I kissed her before I made a decision to.
That was the part that kept returning to me, even in the middle of it, some corner of my mind registering the absence of calculation with the alarm of a man who had built his entire life on never moving without one. I did not act on impulse. I had not acted on impulse since I was nineteen years old and learned in the most permanent way possible what impulse cost in this world.
And yet here I was.
She kissed me back and the last coherent thought I had for some time was that I had not expected that, the immediacy of it, the complete absence of hesitation on her end, fire meeting fire without negotiation, and something in my chest detonated so cleanly I barely felt it happen.
I walked her back against the wall. One hand at her jaw, the other flat against the plaster, and I kissed her the way I had been actively not thinking about kissing her for weeks, with the full weight of every argument I had made to myself against it. Thorough. Unhurried. The kind of kiss that started as want and became something harder to name about thirty seconds in.
She made a sound against my mouth that went straight through me.
I pulled back just far enough to look at her and immediately understood that this had been a mistake, not the kissing, the looking, because the sight of her undid something additional in me that I was not prepared for.
Her lips were red and slightly swollen and parted, her eyes darker than usual, the blue of them deep with something unguarded that she was already trying to close off before I could read it fully. Her cheeks were flushed, her hair displaced from wherever she had put it, and she was looking up at me with an expression that was half fury at herself and half something raw and real that she had not managed to file away in time.
She was perfect.
The thought arrived without permission and I let it stand because denying it would have been dishonest and the one place I permitted myself honesty was inside my own skull.
"You test me, gattina," I said, and my voice came out rougher than I had intended.
"You're not exactly easy yourself," she said, breathless in a way that was clearly irritating her.
"Mi fai impazzire," I said.
Her eyes shifted. "What does that mean?"
"It means you drive me crazy." I said it the way I would report an intelligence assessment. Flat and factual. Because it was.
Something moved through her expression and she looked away from my eyes briefly, which was the closest thing to flustered I had ever seen from her.
I pressed closer and found her neck with my lips, the soft skin just below her jaw, and she tilted her head back against the wall with a sharp inhale that felt like something won honestly. My hands moved, one staying at her jaw, the other finding the curve of her waist beneath her jacket, pulling her closer, and I felt her fingers curl into my lapel with a grip that pulled rather than pushed.
She was not stopping this.
Neither was I.
My lips moved down her neck, unhurried, learning the geography of it, and she made a low sound that I felt more than heard, a sound she seemed surprised by, her breath coming shorter and less controlled with every passing second. I brought my mouth back to hers and kissed her slower this time, deeper, my hand sliding from her waist to her hip and holding there firmly, and she kissed me back with the same focused intensity she brought to every argument we had ever had, like she was committing the whole of herself to it.
"Demetrio," she said against my mouth, and my name in her voice like that was its own kind of damage.
I thought about Sergio's call. The address on her phone, the neighborhood it sat in, three blocks from the center of Cruz territory, and her heels clicking along that sidewalk with no awareness of what surrounded her. I had been across the city in a meeting when the call came through and I had moved before I gave a single instruction to the men still seated at my table, and I had spent the drive across the city telling myself it was duty and obligation and family management and all the other clean, structural words that had nothing to do with the cold thing that had moved through me the moment Sergio said her name and that address in the same sentence.
I pulled back and looked at her.
"You scared me today," I said, and I heard the words land in the air between us before I had chosen to release them.
She went completely still.
The hallway was very quiet. Outside, somewhere in the city, traffic moved and horns sounded and Chicago did what it always did, which was continue without pause, but in this narrow space with the peeling walls and the old carpet smell and the late light coming through the glass door, everything was very still.
"What?" she said, and her voice had changed entirely, the breathlessness replaced by something more attentive and searching.
"The Cruz territory," I said, and I put my voice back where I needed it, level and controlled. "If anyone there had connected your name to this family, you would have become a target before you knocked on that door. The Mexicans are not subtle about what they do with leverage."
She was watching me carefully. "You're saying I was in actual danger."
"I'm saying you were close to it." I held her gaze. "I need you to promise me you won't go back there."
She opened her mouth and I could already see the refusal forming, the default rebellion that was simply part of how she was built, and something about it, about the absolute certainty that she was going to push back regardless, made something move through me that I could only describe as fond, which was a word I had not applied to a person in some time.
"I'm not asking as a command," I said, before she could speak. "I'm asking because I would prefer not to spend the rest of this year managing my own reaction every time your name appears in a dangerous context. That is as honest as I know how to be about it."
She stared at me.
"That might be the most honest thing you've said to me since we met," she said quietly.
"Don't get used to it," I said.