Cellie's POV
The ringing wouldn't stop.
It drilled into my skull like something personal, like it had a grudge against me specifically, and I groaned into a pillow that smelled nothing like mine. Softer than mine. Heavier sheets, cooler air, the kind of stillness that only came with rooms that cost more per night than my monthly rent. I registered all of that before I registered the fact that I was not alone.
My hand, reaching blindly for my phone, landed on something warm. Something firm and unmistakably human. I went completely still.
My heart did that horrible thing where it stops, counts to three, and then slams back into motion twice as hard. Because my fingers were spread flat against a chest. A bare chest. Broad and smooth and rising and falling with the steady breathing of someone deep asleep, completely unbothered by the phone screaming between us.
I pulled my hand back like I'd touched a hot stove.
The ringing cut off mid-shriek.
"What is it." Not a question. A warning. The voice came from right beside me, low and rough with sleep and carrying an accent that wrapped around every word like it owned it. Italian, thick and unhurried, the kind you couldn't fake.
My eyes flew open.
The ceiling above me was high and paneled in dark wood, crown molding catching the grey light of early morning filtering through floor-length curtains I definitely had not picked out. A chandelier hung overhead, small and understated in the way that only truly expensive things managed to be. The sheets beneath me were white silk. I knew because they felt like water sliding against my skin when I shifted, and I realized with a fresh wave of cold dread climbing my spine that I was wearing considerably less than I had been wearing last night.
Memories hit me in fragments, the way they do when your brain is trying to protect you from itself.
Champagne. Too much of it. A ballroom lit gold and buzzing with people I didn't know and didn't care to. My mother's hand on my arm and her voice in my ear telling me to smile, to stand up straight, to not embarrass her. And then the argument, low and vicious, tucked behind a column near the east wing bar. Her eyes cutting into me over the rim of her glass. My heels clicking on marble as I walked away from her and straight toward another drink.
And then him.
I squeezed my eyes shut, but that only made the images sharper.
I didn't want to look. I knew who was lying beside me. Some part of me had known the second I heard his voice, that accent, that particular brand of cold authority. But knowing a thing and seeing it are two different kinds of terrible, so I turned my head slowly, the way you turn toward something you've already accepted is going to hurt you.
Demetrio DeLeon.
He was on the phone, one arm folded behind his head, staring at the ceiling with the focused expression of a man conducting business from bed as if that were the most natural thing in the world. Which, for him, it probably was. He hadn't looked at me yet. He was speaking in rapid Italian, something clipped and final-sounding, and I took the six seconds that bought me to take stock of the situation.
He was exactly as I remembered from the party. Too handsome in a way that felt almost aggressive about it, like his face had been arranged specifically to make you stupid. Dark hair a mess against the pillow. Jaw sharp enough to cut. Broad shoulders and a chest that my apparently very stupid hands had been resting on moments ago.
And there, along his collarbone, a mark. My mark, unless I'd completely lost my mind, which at this point felt like a real possibility.
My face went hot.
I needed to leave. Right now, immediately, before he finished that call and I had to look him in the eye and figure out what you were supposed to say to a man like this the morning after a night like that. There was no script for this. There was no version of this conversation that ended well for me.
I spotted my dress in a heap near the door.
Slow. Quiet. Careful.
I slipped out from under the sheets and the cold air hit me like a judgment, but I moved fast, scooping up my dress and stepping into it, reaching back to zip it with fingers that weren't entirely steady. My shoes were in opposite corners of the room, which said something about last night that I was choosing not to think about. I retrieved them both, hooked them over two fingers, and I was three steps from the door when his voice stopped me cold.
"Stop right there."
I stopped. Every muscle in my body locked up, caught between self-preservation and the very reasonable fear of what happened to people who didn't listen to Demetrio DeLeon. I'd grown up in Chicago. I knew the name. Everyone knew the name. You didn't say it too loud in certain neighborhoods. You didn't say it at all in others.
"Turn around."
I turned slowly.
He was sitting up in bed now, phone gone, and there was a gun in his hand. Not pointed at me with any kind of drama or ceremony, just resting there in a loose grip, casual the way only someone very comfortable with violence could manage. His grey eyes were on me with an expression I couldn't read, flat and assessing, like I was a variable he hadn't accounted for.
"Who are you." Same non-question delivery as the phone call. Like he already expected to be disappointed by the answer.
Something about that pricked at me even through the fear. I'd spent the night with this man and he was looking at me like I was a stranger who'd wandered in off the street.
"Cellie," I said, keeping my voice even. "Cellie Bianchi."
The blankness in his face cracked. Not into warmth. Into something worse. Recognition flickered behind his eyes and then his jaw set and he looked up at the ceiling for a long moment, like he was asking it for patience.
"Bianchi." He said it quietly, like he was testing how bad it tasted.
"That's what I said."
He exhaled through his nose. Hard. His free hand came up and pinched the bridge of his nose and then he looked back at me and the silence between us was pulled so tight I thought it might snap.
"Get out," he said finally, tossing the gun onto the nightstand with a carelessness that made my stomach drop. "Pack your things and go."
I almost laughed. "That's what I was doing before you pulled a gun on me."
He didn't respond to that. He just watched me with those cold grey eyes until I turned back around, picked up my shoes, and walked out the door.
I didn't let myself feel it until the door clicked shut behind me.
Then I leaned against the wall of the corridor, pressed my palm flat against the silk wallpaper, and breathed. In through the nose, out through the mouth, the way my old therapist had taught me before I stopped being able to afford her. The hallway was empty. Early morning light crept under the heavy curtains at the far end. Somewhere deep in the house, I could hear the distant sounds of a household staff already moving, already working, like last night had been just another evening and this morning was just another morning.
For them, I supposed it was.
For me, it was the single worst decision of my adult life staring me in the face, and I had made some genuinely impressive bad decisions.
I pushed off the wall and started walking.
My stepbrother. Technically. Or soon to be. Because my mother, Penelope Bianchi, was marrying his father, Manuel DeLeon, and that made Demetrio and I something adjacent to family in a way that made my stomach turn over slowly and unpleasantly. I'd met him for the first time last night. The first time. And I had been drunk and hurting and lonely the way I got sometimes when Penelope and I fought, the kind of hollow ache that made bad decisions feel like the only decisions, and somehow that had led to this corridor, this morning, this particular disaster.
I turned a corner and stopped dead.
Penelope was standing at the end of the hall.