Chapter 49: Tell Enzo to call me

POV: DIMITRI

The cabinet had been nothing.

He’d checked it thoroughly....every shelf, the space behind the cleaning supplies, the floor beneath. Nothing disturbed. Nothing missing. Nothing that shouldn’t be there.

He’d stood in the dark kitchen for four minutes, listening to the penthouse breathe around him, and found nothing except the particular silence of a building at three in the morning and his own overcalibrated instincts firing at shadows.

He’d gone back to bed.

He hadn’t slept.

By six he was in his office with coffee and Marco on a secure call, the city still dark outside the windows, running through every variable with the cold systematic thoroughness he applied to problems that actually mattered.

Enzo was in the city. Had landed without advance notice, which meant he hadn’t wanted Dimitri to prepare. Which meant he had something to gain from catching Dimitri unprepared.

Which meant he already knew more than Dimitri was comfortable with.

"Location?" Dimitri asked.

"Hotel Noir. Checked in under a company name.....Russo Holdings." Marco’s voice was flat, careful. "He’s not alone. Four men with him. Two I recognize from Antonio’s detail. Two I don’t."

"Find out who the two unknowns are."

"Already working on it."

"And Isabella?" The name sat in his mouth like something metallic.

A pause. "No movement on her yet. Still in Rome as of yesterday."

"Keep watching."

"There’s something else." Another pause, this one heavier. "One of my men at the east perimeter, he flagged a vehicle. Circled the building twice last night. Eleven forty-five and again at two fifteen."

Dimitri was quiet for a moment.

Two fifteen. Twenty minutes before he’d found the cabinet open.

"Plates?"

"Clean. Too clean. Professionally clean."

"Pull the street footage. Every camera within four blocks. I want to know who was in that vehicle and where it went."

"Already pulled. Going through it now." Marco hesitated....and Marco never hesitated, which meant what was coming was something he’d weighed carefully before deciding to say. "Boss. We should talk about telling her."

"I’ll handle it."

"Boss....."

"I said I’ll handle it, Marco." He kept his voice level. "How long before you have something on the unknowns?"

A brief silence that communicated everything Marco had decided not to say. "End of day. Maybe sooner."

"Call me when you do."

He hung up.

He sat there for a moment, the city beginning its grey morning outside the glass, and thought about Eve sleeping down the hallway. Her hand in his hair last night. The way she’d said soon back to him like it was a promise she intended to keep.

He thought about what Enzo would see when he looked at her.

Not a woman. Not a person.

A handle.

Something to grab onto when you wanted to move Dimitri Valentino in a direction he hadn’t chosen to go.

He picked up his coffee and drank it and made his decisions with the cold efficiency of a man who had been making decisions like these since he was sixteen years old.

Enzo would not get near her.

Whatever it cost, whatever it required, that was the one outcome that was not negotiable.

****

POV: EVE

She noticed it at breakfast.

Not anything she could have named specifically, nothing so concrete as a change in his expression or a particular thing he said. More like a frequency shift. The same man, the same kitchen, the same coffee made slightly too strong, but something underneath it running at a different register.

She watched him over her mug.

He was reading something on his phone, his face composed and neutral, one hand wrapped around his coffee. He looked exactly as he always looked. Controlled. Contained. Present.

But his thumb had moved over the same section of screen three times without scrolling.

She said nothing.

They ate. He asked about her day.....a client meeting at ten, a contract review in the afternoon. She asked about his. He said calls and paperworks.

Nonna appeared from the east guest room at half past eight, assessed the kitchen with one sweeping look, and began making something that involved a great deal of purposeful clattering. She kissed Dimitri’s head, squeezed Eve’s shoulder, and said nothing that wasn’t about food.

But her eyes, when they moved between them, were doing something careful.

Marco arrived at nine.

She was in the bedroom getting ready for work when she heard the elevator, heard the low exchange of voices in the hallway, too quiet to make out words, too clipped to be casual, and then the distinct sound of a door closing.

His office door.

She finished her makeup in the mirror and tried not to count the minutes.

Dimitri was in his office for forty minutes. When he came out, he walked her to the elevator himself, which he did sometimes, not always, no established pattern she could point to. He adjusted her collar, which he had never done before. Pressed a kiss to her temple and held it a beat longer than usual.

"Marco will be with you today," he said.

"Marco is always with me."

"I mean close. Not at a distance." His eyes were steady on hers. "Inside the building, not outside."

Eve studied him. "Dimitri."

"It’s precautionary."

"For what?"

"Nothing specific." He said it smoothly, the way he said everything. "I prefer to be careful."

She looked at him for a long moment.

She could push. She could ask the question she’d been assembling since breakfast, could lay out the pieces, the distracted thumb, the careful eyes, Marco’s arrival, the collar, the kiss held one beat too long, and ask him what they added up to.

Instead she said: "Okay."

Something moved through his expression. "That’s all?"

"For now." She held his gaze. "But Dimitri, when you’re ready to tell me what’s actually happening, I’ll be ready to hear it."

He looked at her the way he sometimes did, like she’d surprised him, which she was beginning to understand was rare. Like she’d moved in a direction he hadn’t predicted.

He cupped her face.

"Tonight," he said quietly. "I’ll tell you tonight."

"Okay." She turned her lips briefly into his palm. "Tonight."

The elevator opened. She stepped in.

He stood with his hand on the door, holding it open for one extra second, his eyes on her with that particular attention she’d memorised, the kind that was less about looking and more about making sure.

Then he let go.

The doors closed.

She stood in the descending elevator with Marco beside her.

Something was coming.

She didn’t know what. Didn’t know the shape of it or the name of it or how close it already was.

But she’d meant what she said.

She’d be ready.

****

POV: DIMITRI

He watched the elevator numbers descend on the panel above the doors until they stopped at ground level.

Then he went back to his office, sat down, and called Antonio.

It rang four times. His father answered on the fifth, a deliberate choice, Antonio never did anything without calculation.....with the same smooth unhurried courtesy as before.

"Dimitri. This is a surprise."

"You said Enzo was coming within the week," Dimitri said. "He landed two days ago."

A pause. "Did he? I wasn’t aware of his exact timing."

The lie was so polished it was almost elegant. Dimitri had grown up studying his father’s lies the way other children studied languages.....by immersion, out of necessity, until he could identify every inflection and variation.

"What does he want?"

"I told you. Business. Territory questions."

"And the vehicle that circled my building twice last night?"

A longer pause. When his father spoke again, something had shifted almost imperceptibly in his tone. Still smooth. Still measured. But attentive now in a different way. "I don’t know anything about a vehicle."

This one, Dimitri believed.

Which was almost worse.

If it wasn’t Antonio and it wasn’t Enzo, or at least not on Antonio’s instruction, then whoever had been in that vehicle was a third party. Someone else with an interest in Dimitri’s building. In Dimitri’s life.

In what Dimitri valued.

"Tell Enzo to call me," Dimitri said. "If he wants a meeting, he arranges it through proper channels. He does not circle my building at two in the morning. He does not move through my city without my knowledge. ." He let that land for precisely one second. "Are we clear?"

"I’ll pass it along," Antonio said.

"Make sure you do."

He hung up.

He sat back in his chair and looked at the ceiling and thought about the vehicle.

Enzo was jealous and resentful and calculating in the specific way of a man raised in his older brother’s shadow. But he was not this precise. This patient.

Someone was helping him.

Or using him.

The distinction mattered enormously, and Dimitri didn’t have enough information yet to determine which it was.

He opened a new message to Marco.

Isabella. I need current location confirmed. Today.

The response came back in under two minutes.

Rome as of this morning. But her travel team booked something. Destination unknown. Flight tomorrow.

Dimitri read it twice.

He set the phone face-down on his desk.

Outside his window the city moved through its morning, indifferent and ordinary, forty floors below. Somewhere in it, in a hotel room under a borrowed name, his half-brother was waking up with an agenda Dimitri hadn’t been given.

He picked the phone back up and started making calls.