d done since they were children....and said, quietly, "I’m not done being angry."

"I know," she’d said.

"But I’m not losing you either."

She’d held on tighter. "You’re not losing me."

He’d shaken Dimitri’s hand at the door. Nothing more than that. no words, no warmth, just the handshake of two men who had fifteen years between them and one very complicated fracture to repair. But it was something. It was the beginning of something.

Dimitri had watched him go and said nothing.

Later, in bed, when Eve had asked what he was thinking, he’d been quiet for so long she thought he wasn’t going to answer.

Then: "I forgot what it felt like. Having someone worth apologizing to."

She hadn’t known what to say to that. So she’d pressed her lips to his shoulder and let the silence hold it.

That had been three days ago.

Now the penthouse had settled back into its rhythms.....her work, his calls, Marco’s silent presence, the city forty floors below going about its business. Eve had started sleeping properly again, had stopped watching her phone for Mike’s texts, had let herself sink into the strange, domesticated intimacy of sharing space with Dimitri Valentino.

He made coffee before she woke up. She’d discovered this by accident on the second morning, padding into the kitchen at seven to find a full pot waiting and him already gone to his office. She hadn’t mentioned it. Neither had he. It just kept happening.

Small things. Quiet things. The kind of things that accumulated without announcement and became, eventually, the architecture of a life.

She was thinking about this.....about coffee and silence and the terrifying gentleness underneath the Devil when she woke at two in the morning with a dry throat and an empty bed beside her.

She lay still for a moment, listening.

The penthouse was quiet. Not the comfortable quiet of late nights and deep sleep, but something with more texture to it. A waiting kind of quiet.

She reached for the glass of water on her nightstand. Empty.

She slid out of bed, pulling Dimitri’s shirt over her bare legs, she’d started sleeping in his shirts without consciously deciding to, and he’d stopped commenting on it, which she took as permission....and padded toward the kitchen.

The hallway was dark.

The living room was dark.

But at the far end, past the living room, past the corridor that led to the secondary rooms she’d never had reason to enter, there was a thin line of light under a closed door.

She hadn’t noticed that door before. Or she had, vaguely, the way you noticed things that were always closed and therefore stopped registering as relevant. It sat at the end of a short corridor off the main hallway, unremarkable except for the fact that it was always shut.

It wasn’t quite shut now.

The light underneath it was pale and cold. Not warm lamplight. Something harsher.

She should have gone back to bed.

She knew, in the way her body knew things before her mind caught up, that she should turn around, fill her water glass, and go back to bed.

Her feet kept moving.

She was close enough to hear it before she reached the door.....low voices, a single sharp sound that might have been something hitting a surface, a silence that had weight to it. She pressed her fingers flat against the door, the lightest possible pressure, and it swung open another inch.

What she saw stopped her breathing entirely.

The room was large. Sparse. The kind of room that had been designed for function rather than comfort....bare floors, harsh overhead lighting, a drain set into the center of the floor that she immediately stopped looking at. There were two of Dimitri’s men she recognized from Marco’s security detail standing against the far wall, faces blank.

In the center of the room, a man was secured to a metal chair. His head was down. He was breathing, she could see the movement of his chest....but barely.

On the table beside Dimitri, among other things she couldn’t make herself catalog, was a hand.

Not attached to anything.

Just a hand.

Eve’s vision went white at the edges.

Dimitri stood with his back partially to her, his jacket gone, his shirt sleeves rolled to the elbows, a blade hanging loosely from his right hand. He was speaking quietly to the man in the chair in Italian, his voice completely level, conversational, the same tone he used when he was discussing shipping logistics or dinner reservations.

She must have made a sound. Or maybe he simply felt her the way he always seemed to.....some radar attuned specifically to her presence.....because he turned.

His eyes found her in the doorway.

For one suspended second, they just looked at each other.

His face was unreadable. The blade was still in his hand. There was blood on his shirt, his forearms, the back of his right hand, and he looked at her across that terrible room with an expression that was somehow both completely cold and completely aware of her.

"Go back inside, cara mia," he said. Quiet. Absolute.

Her legs weren’t working properly.

"Eve." Still quiet. Still absolute. "Now."

She went.

She didn’t know how long she sat on the edge of the bed.

Long enough for the white noise in her head to settle into something she could think around. Long enough to stop shaking....or almost stop. Her hands were still trembling slightly when she pressed them flat against her thighs, trying to ground herself in the physical reality of the mattress beneath her, the fabric under her palms, the city lights bleeding through the curtains.

She’d known. That was the thing she kept coming back to. She had known, intellectually, completely, exactly what Dimitri was. She had watched him break fingers with pliers. She had heard him order death over the phone with the same affect most people used to order takeout. She had chosen him anyway, with full knowledge, with open eyes.

But knowing and seeing were still different distances.

And something severed on a table was a different category of seeing.

Her body, traitorously, unhelpfully, was not behaving the way it should.

She was shaking. She was also.....and she hated herself slightly for this, or would have, six weeks ago.....wet.