Chapter 76 The Night Before the End

Chapter 76 The Night Before the End
The house was completely quiet by ten.

Nico had gone to his room. Elena had turned off the kitchen lights and wished us goodnight with the particular look she gave when she understood something was happening that needed space around it. The guards were on their positions outside and the gates were locked and the estate had settled into its nighttime breathing and it was just the two of us in the library with the lamp on low and the fountain running outside and tomorrow sitting in the room with us like a third person neither of us was ready to address yet.

He closed the file he had been working through and set it on the desk.

I closed my book.

We looked at each other.

"Tell me something real," I said. "Not about tomorrow. Something after tomorrow."

He was quiet for a moment and then he said "I want to take you back to the cliffside. When this is done. Not the safe house. Just the cliff. At sunset."

"All right," I said.

"And I want to eat dinner somewhere ordinary," he said. "A restaurant with bad lighting and a menu that takes too long to read and people at the next table talking too loudly about something that doesn't matter."

I looked at him. "You want to go to a normal restaurant."

"I want to sit across from you somewhere that isn't this dining room," he said, "and order food I didn't choose and talk about nothing important."

"We can do that," I said.

"And the bar," he said. "When you open it. I want to be there."

I sat forward slightly. "You want to come to my bar opening."

"I want to sit at your bar," he said, "and watch you work and drink whatever you put in front of me without complaining."

"I'll put something terrible in front of you," I said.

"I know," he said. "I'll drink it."

I looked at him in the lamplight and felt something in my chest that was too large and too warm to look at directly and too real to look away from.

"What else," I said.

He stood up from the desk and crossed to the armchair and sat on the arm of it beside me and I shifted slightly and he put his arm around me and I leaned into his side and the library was warm and quiet around us.

"I want mornings," he said. "Ordinary ones. Coffee going cold because we forgot about it. The cat on the wrong chair. Nothing urgent."

"We already have those," I said.

"I want more of them," he said. "Without any of this sitting underneath them."

I pressed closer into his side and looked at the freesia painting and thought about mornings with cold coffee and Biscuit on the desk and the fountain outside and nothing urgent pressing in from the edges of everything.

"We'll have them," I said. "After tomorrow we'll have all of them."

He was quiet for a long moment.

His arm tightened around me.

"Mia," he said.

Something in the way he said it made me look up at him.

He was looking at me with an expression completely unguarded, no management, no fraction held back, just open and certain and entirely his.

"I love you," he said quietly.

The library held the words.

I pressed my face into his neck and felt his pulse against my cheek and his arm around me and his heartbeat steady and real and I stayed there for a moment in the warmth of what he had just said and let it settle into every part of me that had been waiting for it without knowing it was waiting.

"Say it back," he said. His voice was rough and quiet and completely serious.

I lifted my head and looked at him directly.

"I love you," I said.

Something in his face moved, something that had been braced for a long time releasing all at once, and he pulled me against him and held on and I held on back and the library was warm and the lamp was low and outside the estate was dark and still and tomorrow was tomorrow but tonight was this.

We stayed in the armchair together for a long time.

We talked about small things after that. Not plans or operations or anything with weight. He told me about Marco learning to cook at fourteen after their mother died, the catastrophic early attempts, the one incident involving carbonara that Elena still refused to discuss. I told him about the first time I managed a full Saturday shift alone at Luca's bar, nineteen years old and absolutely certain every five minutes that something was about to go catastrophically wrong.

He laughed at the carbonara story.

I laughed at his description of Marco's face when he was told the carbonara was inedible.

The lamp burned low.

The fountain ran.

At some point we moved from the armchair to the bedroom and lay in the dark together and he held me and I pressed my face into his shoulder and neither of us tried to sleep because sleep felt like a waste of the last hours before everything changed and we both understood that without saying it.

He traced patterns on my arm in the dark.

I listened to his heartbeat.

At three in the morning he said "After this you can throw another glass at my head if you want."

"I'll aim better this time," I said.

His chest moved with a laugh that was real and warm and entirely his and I held onto it and the night held onto us and tomorrow was coming whether we were ready or not.

Neither of us slept.

Neither of us minded.