Aria's POV
I am still awake at four in the morning.
I know this because I have watched every hour tick past on the small clock above my bedroom door, and because the man on the other side of my wall has not made a single sound in six hours and somehow that silence is louder than anything I have ever tried to sleep through.
I turn onto my back and stare at the ceiling.
You don't know what you've let into your home.
His words from last night sit in my chest like a splinter I cannot get to. Low and careful and carrying something underneath them that I cannot name. Not a threat exactly. Something closer to a warning. The kind a person gives when they already know what is coming and are deciding, for reasons of their own, to tell you anyway.
I pull the blanket over my face.
It doesn't help.
By six I give up entirely.
I get out of bed, pull on a cardigan over my sleep shirt, and walk quietly into the kitchen. I don't look at the couch. I fill the moka pot and set it on the stove and stand with my back to the living room and focus very deliberately on the sound of the water beginning to heat.
"You didn't sleep."
The voice is so quiet and so certain that my hand jerks sideways and I catch the moka pot before it goes anywhere.
I turn around slowly.
He is sitting exactly where I left him. Upright. Completely still. One arm resting on the back of the couch like he owns it and everything around it. His shirt is still ruined. His dark hair is slightly less perfect than last night and somehow that makes him look more dangerous, not less. Those eyes find mine across the kitchen and hold without any effort at all.
I press my hand flat against the counter.
"I slept fine," I say.
"You didn't."
"I didn't ask for your opinion."
"I know." A pause. "I'm giving it anyway."
Something about the easy way he says it not rude, not soft, just completely certain makes heat crawl up the back of my neck. I turn back to the stove.
"Coffee?" I ask.
"Please."
I pour two cups and carry them across the room and hold his out far enough that he has to reach for it. He notices the distance. I see it in the way his eyes drop briefly to the space between us before coming back to my face without a single comment.
He takes the cup. Wraps both hands around it. Slow. Unhurried. Like a man who has never once in his life been rushed by anything.
I drop into the armchair across from him and curl my legs underneath me.
"How is the side?" I ask.
"Better."
"Can I look at it?"
"No."
"Dante—"
"It's fine, Aria."
The way he says my name stops me. Not soft. Not sharp either. Just direct. Like the word fits naturally in his mouth and has been there longer than last night. I wrap both hands around my cup and look at him over the rim and try to figure out what to do with that.
"You need a doctor," I say.
"What I need," he says, "is to be out of your apartment before anyone notices I'm here."
"And go where?"
He looks at me.
Says absolutely nothing.
"Right." I drink my coffee. "None of my business."
"Correct."
"You're very charming first thing in the morning. Has anyone told you that?"
Something shifts at the corner of his mouth. The ghost of something that could be a smile if it ever decided to commit.
"Not recently," he says.
My phone goes off at eight forty-three.
The screen lights up with Sofia's photo the one she took of herself three years ago finishing an entire cannolo in one bite, eyes wide and completely unashamed, which I have never changed because it is the most accurate image of her in existence.
I stand up fast and take the call into the hallway before it rings twice.
"Ciao—"
"Why do you sound like that?" Sofia's voice fills my ear at full volume. She has never once in her life understood the concept of indoor tone. "You sound like you've been awake since yesterday. Have you been awake since yesterday?"
"I'm fine, I just—"
"I'm bringing cornetti. Marco pulled them out twenty minutes ago, they're still warm. I'm already walking."
"Sofia, today is actually—"
"I'm at your corner."
The line goes dead.
I stand in my hallway and stare at the wall for three full seconds.
Then I walk back into the living room.
Dante is already on his feet.
He is standing at the window, angled against the wall so he can see the street below without being visible from it. The movement has clearly cost him something — his jaw is set and tight but he stands completely straight regardless, one hand resting flat against the wall, eyes on the street below.
"Someone is coming," he says. Still not looking at me.
"My best friend." I grab my cardigan from the hook. "She doesn't know anything. I'll get rid of her."
He turns from the window.
"How long?"
"Ten minutes. Maybe less."
He looks at me. Then at the door. Then back at me with those dark eyes that give absolutely nothing away.
"No one can know I'm here," he says. Low and even and leaving no room for argument.
"I know that."
"If she sees me—"
"She won't." I point at the bedroom. "Second door. Go."
He goes still.
And for one long moment I am completely certain he is about to tell me that no one points at Dante Moretti and tells him where to go certainly not a waitress from Trastevere who hasn't slept and is still in her sleep shirt at eight in the morning.
Three loud rapid knocks at the front door.
"Aria! I have pastries and I have drama and I need a witness for both!"
I look at Dante. He looks at me.
"Please," I say. Quieter than I intend.
Something crosses his face that I cannot read.
Then he moves. Silently. Completely. The bedroom door closes behind him without a sound, as if a man that size can simply choose to take up no space at all when it suits him.
Sofia comes in like a weather event.
Yellow coat. Wild dark hair. Paper bag clutched to her chest and already talking before the door finishes opening.
"Okay so you will not believe the morning I have had." She drops onto my couch and pulls two cornetti from the bag. "This man came into the bakery beautiful, rude, you know how that combination completely destroys me every single time and he complained that Marco's brioche was too sweet. Too sweet, Aria. At our bakery. Marco heard him and I genuinely thought we were going to have an incident."
I settle into the armchair and take the cornetti she holds out and try to arrange my face into something that looks like a normal person having a normal morning.
"What did Marco do?" I ask.
"He smiled." She bites into her cornetti. "Which was somehow worse than if he'd shouted. You know the smile. The one that means someone is about to have a very bad day."
"I know the smile."
"Anyway the man left." She looks around the apartment while she chews. Casual. Easy. The way Sofia always looks casual and easy while she is, in fact, absorbing everything in the room.
I watch her eyes move.
To the couch cushions. To the coffee table. To the kitchen counter where two cups are sitting side by side.
I watch her go very still for exactly half a second.
"So," she says. Slowly. Setting her cornetti down on the bag with the particular careful energy of a person who is choosing their next words very deliberately. "How was your night?"
"Fine. Long shift. You know how Thursdays are."
"Mm." She looks at me. "And this morning?"
"Quiet."
"Is it."
"Sofia."
"I'm just asking, Aria." Her eyes go back to the counter. To the two cups. "Because there are two coffee cups on your counter and you live alone and I know for a fact you don't have overnight guests because you haven't had an overnight guest in fourteen months and I know this because you told me and also because you tell me everything."
The silence sits between us.
"There is no one here," I say.
She looks at my face.
Reads it the way she has been reading it since we were fourteen years old sitting next to each other in a classroom getting in trouble for talking too much. The way that means she already knows something is different and is giving me the space to decide whether to say it.
"Okay," she says finally. Soft.
She picks her cornetti back up.
"Okay," she says again. "Tell me when you're ready."
She stays forty minutes.
She talks and laughs and fills my apartment with all the noise and warmth that Sofia has always filled every room with, and I sit across from her and laugh in the right places and feel the distance between my ordinary life and last night stretch into something I cannot see across anymore.
At the door she pulls me into a hug.
Holds on.
"You're not fine," she murmurs into my hair. "But I'm not going to push."
"I know," I say.
"Call me. Today. Not tomorrow. Today."
She pulls back. Looks at my face one more time with those sharp warm eyes.
Then she is gone down the stairs and I close the door and press my back flat against it and let out a breath I have been holding for forty minutes.
The bedroom door opens.
Dante steps back into the living room. He has re-buttoned what is left of his shirt. His eyes go to the front door. Then to me. Then something in his expression shifts something small and quick that I almost miss.
"She knows," he says.
"She suspects." I push off the door. "There's a difference."
"Not in my world."
"Lucky we're not in your world then."
He opens his mouth.
My phone buzzes on the counter.
I look down at the screen.
Unknown number.
I frown and open it.
One message. No name. No introduction.
We know where you live, Aria Russo.
Tell your friend to stop visiting.
Next time we come for him we come through you.
The phone slips in my hand.
I look up.
Dante is already reading it over my shoulder.
His face does something I have not seen it do yet.
It goes completely, terrifyingly blank.
"Get away from the window," he says.
And his voice is not the voice of the man who drank my coffee this morning.
It is something else entirely.