Six Months Contract With The Mafia God

The coffee made slightly too strong.

The hand at her back in every doorway.

The way he’d started leaving his office door open when she was home, so the sounds of the penthouse could reach him while he worked.

The temple kiss.

She added them up and said nothing and let them be what they were.

The afternoon was quiet.

Nonna commandeered the living room for what she called riposo....rest...and was asleep in the armchair within minutes, a small domestic miracle that made Eve smile every time she looked over. Dimitri was in his office, door open, the low murmur of Italian occasionally drifting into the living room where Eve had set up her own work, laptop open across her knees on the sofa.

She got through three contracts and two emails and was halfway through a proposal when she became aware that the murmuring from the office had stopped.

She looked up.

Dimitri was leaning in the doorway, watching her.

Not with the assessing heat of the man who had spent six weeks systematically dismantling her self-control. Just watching her. The way she’d watched him this morning....quietly, like he was trying to memorize something before it could change.

”What?” she asked softly, conscious of Nonna sleeping ten feet away.

”Nothing.” He didn’t move from the doorway.

”You’re staring.”

”I’m aware.”

She set her laptop aside. ”Come here or stop staring. You’re distracting me.”

The corner of his mouth moved. He pushed off the doorframe, crossed the room, and sat beside her on the sofa....not at the other end, not with careful distance, but close. His thigh against hers. His arm along the back of the cushion behind her.

She leaned into him without thinking about it.

His arm came down around her shoulders.

They sat like that — her with her laptop, him with his phone, Nonna asleep in the chair, the ragù doing its slow patient work on the stove — and said nothing for a long time.

”This is strange,” Eve said eventually.

”What is?”

”This. Being... comfortable. With you.” She tilted her head to look at him. ”I didn’t expect comfortable. I expected intense and terrifying forever.”

”It’s still terrifying,” he said.

”You know what I mean.”

He was quiet for a moment. ”Yes,” he said. ”I know what you mean.” His thumb moved in slow circles on her shoulder. ”I didn’t expect it either.”

”Does it bother you?”

He considered this with the seriousness he gave everything. ”No,” he said finally. ”It should. Comfortable means lowered defenses. Lowered defenses means vulnerability. Vulnerability means exposure.” A pause. ”But no. It doesn’t bother me. Not with you.”

She turned back to her laptop, hiding the way that landed.

”Good,” she said quietly.

His arm tightened slightly around her.

Good, it said back.

Dinner was the ragù, over fresh pasta that Nonna made from scratch in a process Eve watched with genuine awe, served at the dining table with bread and wine and Nonna holding court with a story about a member of the Valentino household from thirty years ago that had Dimitri covering his face with one hand and Eve laughing so hard she nearly knocked over her wine.

”He did not,” Eve said.

”He absolutely did,” Nonna said serenely. ”Fully grown man. Terrified of one small cat. The most feared man in the city, and he climbed on top of the refrigerator.”

”Nonna,” Dimitri said.

”It is a true story.”

”It is a story that doesn’t need repeating.”

”All true stories need repeating. Otherwise what is history for?” She refilled Eve’s wine with the satisfaction of someone filing away the entire exchange for future use. ”Eat. You’ve barely touched the pasta.”

Eve ate. The ragù was extraordinary....eight hours of slow cooking collapsed into something rich and deep that tasted like time itself. She told Nonna this and Nonna looked pleased in the specific way of someone who had known this already but appreciated hearing it confirmed.

Dimitri ate without commentary but finished two full plates, which Nonna noted with visible satisfaction.

After dinner, after Nonna had retired to the east guest room with the finality of a woman who had decided the evening was complete, Eve and Dimitri stood side by side at the kitchen sink. She washed. He dried. Another unremarkable domestic rhythm that had established itself without discussion.

”She told me you sleep better now,” Eve said.

He was quiet for a moment. ”She talks too much.”

”She talks exactly the right amount.” Eve handed him a glass. ”Is it true?”

Another pause. Longer.

”Yes,” he said.

She didn’t push it. Just handed him the next glass and let the admission sit between them, quiet and significant and entirely his.

When the kitchen was clean, he turned off the lights and took her hand in the dark.

She followed him to bed.

****

POV: DIMITRI

He lay awake after she fell asleep.

This was not unusual....he had always slept less than other people, had always found the hours between two and four in the morning to be the ones where his mind worked most clearly, most coldly, turning problems over until they resolved into solutions.

What was unusual was the problem he was turning over tonight.

Enzo.

He hadn’t told her yet. Had spent an entire day watching her laugh with Nonna and learn Italian words with terrible pronunciation and lean into his side on the sofa like she belonged there....which she did, she absolutely did.....and he had said nothing about the call. About Antonio. About what was coming.

He’d told himself it was because he didn’t have enough information yet. Because there was no point alarming her before there was something concrete to alarm her about.

This was partially true.

The other part, which he was honest enough to acknowledge in the dark with her breath warm against his shoulder, was that today had been exactly what it appeared to be. Quiet. Ordinary. The kind of day he had not had in longer than he could remember, and he had wanted to protect it for a few more hours.

Selfish. He knew it was selfish.

Tomorrow he would tell her.

His phone lit up on the nightstand. A single line from Marco, sent at quarter past two in the morning.

Private jet landed. Domestic terminal. No advance notice.

Dimitri read it twice.

Enzo was in the city.

He set the phone face-down and looked at the ceiling and listened to Eve breathe and thought about all the ways this could go wrong and the very specific, very efficient ways he would prevent each of them.

Across the penthouse, in the kitchen he had just cleaned, a single cabinet door hung slightly open.

He was almost certain it had been closed when he turned off the lights.

He lay still for another moment.

Then he got up, quietly, and went to check.