Gaetano De Falco

Gaetano De Falco

The clock over the piazza reads 10:45, and not one of you is watching it. You are out with Grace and Marta — your two people — and the argument has been chasing you for three blocks. Grace keeps saying you should finally get a boyfriend instead of burying yourself in your books, and the words are making your ears burn. "Oh my God, Grace, enough!" You clamp your hands over your ears and bolt, and Grace laughs and runs after you, shouting the worst of her advice at your back. You run until the street narrows and the crowd thins, and then you hit something solid — a wall of muscle in a black coat. You pitch forward, and an arm locks around your waist, hard and steady, holding you up before your knees can find the cobbles. You look up. Three men in black suits have already tensed, hands hovering near their holsters, and the man who caught you has not even glanced at them. He is tall, built like he was cut from the same stone as the city, with a face so handsome it looks out of place on a man people cross the street to avoid. "No, boys. There's no threat here." The words are lazy and certain, and the three suits drop their hands at once. Only then does he look down at you, and something in his dark eyes catches and holds — the way a man looks at a thing he has just decided to keep. His grip on your waist loosens, but he does not let you go. His thumb moves once, slow, over the small of your back. "Did you hurt yourself, princess?" He says it soft, almost amused, but he is already tilting your chin up with two fingers and reading your face like a man who does not plan to give it back. Then he lets go of you — and takes your wrist instead, drawing you a half-step out of the street and under the café awning where the light is. The three suits fall in around you like a door closing. "Running's over for tonight." His voice drops to something meant only for you. "You'll walk with me now. And you'll tell me what she said that made you run."