Chapter 12: Night Terrors
The city lights bled into the room, a permanent electric dusk framing the Madonna’s serene, sorrowful face. Enzo hadn’t moved. He stood just inside the doorway, a statue watching the woman in his bed.
His own sleep was a sparse commodity, stolen in brief, alert stretches. Tonight, it was a lost cause. The quiet hum of the penthouse’s systems, the distant pulse of traffic thirty stories below—none of it could drown out the calculations clicking behind his eyes. The ledgers were balanced. Castello was a problem erased. The message sent. It was clean.
It should have felt like victory.
Instead, he watched her. The way her fingers spasmed against the pillow. The faint, fevered movement beneath her closed eyelids. She was walking some other, darker gallery in her dreams. He knew the path.
He’d intended to check on her, to ensure the asset was secure and stable. He’d told himself that. The water on the nightstand was a practical gesture. Hydration after shock. But he hadn’t left.
The first sound was a whimper. Soft, stifled, animal. It twisted something low in his gut. Her head thrashed once on the pillow, her hair a dark cascade against the white linen.
Then her breath hitched, sharp and loud in the silence. A full-body flinch followed, as if she’d been struck. Her legs kicked, tangled in the duvet.
“No.” The word was a slurred protest, thick with sleep and terror. “Don’t.”
Enzo took a silent step into the room. His instincts, honed over two decades in a world of sudden violence, screamed at him to assess the threat. There was none. Only the ghost in her mind.
He should let it pass. Let her fight it alone. Trauma was a solitary war. Comfort was a currency he didn’t trade in. It made you soft. Visible.
Another jerk of her limbs. A choked gasp. “Leo…” she moaned, the name a poison on her lips.
He was moving before the decision fully formed in his mind.
He sat on the edge of the bed, the mattress dipping under his weight. He didn’t touch her. Not yet. “Isabella.” His voice was low, a rumble meant to anchor.
She didn’t hear him. She was back in the warehouse, the blue neon strobing across Castello’s smirk, the bite of the rope, the deafening roar. Her hands flew up as if warding off a blow. A raw, guttural scream tore from her throat, shrill and shattered in the lavish room.
He reacted. In one smooth motion, he slid into the bed behind her, his body curving around hers. One arm hooked under hers, wrapping across her chest, pinning her thrashing arms. The other leg trapped hers, stopping the frantic kicking. He pulled her tight against him, her back to his chest, immobilizing her in a cage of muscle and intent.
She fought. She was stronger than she looked, fueled by pure, blind panic. Her elbows jabbed backward. Her head snapped, trying to connect with his jaw. Heat radiated from her, and the scent of fear-sweat cut through the clean linen.
“Enzo!” It was a snarl, a warning, her eyes wide open but seeing nothing but memory.
“Shh.” He tightened his grip, not enough to hurt, but enough to be an immovable fact. “I’ve got you.” He murmured the words into the sweat-damped hair at her temple. His voice was calm, steady, a counterpoint to her chaos. “You’re here. You’re safe. It’s over.”
She strained against him, a wild thing caught in a snare. “Let me go!”
“No.” The word was absolute. He held firm. “Stop fighting. Breathe.”
A sob wrenched through her, breaking the fury. The tension seeped from her muscles all at once, leaving her limp and shaking in his arms. The screaming ceased, replaced by ragged, hitching breaths that shuddered through her entire frame. She was awake now, he could feel it—the horrible, trembling return to the present.
“That’s it,” he murmured, his lips still close to her ear. The arm across her chest loosened slightly, becoming less a restraint and more a simple hold. His hand splayed over her sternum, feeling the frantic drum of her heart. “Just breathe. In and out.”
She trembled, a fine, constant vibration. A tear tracked from the corner of her eye and slid over the bridge of her nose. She didn’t try to wipe it away. She just lay there, trapped against him, staring at the faint glow on the opposite wall.
“I killed them,” she whispered. It wasn’t a question. It was a confession to the dark.
“Yes.”
“I felt his skull break. Under my head.”
“I know.”
She was silent for a long moment. The only sound was her breathing gradually slowing, syncing with the slow, deliberate rise and fall of his own chest behind her.
“The gun… it was so loud,” she said, her voice small. “My ears rang for hours. I can still hear it.”
He didn’t offer empty platitudes. He didn’t tell her it would fade. He just kept holding her, a solid, warm presence in the aftermath.
“Why are you here?” she asked finally, the vulnerability replaced by a thin veneer of her old defiance.
“You were screaming.”
“Marco could have come. You have other people for this.”
“No,” he said, the word leaving no room for argument. “I don’t.”
She absorbed that. The implied weight of it—that her nightmares were his domain, that her vulnerability was a sight for his eyes only—hung in the air between them. The intimacy of it was more shocking than the violence. This was a different kind of trespass.
“I need to shower,” she said, her voice steadier. “I can still… I can smell it on me.”
He released her. The cool air rushed in where his body heat had been. She sat up slowly, pulling her knees to her chest, not looking at him. He swung his legs out of the bed and stood, a shadow detaching itself from the gloom.
“There’s water by the bed,” he said, his tone shifting back to its practical neutrality. “Drink it.”
He walked to the door, pausing with his hand on the frame. He looked back at her, curled into herself on the vast bed, her face pale in the city’s glow. The Madonna watched over her, serene and untouchable.
“The first night is the worst,” he said, the words stripped bare. “After that, you just get used to it.”
He left, closing the door softly behind him.
Izzy sat frozen, the echo of his body around hers like a brand. She looked at the glass of water. She picked it up and drank it all in one go, the coolness doing nothing to wash away the taste of the dream.
In the sterile brightness of the bathroom, she scrubbed her skin again until it was pink. She avoided the mirror. When she returned to the bedroom, she expected it to feel empty. It didn’t.
His presence lingered in the indent on the mattress, in the faint scent of his soap and the cigars that clung to him, now imprinted on the sheets where he’d held her. She stood by the bed, staring at the spot where he’d lain. The nightmare was a dull ache now, a horror remembered rather than relived. What remained was the unsettling solidity of his arms, the low murmur in her ear, the terrifying gentleness of a man who had handed her a gun to clean and then held her while she shook.
She climbed back into the bed. She didn’t curl up on her side. She lay on her back, staring at the shadowed ceiling, her hand resting on the empty space where he had been. The silence was complete, but for the first time since the warehouse, it didn’t feel like it was waiting to be filled with screams.
Down the hall, Enzo stood at the floor-to-ceiling window of his study, a crystal glass of Amaro in his hand. The city sprawled below, a circuit board of ambition and failure. He took a slow sip, the bitter liquid warming his throat.
He saw her face in the reflection of the glass. Not the terrified woman from the nightmare, but the one from the warehouse floor—eyes blazing, hands steadying the gun, embracing the brutal math without flinching. An asset. A complication.
A problem that was now, irrevocably, his.
He finished the drink and set the glass down with a quiet click. He did not return to his own bedroom. Instead, he sat in the high-backed leather chair behind his desk, in the dark, and kept watch over the silent hallway, waiting for the dawn.
The leather creaked under his weight, a familiar complaint in the silence. Down the hall, nothing stirred. He counted the intermittent pulses of a faulty neon sign three blocks away, a rhythm as unreliable as his own thoughts. Dawn felt like a theoretical concept, something for other people in other apartments.
His knuckle ached. He flexed his hand, examining the split skin across the joint in the dim light—a souvenir from redirecting one of Castello’s men into a concrete wall. The pain was clean. Specific. It was preferable to the formless tension coiled behind his sternum, the one that had driven him from his own room to this vigil.
A floorboard sighed.
He was on his feet before the sound finished, a silhouette against the window, his body blocking the city’s glow. It wasn’t the hesitant footfall of an intruder. It was lighter. Closer.
Izzy stood in the doorway of his study, dwarfed by the frame. She’d pulled on one of his discarded dress shirts from a chair, the fine cotton swallowing her, the sleeves hanging past her fingertips. Her hair was a tangled aura around her pale face. She didn’t speak. She just stood there, her breath a shallow rhythm in the quiet.
“The water’s in your room,” he said, his voice rougher than he intended.
“I don’t want water.”
“What do you want?”
She looked down at her hands, lost in the white fabric. The shirt smelled like him—sandalwood and smoke. She’d sought it out. “I can’t go back in there. The dark… it gets loud.”
He understood. Silence after violence wasn’t empty; it was a vault echoing with every unsaid thing. He gave a single, curt nod toward the deep sofa facing the window. “Sit. Then.”
She moved on bare feet, the marble floor cool. She didn’t take the sofa. She walked to his chair instead, stopping an arm’s length away, her green eyes holding a glassy sheen. The defiance was gone, burned away by exhaustion, leaving something raw and unmistakable.
“You said the first night is the worst,” she whispered. “You didn’t say how to get through it.”
“You just do.”
“I’m not,” she said, a crack in the words. “I’m not getting through it.”
He saw it then—the fine tremor in her lower lip, the way her shoulders had begun to curl inward again. She was seconds from fracturing, and the last pieces of her composure were slipping through her own fingers. The asset was compromised. The complication was weeping in his study.
He didn’t think. He opened his hand, a simple, unspoken offer.
She stared at his outstretched palm, then at his face, searching for the trick, the cruelty. Finding neither, she stepped into him. It wasn’t an embrace she initiated, but a collapse. Her forehead came to rest against his chest, and her hands fisted in the front of his own shirt, holding on as if to a cliff edge.
A shudder ran through her, deep and seismic. Then another. He brought his arms around her slowly, giving her time to pull away. She didn’t. She pressed closer, her whole body trembling against the solid wall of him. His chin came to rest on the crown of her head.
“It’s okay,” he murmured into her hair. It was a lie. Nothing about this was okay. But the words were what you said. “Let it out. Just let it go.”
A sob broke free, muffled by his chest. Then another. They were ugly, wrenching things that spoke of shattered nerves and the visceral memory of a man’s life ending by her own will. She cried for the blood, for the ringing in her ears, for the person she was before she pulled the trigger. He held her through all of it, his hand a steady pressure between her shoulder blades, anchoring her to the here and now.
The trembling gradually subsided. The sobs softened into hiccuping breaths. She didn’t let go. Her grip on his shirt merely loosened, her hands flattening against his heartbeat.
“Sorry,” she mumbled, the word wet and thick against him.
“Don’t.”
“Your shirt’s ruined.”
“I have others.”
A weak, watery laugh escaped her. It was the most beautiful sound he’d heard in years. She tilted her head back just enough to look up at him. Her eyes were red-rimmed and exhausted, but clear. Present. “I really did it, didn’t I?”
“You saved your life.”
“I took his.”
“Same thing.” He brushed a stray strand of hair from her damp cheek with his thumb, the gesture startling them both. “In my world, it’s the same thing.”
She leaned into the touch for a fraction of a second before her eyes drifted toward the window. The blackness was softening at the edges, yielding to a deep, bruised indigo. “It’s almost morning.”
He didn’t reply. He just kept holding her, watching the night begin its slow retreat over the skyline. The weight of her in his arms felt foreign and utterly correct.
“Enzo?” Her voice was small, tentative.
“Hmm?”
“Can I stay here? Just… until the sun comes up?”
He looked down at her, at the trust laid bare in her upturned face. It was a vulnerability more dangerous than any gun. He should refuse. Send her back to bed. Re-establish the lines.
Instead, he guided her to the wide sofa. He sat, and she curled into his side without hesitation, her head finding the hollow of his shoulder, her legs tucked up. He pulled a wool throw from the back of the couch and draped it over her. She let out a soft sigh, her entire body going lax against him.
They sat in silence as the indigo bled into gray, then into a pale, watery gold. The city’s edges slowly sharpened into existence. Her breathing evened out into sleep. He didn’t move. He watched the light grow, and for the first time in a long time, he didn’t think about territory, or respect, or the delicate balance of fear that kept his empire standing.
He thought only of the warm, trusting weight against his side, and the terrifying, quiet truth taking root in the dawn. She wasn’t just his to protect anymore.
She was his to keep.
And he belonged to her.
The sun rose, not with a fanfare, but as a gradual suffusion of gold seeping around the edges of the blackout drapes Enzo never bothered to close. It painted a sharp line across the floor, up the side of the sofa, and over their tangled forms.
Izzy’s breathing had deepened into the soft, unmistakable rhythm of true sleep. The earlier hitches and tremors were gone. Her fist, which had been clenched in his shirt, relaxed, fingers splayed open over his heart. The warmth of her seeped through the layers of cotton and wool, a solid, trusting weight against his side.
He should extricate himself. The city was waking. There were calls to make, movements to assess, the aftermath of Castello’s end to manage. His phone lay silent and dark on the desk, a silent monument to neglected duty. He didn’t reach for it.
His neck ached from the angle, his arm pinned beneath her had lost sensation. He welcomed the discomfort. It was proof. Her auburn hair smelled faintly of his shampoo and the last vestiges of warehouse dust. He watched a single strand lift and fall with her breath.
He had held many things in his life. Weapons. Power. The fates of men. Nothing had ever felt so irrevocable as this. He leaned his head back against the cushions, letting his eyes close. Just for a moment. Just until the sunlight climbed to her knees.
His last conscious thought was a simple, startling calculation. He would burn the city to ash for the peace of this single, quiet hour.
The light had moved. It now lay in a warm, wide rectangle across their legs, baking through the throw blanket. A distant, rhythmic beeping—a truck backing up several streets over—insinuated itself into Enzo’s consciousness. He swam toward it through layers of deep, dreamless sleep.
A deeper warmth registered first. Not the sun’s, but a living heat along his right side. The scent of her hair was closer now, his face buried in it. His arm was no longer numb; it was wrapped around her, his hand resting on the dip of her waist, his fingers curled possessively into the soft cotton of his own shirt that she wore.
Her back was pressed flush against his chest. Somehow, in the depth of sleep, they had shifted. He was now lying on his side, spooned around her on the wide sofa, his larger body sheltering hers completely. One of her hands was tucked under her cheek. The other rested over his forearm, her fingers loose in sleep.
He didn’t move. He barely breathed. This was uncharted territory. Waking beside someone was one thing. This conscious, deliberate entanglement was another. He could feel the gentle expansion of her ribs with each breath, the delicate architecture of her spine against his sternum.
The backing signal stopped. In the new silence, he heard her breath catch, change. She stirred, a small shift backward into him, a soft, sleeping sound escaping her lips. Her fingers twitched against his arm.
Then they stilled. He felt the exact moment she woke. A slight tensing of her shoulders, a sharp intake of breath held. She was cataloging the weight of his arm, the solid warmth at her back, the unfamiliar intimacy of the position. He waited for her to pull away, to bolt, to rebuild the walls her nightmare had demolished.
She didn’t.
She exhaled, long and slow, and melted back into him. Her hand slid more firmly over his forearm, holding him in place.
“You’re awake,” she murmured, her voice husky with sleep. It wasn’t a question.
“Yes.”
“Your watch is digging into my back.”
He shifted his wrist minutely. “Better?”
“Mmm.” She was quiet for a long moment. The sunlight was in her eyes now; he could see her squinting against it. “What time is it?”
“Late.” It was past ten. The morning’s business had already begun without him. He found he didn’t care.
“Marco must be having a field day.”
“Let him.”
A faint smile touched her voice. “The great Enzo Moretti, playing pillow.”
He nipped gently at her shoulder through the fabric, a quiet rebuttal. She gasped, then laughed, a low, sleepy sound that vibrated through him. She turned her head slightly on the cushion, her cheek now resting on his bicep. He could see the curve of her eyelashes, the faint freckles across her nose revealed by the sun.
“I didn’t dream,” she said. The wonder in her voice was a quiet, profound thing.
“Good.”
She was studying their joined hands, her smaller one over his. “I thought I would. I thought I’d see it all again.”
“You might tonight.”
“Probably.” She traced a faint scar across his knuckles. “But not right now.”
He tightened his arm around her, drawing her infinitesimally closer. The world outside this room, outside this cocoon of sunlight and shared breath, was a distant rumor. Here, there was only the reality of her body fitting against his, the peace they had stolen, and the unspoken vow hardening in his chest.
He would ensure she slept like this again. However he had to make it happen.
Her stomach chose that moment to growl, a loud, plaintive sound in the quiet room. She giggled, the tension of the moment dissolving into something lighter, more real.
“Sorry,” she said.
“You’re hungry.”
“Starving. I think the last thing I ate was a stale cracker in that warehouse office before…”
She didn’t finish. She didn’t need to. The shadow of it passed over them, but it didn’t chill the sun-warmed air. It was just a fact, another part of the landscape they now shared.
“Come on,” he said, his voice rough from disuse. He began to slowly withdraw his arm.
She caught his hand, lacing her fingers through his. “Five more minutes.”
He stilled. Looked down at their joined hands. Hers were delicate but strong, the nails short, a smudge of something dark—oil or dirt—still under one. His were scarred, capable of far worse. They looked right together.
“Five minutes,” he agreed, and settled back into the cushions, into her.
Outside, the city thrummed with its relentless life. Inside, for five more stolen minutes, they just were. Two fractured pieces, holding very still, trying not to cut each other on the broken edges.