"This is something you can’t fix, Massimo." He straightens his jacket, a gesture so familiar I've seen him do it a thousand times leaving courtrooms and conference rooms. "Get out of the way or I’ll make sure Harlon eliminates the problem."
He walks out. The door closes behind him with a quiet click that sounds louder than a slam.
I sit in the silence. My hands are flat on the desk, fingers spread. Twenty years of shared holidays and a trust built on seeing each other at our worst. Gone in twelve minutes.
He'll come back. Or he won't. Either way, the man who walked out of my office is not the same man who walked in, and neither am I.
My phone buzzes. Luca's name on the screen.
"Talk to me."
"We've got a problem." Luca's voice is stripped of its usual playfulness. "Kon's surveillance team just flagged two men on foot three blocks south of Redthorne. He recognized them as Genesis runners. They're not approaching, just positioning. Mapping sight lines and entry points. It’s getting real. They do not play around, man."
My blood chills. Three blocks. Genesis runners don't position unless they've been given a timeline. Harlon is organized and methodical and his people are already preparing for the possibility that I don't fix this in time.
"How long have they been there?"
"Two hours. They rotated once. Fresh team."
Six days. Harlon's runners are mapping Redthorne's perimeter and Sloane is upstairs in my penthouse with no idea that the men positioning themselves outside our building are there for her.
"Double the internal security. Nobody moves through the lobby without being logged. And Luca." I pause. Swallow against the tightness in my throat. "Harrison is never allowed in this building again."
Another secret. Another brick in the wall I'm building between us.
Six days.
Eighteen
Sloane
Ihave read forty-seven pages of Syndicate contract law in the past hour and I understand exactly none of it.
Massimo sits at the kitchen counter with a red pen in his hand, marking up a brief. The glasses are new to me. He only wears them at night when his eyes are tired, dark tortoiseshell frames that make him look like a professor who moonlights as a hitman, and the sight of them does unreasonable things to my concentration.
I'm perched on the stool beside him with my bare feet hooked around the rungs, my chin resting on his shoulder, reading along because he doesn't tell me to stop and because the warm weight of his body against mine is better than anything on television.
"You're breathing on my neck," he says without looking up.
"I'm reading."
"You're breathing on my neck and pretending to read."
"I understood at least three words on that page. Heretofore. Notwithstanding. Andthe." I press my lips against the spotbelow his ear just to feel his pen hand falter. The muscles in his jaw flex and a smile fights its way onto his mouth before he catches it. "I'm practically a lawyer now, wouldn’t you say?"
"You're practically a menace." He turns his head and catches my mouth with his. Quick, distracted, his brain still half-buried in the brief, but his free hand finds my thigh and squeezes and the warmth of his palm against my bare skin tells me the other half of his brain is right here.
This is what we've become. Barefoot mornings and contract briefs and pasta dinners where he eats whatever I put in front of him without complaint in less than two weeks. Moving fast? Err… yes and no.
I am the happiest I have ever been and it terrifies me.
Lorenzo doesn't scare me. My father doesn't scare me. What scares me is that happiness has always been the deep breath before the punch lands. The moment you stop bracing is the moment the floor gives way, and I've been standing on this floor with Massimo without checking for cracks.
But I also don’t find myself looking for them. Not like I used to, anyway.
His phone buzzes on the counter. He glances at the screen and his left hand twitches, fingers curling toward his palm before he flips the phone face down and returns to his brief. Smooth. Practiced. But I saw the jaw tighten before his hand moved. I saw the crease form between his brows and disappear just as fast.
"Everything okay?"