The Spanish morning came in through the curtains warm and golden and entirely different from Milan.
Rosalina stood at the mirror doing her hair with one hand and holding her phone with the other, the video call propped against the water glass on the dressing table so she could see both Betty and Brian at the same time.
Brian was eating cereal.
This was already a victory.
"You're eating," she said.
"I told you I'm a big boy," he said, around a spoonful.
"Are you taking your drugs?"
"Rosie—"
"Brian."
"Yes." He put the spoon down with the patience of someone who had answered this question many times. "I took them this morning. All of them. Including the white one."
"Good." She clipped the last section of her hair into place. "How are you feeling?"
"Fine." He looked at the screen properly. "How's Spain?"
"Beautiful," she said honestly. "The city lights last night were — I've never seen anything like it."
"Did you explore?" Betty appeared beside Brian with her own cup of tea and the expression of someone who had been waiting for this specific update. "Tell me you explored."
"We had dinner."
"At the hotel?"
"At the hotel restaurant yes."
Betty opened her mouth.
"It was a very nice restaurant Betty," Rosalina said quickly. "Very beautiful. Top floor. The whole city was visible from the windows."
"With him?"
"He's my employer. We had a work dinner."
Betty looked at Brian.
Brian looked at Betty.
"Work dinner," Brian said.
"In Spain," Betty added.
"On a work trip," Rosalina said firmly. "I have to finish getting ready. Brian eat your cereal. Betty—"
"I know, I know." Betty waved her hand. "Take care of Brian. We're fine. Go and have your very professional work morning." She smiled with everything she wasn't saying out loud. "Text me later."
"Text me if anything—"
"Rosalina." Betty's voice was warm and steady and entirely certain. "We are fine. Both of us. Go."
Rosalina looked at them both for a moment — Brian with his cereal and his easy face, Betty with her tea and her knowing smile — and felt the familiar thing move through her chest.
"Okay," she said quietly. "I'll call tonight."
She ended the call.
Picked up her bag.
And went to be professional in Spain.
The knock came at exactly the time she expected it.
She opened the door.
Enzo stood in the corridor in a dark suit — back to the office version of himself, precise and unhurried, those green eyes already organised around whatever the day required.
"It's time," he said simply.
"Ready," she said.
They walked to the elevator together in the comfortable silence that two months of working alongside each other had produced — not awkward, just quiet, the kind that didn't need filling.
Downstairs the cars were already waiting.
Three of them — black, engines running, positioned with the deliberate precision of people who had planned this down to the last detail. Security in the front car. Security in the back. Rosalina and Enzo in the middle one with Jeremy behind the wheel looking exactly as he always looked — calm, ready, entirely prepared for whatever the day required.
She got in.
The convoy moved.
The conference centre was everything a Salvatore conference centre was likely to be — large, well appointed, full of serious people in expensive suits who moved through the space with the particular confidence of people who were used to rooms like this and saw no reason to be impressed by them.
Rosalina sat beside Enzo at the long table and opened her notebook.
He sat at the head of it — or rather, he sat at one end of it and the room arranged itself accordingly, the way rooms always arranged themselves around him, without anyone deciding this was what was going to happen.
The conference began.
She wrote.
Not everything — she had learned his system by now, the things that mattered and the things that were filler, the names that needed noting and the figures that would come up again. She wrote quickly and neatly and kept one part of her attention on the room and another on her page and another on the document in front of her that she cross-referenced twice during the first hour without being asked.
The conference was smooth and well run and she was doing exactly what she was there to do.
And then she felt it.
A pair of eyes.
She had learned — in two months on the sixtieth floor, in a world where reading a room was simply a survival skill — to feel when someone was looking at her with a specific kind of attention. The kind that had nothing to do with the documents on the table or the conference proceeding around them.
She looked up.
Across the table, perhaps four seats down, a man was watching her.
He was perhaps fifty, broad shouldered, with the easy confidence of someone who had been powerful long enough to stop worrying about whether it showed. He was supposed to be listening to the speaker at the front of the room.
He was not listening to the speaker.
His eyes were on her with an attention that was not professional and made no effort to pretend otherwise.
She looked back down at her notebook.
She kept writing.
The rest of the conference passed without incident and she was grateful for it.
The room began to empty gradually — men gathering papers, breaking into smaller conversations, the comfortable wind-down of a long morning of serious work. Enzo moved away from his seat toward a group near the windows, deep in the kind of quiet conversation that was clearly a continuation of something that had started during the session.
Rosalina stayed at the table and gathered her things.
She stacked the documents in the order she would need them for the evening briefing. Checked her notes against the agenda. Flagged two items that would require follow-up before the end of the day. She was efficient about it — focused, systematic, the way she was about everything.
She was reaching for the last file when a hand covered hers on the table.
She went very still.
"Miss Rosalina."
She looked up.
The man from across the table — Mr Alan — was standing beside her with a smile that was warm and entirely too comfortable.
"You look very pretty," he said pleasantly. "A very pretty name to match." His hand was still on hers. "Will you be attending the dinner this evening? I would very much enjoy the chance to—"
"Take your hands off of her."
The voice was low.
It was always low. It never needed to be anything else.
But there was something in it right now — a specific quality underneath the evenness — that Rosalina had not heard before. Not quite cold. Not quite sharp. Something more controlled than either of those things and considerably more dangerous.
Mr Alan looked up.
Enzo stood two feet away.
He was not moving. He was simply there — with the particular stillness of a man who had made a decision and was waiting for the other person to catch up with it.
"You know better than to test my patience Mr Alan," Enzo said. Quietly. Evenly. "Take your hands off of her."
Mr Alan lifted his hand from Rosalina's slowly.
He smiled — the smile of a man choosing to find this entertaining rather than threatening, which was its own kind of choice.
"Salvatore." He tilted his head. "You're very possessive of this little PA of yours." An appreciative sound. "Nice one."
He turned and walked away with the unhurried ease of a man who had decided to leave on his own terms.
Enzo watched him go.
Then he looked back at Mr Alan's retreating figure and said — clearly, calmly, entirely for Mr Alan to hear as he walked away:
"The dinner this evening is a business dinner. The invitation was not yours to extend." A pause. "And let it be the last time you lay your hands on her."
Mr Alan did not turn around.
Enzo looked at Rosalina.
"Let's leave Miss Evans," he said.
His voice was exactly what it always was.
She gathered her files and followed him out.
She was in her room at five o'clock when the knock came.
She opened the door expecting — she wasn't sure what she was expecting. A hotel staff member with something routine.
It was a hotel staff member.
A young woman in the hotel uniform, holding a large white box with both hands and a small envelope on top of it.
"Mr Salvatore asked me to give this to you," she said with a warm professional smile.
She held out the box.
Rosalina took it.
The staff member left.
Rosalina stood in the middle of her hotel room holding the box for exactly five seconds.
Then she sat on the edge of the bed and opened it.
The tissue paper parted.
And she stopped breathing for a moment.
The gown was deep blue — the kind of blue that was almost black in some lights and entirely itself in others. Floor length, sleek, with the kind of simple elegance that came from someone who understood exactly what they were doing. Beneath it, wrapped carefully, were heels that were exactly the right height and exactly the right colour. And beside them a small purse in the same deep blue that completed everything so perfectly it could not have been an accident.
She set the lid aside and found the envelope.
She opened it.
The note inside was in his handwriting — precise, even, no wasted space:
Wear it for tonight's dinner. Don't think too much about it. Consider it compensation for your hard work.
She read it twice.
Then she sat on the edge of the hotel bed in Barcelona with the most beautiful things she had ever owned in a box on her lap and felt something warm and complicated move through her chest that she did not immediately have a name for.
She was going to wear the dress.
She was absolutely not going to think too much about it.
By seven fifty-five she was ready.
The gown fit like it had been made for her — which, she was beginning to suspect, it might have been, because there was no other explanation for how perfectly it fell. The heels were exactly right. The purse sat in her hand like it belonged there. Her blonde hair fell loose past her shoulders the way Betty always said it should.
She looked at herself in the mirror for a long moment.
Then she looked away before she started thinking too much about any of it.
The knock came at eight exactly.
She opened the door.
Enzo Salvatore in a fitted brown tuxedo was — she took exactly one second to process this — a significant problem.
The tuxedo fit him the way everything fit him — like it had been constructed specifically around the fact of him and saw no reason to apologise for it. Italian shiny brown shoes. Dark hair in its usual sleek precision. Those green eyes that she had filed under irrelevant on day one and had been failing to keep there ever since.
He looked at her.
It was the same look he had given the Ferrara documents and the Conti projections and every other thing he was making a considered assessment of — thorough, unhurried, giving nothing away.
Then — and this was the part she was going to have to file somewhere very carefully — he smiled.
Small. Real. The kind that reached those impossible green eyes and made them do something she had no existing category for.
"You look good Miss Evans," he said.
She held herself together with the composure of a woman who had been practising this for two months.
"You too sir," she said. "And thank you — for the dress. And everything. I love them."
He looked at her for one more moment.
"Mm," he said.
They walked to the elevator.
Inside it she looked at the doors and said — because she was constitutionally incapable of leaving things alone — "How did you know my size?"
He looked at the doors too.
A small pause.
"I think I'm just good at guessing Miss Evans," he said.
The elevator opened.
She decided not to examine that answer.
The dinner was everything the previous evening's dinner should have been and wasn't — because Mr Alan, to his considerable credit, had understood Enzo Salvatore's morning message completely and spent the entire evening being professionally pleasant from a safe and appropriate distance.
Rosalina noticed this with quiet satisfaction.
She ate her dinner and spoke when spoken to and managed two separate conversations with Barcelona team members with the easy competence that two months on the sixtieth floor had given her. The food was extraordinary. The company was, on the whole, decent. The view from the restaurant was, once again, everything Barcelona had to offer at night spread out below them like a gift.
It was a good evening.
A genuinely good one.
The elevator back to their floor opened with a soft sound and they stepped out into the quiet corridor — the particular quiet of a good hotel late at night, warm and still and entirely comfortable.
They walked toward their rooms.
At the point where the corridor split — her door on one side, his on the other — Enzo stopped.
She stopped too.
He looked at her with the even, unhurried attention he gave most things.
"Since it's your first time in Spain," he said, "I'll take you to see some of the city before we leave tomorrow. Be ready at ten."
She looked at him.
At the complete naturalness with which he said it — not an offer, not a question, just a statement of what was going to happen next, the way he stated most things.
"Alright sir," she said. "Ten."
He nodded once and turned toward his door.
"Thank you sir," she said. Then, because the corridor was quiet and the evening had been good and she was perhaps slightly less composed than usual: "Thank you for — all of it. Today."
He had his key card in his hand.
He didn't turn around.
But she saw — in the set of his shoulders, in the slight pause before he pressed the card to the door — something.
Small. Real.
"Goodnight Miss Evans," he said.
His door opened and closed.
She sat on the edge of her hotel bed in the deep blue gown and looked at the Barcelona skyline through the window for a long quiet moment.
She thought about the conference and the documents and the efficient productive morning that had been exactly what she was there for.
She thought about Mr Alan's hand on hers and the voice that had cut across the room two seconds later without hesitation.
She thought about a white box on her bed and a note in precise even handwriting that said don't think too much about it.
She thought about a small real smile in a hotel corridor and I think I'm just good at guessing and sightseeing at ten tomorrow morning.
He's not that bad, she thought.
She sat with that for a moment.
Then she picked up her phone and opened her messages to Betty.
You were right about the sweaters, she typed.
Also — he bought me a dress.
Don't say anything.
She looked at the message for three seconds.
Then she sent it.
She was still smiling when Betty's response came through — three words, entirely predictable, completely Betty:
I TOLD YOU.
Rosalina laughed — quietly, in the warm Barcelona night — and went to get ready for bed.
Tomorrow at ten, she had somewhere to be.
*******