Page 92 of Deadly Confessions
Valentina
Something is different about Niccolo tonight.
Not wrong. Different. A quality in the way he holds his wine glass, loose-fingered, unhurried, as if he's made a decision about something and the making of it released a tension I didn't know he was carrying. He's been carrying it for days. I noticed. I notice everything about this man, the way I notice sightlines in unfamiliar rooms, the way I notice the weight distribution of a jacket that might conceal a weapon. Automatic. Involuntary. The cost of being trained to observe by a man who turned observation into a sacrament.
Niccolo is sitting on the floor of his penthouse with his back against the couch, his legs stretched out, his bare feet on the marble. I'm on the couch behind him, my legs on either side of his shoulders, my fingers in his hair. We've been here for an hour. The remains of dinner on the kitchen counter. Takeaway from a place in the Quartieri Spagnoli that makes the best pizza fritta in Naples, greasy and golden and stuffed with ricotta and provola, the kind of food that stains the paper it comes in.
He chose the food. He chose the quiet. He chose the floor instead of the dining table, the dim apartment instead of a restaurant, the private instead of the public. He's been choosing private more often lately. As if the world outside this penthouse requires something from him he's running low on.
"Your hands," he says.
"What about them?"
"They're never still. It's one or the other with you. Moving or perfectly motionless. There's no middle."
"Some people fidget."
"You don't fidget. You oscillate between action and surveillance. Even now, with your hands in my hair, you're reading the room."
I look down at him. His head is tilted back, resting between my knees, his face upturned. His eyes are dark in the low light. The silver at his temples catches a reflection from the bay through the windows.
"What am I reading?" I ask.
"The exits. You always read the exits first. Then the windows. Then me."
"You're usually the most interesting thing in the room."
"Usually?"
"The pizza fritta was strong competition tonight."
He reaches up. Takes my hand from his hair. Brings it to his mouth. Kisses my knuckles. One by one. His lips on each ridge of bone, slow, deliberate.
"Come down here," he says.
I slide off the couch. Onto the floor beside him. The marble is cool through my leggings. He pulls me against his side. My head on his shoulder. His arm around me. The baystretches out through the windows, black glass holding the city's scattered lights.
"I need to tell you something," he says.
My body doesn't react. Fourteen years of training. My pulse holds at sixty-two. My hands stay still. But somewhere inside, in the place below the training, the place where the girl who hid in a closet at ten years old still lives, something tightens.
"Okay," I say.
He's quiet for a moment. His thumb traces circles on my shoulder. The pattern he makes when he's constructing a sentence before he speaks it. Most people assemble their words in real time, letting thought become language become sound in an unbroken stream. Niccolo builds his sentences in advance, tests their weight, then delivers them finished. Like furniture. Like architecture.
"My mother used to say that love is the thing that survives knowledge," he says. "That anyone can love a version. The test is whether the love holds when the version falls away."
"Your mother was smart."
"My mother was terrified. She loved my father despite knowing exactly what he was. The knowledge didn't kill the love. It just made the love more expensive."
I wait. His thumb continues its circles.
"I'm not telling you this to be philosophical," he says. "I'm telling you because I want you to know that I understand what it costs to love someone whose full picture you don't have."
The tightening again. Deeper this time. In my chest, behind my sternum. The place where the ribs meet.
"Niccolo."
