"Agreed," Tomas says, which surprises me a little, but when I look at him his expression is thoughtful rather than relieved. "She needs one night that isn't this."
I think about her voice talking to herself in the kitchen.I know. It's pretty good.The soft rose in her trace, no thorns, just warmth. The particular scent of an omega who has found a place that agrees with her and doesn't know yet that the place is complicated.
"One night," I agree.
Matteo looks at me steadily. "Santos."
"I know," I say.
"She left Vegas believing she was abandoned—"
"I know, Matteo." My voice comes out rougher than I intend. "I was there when you decided what she'd believe. I remember."
He absorbs that without defending himself, which is the closest thing to an apology Matteo offers without being directly cornered.
Tomas stands up from the sofa. He's thinking, I can see it, the particular quality of focus he gets when something needs to be handled correctly and he's working out the architecture ofit in his head before he speaks. "She's going to be blindsided," he says. “Whenever she sees one of us, it's going to be a shock and she's going to feel ambushed. There's no version where that doesn't happen."
"No," I say.
"So it needs to happen in a way that gives her the control." He looks at us both. "She needs to be the one who decides what comes next. We don't push. We don't use the fact that she's here. We let her land."
Matteo is quiet for a moment. Then he nods once, the slow kind, the kind that means the decision is made.
Domani,I tell myself.
I take the place Tomas vacated on the sofa. He pours three glasses of something expensive without being asked. Matteo returns to his chair.
Outside, the water moves softly against the dock. Inside, no one pretends anymore.
For the first time in three months, all three of us sit in the same room and admit we’re thinking about her.
It doesn’t fix anything.
But it is a start.
12
MATTEO
I've been walking the perimeter of this island for four hours and the staff are starting to look at me the way people look at something they've decided not to comment on.
Elara watched me cross the lower garden twice without saying anything. Miguel found something very interesting to do with a rope when I passed the dock for the third time. They're professionals. They'll keep it to themselves. But they've noticed, and I've kept walking anyway because the alternative is sitting in the study pretending to read documents I stopped understanding the moment I stepped off the boat.
Santos has never been wrong about a scent. Not once in fourteen years. If he says it's her, it's her.
Which is how I end up with my jacket sleeve against the outer kitchen wall, every instinct I possess pointed at the open window above me, telling myself this is a reasonable thing to be doing.
Inside: a pan set down. Drawers. A knife on a board in a clean steady rhythm. Then her voice, low and warm, and my scent does something I have no interest in examining.
Then a different scent reaches me. Citrus soap. Fresh linen. Closing fast.
Fuck.
I push off the wall a second too late. Carmen rounds the corner with her clipboard and stops. We look at each other. Her eyes travel from my shoes to my face to the wall behind my shoulder, slow and deliberate, and I watch her file the whole thing away somewhere I will never have access to.
"Sir."
"Carmen." I straighten my jacket. It helps nothing.