Six Months Contract With The Mafia God

”Which is why I want you there.”

”Yes.” A beat. ”Yes, I’ll come today. Give me two hours.” A pause, and then, softer: ”Have you told her? About any of this?”

He looked out at the city.

”Not yet.”

”Dimitri....”

”I’ll tell her. When I know how much there is to tell.”

Nonna made a sound that conveyed, with remarkable economy, that she found this answer inadequate but was choosing her battles. ”She deserves to be prepared.”

”I know.”

”The girl loves you. That means she’ll walk into whatever is coming without hesitating. The least you can do is make sure she can see it coming.”

”I said I know, Nonna.”

”Then act like it.” The warmth crept back into her voice, tempering the sharpness. ”Two hours. Have someone make up the east guest room....I’m bringing my good pots, I refuse to cook with what you have in that kitchen.”

Despite everything, the corner of his mouth moved. ”You’ve used that kitchen for three years.”

”Under protest. Two hours, caro.”

She hung up.

Dimitri stood at the window for a long time after.

Enzo. Coming here. Within the week.

He thought about his half brother....twenty-seven years old, raised at Antonio’s knee, shaped by a father who had loved him with the possessive, conditional love he’d withheld from his firstborn. Enzo who had grown up in Dimitri’s shadow and resented every inch of it. Enzo who smiled like Antonio and calculated like Antonio and had learned, from the best possible teacher, how to use people’s vulnerabilities against them.

He thought about Eve. At her office right now, in a meeting probably, completely unaware that the carefully maintained peace of the last few weeks was about to develop fault lines.

She would handle it. He knew that. She had handled everything else.

But handling it and being blindsided by it were different things, and he had promised himself, not out loud, not in words, but in the way that mattered more than words.....that he would not let her be blindsided. Not again. Not the way she’d been blindsided by Simon, by betrayal, by a life that had kept pulling the ground out from under her.

He would tell her tonight.

He just needed to figure out how.

*****

POV: EVE

She knew something was wrong the moment the elevator opened.

She couldn’t have said exactly what told her....the penthouse looked the same, smelled the same, the city light through the windows was the same amber-grey of early evening. But something in the quality of the air was different. Tighter. Like the pressure before a storm.

Nonna was in the kitchen.

That was the first thing. Nonna, who visited but had never been here when Eve came home from work, moving around the kitchen with a focused efficiency that was subtly different from her usual ease. Two large bags sat unpacked near the hallway.

Eve stopped.

The older woman appeared in the kitchen doorway, dish towel over her shoulder, and her smile was warm and immediate and entirely genuine. Everything about Nonna was genuine....it was one of the things Eve had understood about her from the beginning, that whatever Sophia Marchetti felt was fully visible in her face, with no gap between the feeling and the expression. It was, Eve had thought more than once, the most radical possible contrast to the man she’d raised.

”Cara! You’re home.” She waved Eve in with the dish towel. ”Come, sit. Dinner is almost ready. You look tired.”

”I’m okay. Are you....” Eve looked at the bags in the hallway. ”Are you staying?”

”For a while.” Nonna had already turned back to the stove, her hands moving with practiced efficiency over three things at once. ”Dimitri asked. I said yes. You don’t mind?”

”Of course not, I just.....” Eve set her bag down slowly.

”Where is Dimitri?” Eve asked.

”Office. He’ll be out soon.” Nonna glanced over her shoulder, her dark eyes moving over Eve’s face with that quick, total assessment. ”Go change. Rest a few minutes. You work too hard.”

Eve looked at the unpacked bags. At Nonna’s slightly too-focused attention on the stove. At the careful way the older woman had answered each question with the minimum necessary information.

She’d spent five weeks learning to read Dimitri. She was apparently also developing a working fluency in Nonna.

Something had happened.

She didn’t push. Went to change out of her work clothes, washed her face, came back to the kitchen and sat at the counter and let Nonna put food in front of her and talk about the market and the east guest room curtains and whether the penthouse needed more plants.

Eve answered in the right places and watched the hallway.

Dimitri appeared at half past seven. He was dressed casually....dark shirt, no jacket....but his jaw was tight in the particular way it got when he was carrying something he hadn’t decided to put down yet. His eyes found her immediately, the way they always did, and moved over her face with that total, assessing attention.

She looked back at him steadily.

I can see it, her expression said. Whatever it is. I can see it on you.

Something shifted in his face. An acknowledgment.

”Good day?” he asked, crossing to the kitchen, pressing a kiss to the top of her head as he passed....a habit that had developed so gradually she hadn’t noticed until it was simply part of the rhythm of evenings.

”Productive.” She turned slightly to watch him. ”Yours?”

”Interesting.” He met her eyes over the counter, and in his she saw the thing she’d been looking for....the decision forming. The working out of how and when and how much.

She would wait. She was learning patience, in this penthouse, in ways she hadn’t expected.

But she knew, with the bone-deep certainty of a woman who had chosen to see all of him, that whatever interesting meant, she would find out before she slept tonight.

And whatever it was, it wasn’t small.