The week had found its rhythm.
Rosalina arrived at six fifty every morning and left somewhere between seven thirty and eight in the evening and had stopped noticing that these were unusual hours because the sixtieth floor operated on its own sense of time — compressed and purposeful, the kind of time that moved quickly when you were inside it and felt, only later, like it had taken everything.
She had learned new things.
That Enzo read faster than anyone she had ever observed — not skimming, actually reading, retaining everything, the kind of reading that left no margin for error in whoever had prepared the document. That he took exactly one break between nine and one, lasting approximately four minutes, during which he stood at the window with his coffee and looked at Milan with the expression of a man reviewing something that had nothing to do with the city below. That he said her name — Miss Evans — slightly differently depending on what he needed. Clipped when it was urgent. Even when it was routine. And once, on Tuesday, when she had anticipated a scheduling conflict before he had identified it himself, with a quality she had decided not to name.
She was learning him.
She was also, she had noted with the honest self-awareness that had always been both her gift and her inconvenience, trying very hard not to think about four minutes standing half a desk apart and green eyes at close range.
Trying. Mostly succeeding.
Mostly.
They arrived together.
That was the first sign that Wednesday was going to be something other than ordinary — not Matteo alone with his easy grin and his ulterior motives, not Aiden alone with his warm eyes and his chaos energy, but both of them, together, stepping off the private elevator at eleven fifteen with the coordinated ease of two people who had planned this and saw absolutely no reason to pretend otherwise.
Matteo had the paper bag. Rosalina could smell it from her desk — pastries, the good kind, from the bakery three streets over.
Aiden had nothing except his presence, which he clearly considered sufficient.
"Miss Evans." Matteo set the paper bag on her desk with the confidence of a man making an offering. "Cornetti. Pasticceria Cova. The ones with the cream."
"You came together," she said.
"We carpooled," Aiden said pleasantly, already looking around the floor with the bright interest of someone conducting an unofficial inspection. "Very efficient. Very environmentally conscious of us."
"Neither of you is on the schedule."
"We never are." Aiden turned his warm green eyes to her with a smile that had clearly opened many doors it had no business opening. "It keeps things interesting."
Matteo was already moving toward the double doors.
"He has a call at eleven thirty," Rosalina said.
"We'll be fast." Matteo knocked once — a formality he observed approximately half the time — and pushed through.
Aiden lingered at her desk for exactly one moment, looked at her with an expression that was warm on the surface and considerably more assessing underneath, and said: "Has he smiled yet?"
Rosalina blinked. "I'm sorry?"
"Enzo." Aiden tilted his head. "Has he smiled. At you. Even a small one." He held up two fingers very close together. "Even that much."
She thought about good said to an open intercom line. About go home delivered at six forty-five like it cost him something to say it.
"He's my employer," she said.
Aiden's expression shifted into something that looked almost like satisfaction.
"Right," he said, as though she had answered a question she hadn't realised he was asking. He straightened. "Save me a cornetto."
He pushed through the double doors after his cousin.
She could see them through the glass.
That was the thing about the sixtieth floor — her office faced his, all glass and clean lines, and when the double doors were open even slightly she had a direct sightline into the room that had nothing to do with intention and everything to do with architecture.
The doors were not fully closed.
She was not watching.
She was working, efficiently and professionally, on the revised Ferrara agenda — and if her eyes moved occasionally to the glass wall and the room beyond it, that was simply the natural consequence of sitting in a glass office that faced another glass office and had nothing whatsoever to do with the conversation happening inside it.
Enzo was behind his desk.
He had not stood when they came in — had simply looked up from whatever he was reading with the expression of a man confronted with something he had not scheduled and was deciding how much of his attention it deserved. Matteo had taken the chair across from him with the easy entitlement of someone who had been sitting in that chair since before the desk existed. Aiden had gone to the window — of course he had, it was the most dramatic position in the room — and was looking out at Milan with his hands in his pockets and the posture of a man who had something to say and was deciding when to say it.
She couldn't hear the words. The walls were too thick for that.
But she had learned, in eight days on this floor, to read the quality of things. The way Enzo's jaw set slightly when Matteo said something that required patience. The way Aiden turned from the window with his easy smile that wasn't entirely easy. The way Enzo's hand moved — once, deliberate — to close the document he had been reading before they came in.
Private. Whatever this was, it was private.
She looked back at her screen.
Then Enzo looked up.
Not at Matteo. Not at Aiden.
At the glass wall.
At her.
She met his gaze for exactly one second and then returned her attention to the Ferrara agenda with the composure of someone who had absolutely not been watching anything at all.
Through the glass, she saw him say something to his cousins.
Matteo glanced at the glass wall. His mouth curved.
She kept her eyes on her screen.
They came out twenty minutes later.
Matteo first, with the satisfied expression of a younger sibling who had successfully delivered information he had been holding for exactly the right moment. Aiden behind him, unhurried, hands back in his pockets, that warm gaze doing its careful work.
Matteo stopped at her desk.
"He's going to pretend that conversation didn't happen," he said pleasantly. "Just so you know."
"I don't know what conversation you're referring to," she said.
Matteo pointed at her. "I genuinely like you." He took a cornetto from the bag and slid the rest across to her. "Those are yours. Giorgio gets one. The rest are for you."
"What was the conversation about?" she asked, before she could stop herself.
Matteo looked at her.
Then at Aiden.
Aiden looked at the ceiling with the expression of a man who found the architecture suddenly fascinating.
"Let's just say," Matteo said carefully, "that there are people who have recently become aware that Enzo has a new PA. People whose awareness of things that happen on this floor is not something any of us particularly welcome." He paused. "Enzo is handling it. He handles everything." A beat. "But it was important that he knew we were aware. That we're paying attention."
The corridor was very quiet.
Rosalina looked at Matteo steadily.
"What kind of people?" she said.
Matteo held her gaze for a moment with those lighter green eyes that were warm but not, right now, entirely easy.
"The kind," he said simply, "that Enzo has spent a long time making sure stay on the other side of certain walls."
He said goodbye with the ease of someone who had said enough and knew it.
Aiden paused at her desk last. He looked at her with those warm green eyes and for once the charm was set slightly aside — what was underneath it was genuine and direct.
"You're not frightened," he said. It wasn't a question.
"Should I be?" she said.
He considered this honestly. "Most people would be."
"I'm not most people."
Something moved across his face — quick, warm, decided.
"No," he said. "You really aren't." He straightened. "Adrian wants to meet you properly. For what it's worth — that means something. He doesn't want to meet most people either."
He left on the private elevator.
Giorgio watched him go.
"Every two weeks?" Rosalina asked.
"Alternating with Matteo," Giorgio said. "Except today they came together which means—" he paused, considering — "something has changed in the schedule."
Rosalina looked at the double doors.
"Yes," she said quietly. "I think it has."
She was still at her desk at six forty-five when the intercom clicked.
"Miss Evans."
"Yes?"
A pause. The length of something being decided.
"Go home," he said. "You've been here since six fifty this morning."
She looked at the intercom.
He was not a man who noticed hours. Or rather — he noticed everything, she had learned that by now, the March projections and the clause on page seven and the precise difference between every silence this floor produced — but he did not comment on them. He did not send people home.
"I have the Ferrara prep—"
"It can wait until morning."
"It'll take twenty minutes."
A silence.
"Then take twenty minutes," he said, "and go home."
She finished in seventeen.
On her way to the elevator she passed his office — door closed now, properly — and she stopped for just a moment without meaning to.
Behind that door was a man who ran legitimate companies and other ones that didn't appear in annual reports. Who had cousins who came together when something shifted, who spoke in careful language about walls and people on the other side of them. Who sent women home without a second glance and orphaned children to school without needing thanks.
Who had just told her to go home and meant something more than the words contained.
She pressed the elevator button.
The doors opened.
She stepped in and let the sixtieth floor go.
In the elevator going down she stood with her back against the wall and admitted, quietly and only to herself, that she was not afraid of what she had understood today.
She probably should be.
She wasn't.
And that — she suspected — was the most important thing she had learned about herself in eight days on the sixtieth floor.
*******