Chapter 96 Little things with Salvatore

Chapter 96 Little things with Salvatore
Alexandria's POV.

Dominic stood up first.

He looked at his phone, said something to Kara in a low voice, and they both moved toward the door with the particular efficiency of people who had somewhere to be and understood that the room needed to be smaller for a while.

Kara picked up her bag. She looked at me briefly before she left — not long, just a glance, the kind that carried something without naming it. Then the door closed and the apartment went quiet.

Just Salvatore and me.

And the table between us with four empty cups and Dominic's notepad still open and the weight of everything that was about to happen sitting in the room like a fifth person.

Salvatore looked at me.

I looked back.

"How long do we have," I said.

"Two hours," he said. "Maybe less."

I nodded.

I stood up and he stood up at the same time and the table was between us and then it wasn't because he came around it the way he always came toward things — without hurry, without hesitation, like the distance was simply something to move through.

He stopped in front of me and looked at my face and I looked back at his and neither of us said anything because there was nothing left to say that we hadn't already said in corridors and studies and lodges and cars and kitchens and one very quiet apartment on the sixth floor of a building that had become the center of everything.

His hand found my face.

I let it.

\---

He was careful at first.

More careful than he had ever been with me — not uncertain, not hesitant, just deliberate in a way that was different from the deliberateness I was used to from him. His hands moved across me like a man taking stock of something precious and breakable and entirely his to protect.

I was not in the mood for careful.

"Salvatore," I said.

He looked at me.

"I'm pregnant," I said. "Not fragile."

Something shifted in his expression. The carefulness gave way to something darker and more familiar and I felt it move through the room like a change in temperature.

He pulled me closer.

This was the version of him I knew. The one that didn't ask permission and didn't manage the distance and moved through whatever was between us with the same absolute certainty he brought to everything else in his life. His mouth found my neck and I pressed my hand flat against his chest and felt his heartbeat under my palm — faster than usual, which was the only thing that told me this was costing him something too.

He walked me backward toward the bedroom.

I went.

\---

The city was still going outside the window.

I could see it from the bed — the particular nighttime version of it, reduced and glittering, entirely unaware of what was happening on the sixth floor of this building or what was going to happen in two hours when four people walked into a room and dismantled everything Emeka had spent eight months building.

Salvatore's hands were warm on my skin and I stopped thinking about the city.

He moved over me slowly, the way he always moved — unhurried, deliberate, like time was something he had in abundance and intended to use. I pressed my face into his shoulder and felt the weight of him and thought about nothing useful and was grateful for it.

There was something different about tonight.

Not in the mechanics of it — in the air underneath it. The particular charge of two people who understood that what came next was significant and were here, in this room, in this hour, because the body needed something to hold onto before it walked into uncertain ground.

He pushed deeper and I exhaled and wrapped my legs around him and felt everything I had been carrying — the storage unit, the envelope, the letter, my father's handwriting, Kara sitting beside me at the table — arrive and then recede, the way a tide pulled back when something else moved in.

Just this. Just him. Just the weight and warmth of a man who had said I'll make it true and had been, imperfectly and at considerable cost to everyone around him, trying.

I came with my hand pressed flat against my stomach and his forehead against mine and the city moving outside the window and the two hours sitting patiently in the corner of the room waiting for us to be done.

Afterward he didn't move immediately.

He stayed close, his hand resting over mine against my stomach, and we lay in the quiet of the apartment and listened to the building settle around us.

"I read the letter," I said.

"I know."

"He said to trust myself."

Salvatore was quiet for a moment. "He was right."

I looked at the ceiling.

"He never met you," I said. "He never knew any of this would happen. He just left something behind and trusted that whoever needed it would find it." I paused. "I keep thinking about what it cost him. Fourteen years of carrying that. Fourteen years of being careful and precise and afraid and still showing up every day and being my father." My chest was tight. "He never told me any of it."

"He was protecting you," Salvatore said.

"I know." I pressed my lips together. "It doesn't make it smaller."

"No," he said. "It doesn't."

We lay in the quiet for a moment longer.

Then he said, "After tonight — when this is done and Emeka can't reach any of us anymore — what do you want."

I turned my head and looked at him.

At the question. At the plain directness of it, no architecture around it, just the thing itself placed between us like something he needed to know the answer to before we walked out of this room.

I thought about it honestly.

Not the answer I was supposed to give or the answer that would make the situation cleaner or the answer that managed anyone's feelings including my own. The actual answer.

"I want my mother close," I said. "I want the baby to know who her grandfather was. I want to not be afraid of that family's name anymore." I looked at him steadily. "And I want to know what you actually are when you are not managing a situation. Because I have seen you manage situations very well and I have seen you in corridors and studies and cars and I have never once seen you when there was nothing left to manage."

He looked at me for a long moment.

"Neither have I," he said quietly.

I held his gaze.

"Then that's what I want," I said. "To find out."

He looked at me with those steady dark eyes and said nothing and I understood that the silence was not an absence of answer but the answer itself — the plain, undecorated acknowledgment of a man who had been asked a question he couldn't arrange into something safer and had chosen honesty instead.

His phone vibrated on the nightstand.

Dominic.

We looked at each other.

"Time," I said.

"Yes," he said.

We got up.

I went to the bathroom and came back and picked up my bag and checked the inside pocket where the envelope was and felt it there, solid and present, my father's handwriting against my fingers.

I looked at the city one more time through the window.

Then I turned away from it and faced the room and the man standing in it and the two hours that were about to become the thing everything else had been building toward.

"Let's go," I said.