GIVE ME YOUR EYES
word count: idk warnings: possible character death implied kind + talks abt the mafia pairings: roman davenport x luca russo summary: they have a nice talk then roman disappears then bad things happen pov: luca russo previous chapters: chapters IMPORTANT: both mmcs belong to ana huang.
tagging the only person who reads these: @sloanetavishsno1 © halfwrittentruths
ps. this is NAWT proof read and yes the end was basically copied from tgb but like wtv
I loved dating Roman Davenport.
Yep. You heard me. Dating. For almost 3 months now.
It still felt surreal to say out loud. Surreal, but absolutely fucking amazing too, because somehow this impossibly beautiful, permanently grumpy man had looked at me and decided, against all reason and common sense, that I was somebody he wanted to build a little life with. He was my boyfriend. Somebody I got to hug and laugh with and tell pointless stories to at two in the morning, somebody I got to share pieces of myself with until, little by little, our lives started weaving together.
He was mine.
Unfortunately, we lived apart.
Roman's...job (I guess you could call it?) took him everywhere, and even when it didn't, he insisted on spending most of his time in that godforsaken building because he needed to keep an eye on his people and make sure everything was running smoothly. And, of course, there was Morana, whom he absolutely refused to admit he loved despite the fact that every single person around him could see straight through the act.
The longest we'd been apart was a week. A full week.
And I learned very quickly that I was absolutely terrible at long distance.
On day one, I managed to act like a normal, well-adjusted human being and called him once in the morning and once before bed. By day two, I'd started sending him completely meaningless texts and a concerning paragraph explaining why I thought at least half the animals in Central Park were government spies. Days three and four somehow evolved into me sending him pictures of things that reminded me of him for absolutely no reason whatsoever. A crow sitting on a fence. A particularly dramatic cloud. A motorcycle that was vaguely the same shade of black as his. By days five and six, I had completely lost the plot. I was sending him voice notes, pictures of Yves, updates on what I'd eaten for lunch, and detailed complaints about strangers who had mildly inconvenienced me.
Then, finally, day seven rolled around and I got him back.
Turns out I was completely, hopelessly, embarrassingly attached to the cute little fucker.
But being with Roman had done something else, too. It had helped me understand him. Not just the version everybody else saw, but the person underneath all of that.
His mental conditions especially started making more sense the longer we were together, because I realised that his mind wasn't cruel to other people nearly as often as it was cruel to him. The first time I saw him having a really bad episode, I didn't know what to do. I'd only known him for so long before then, and seeing somebody who always looked so composed suddenly overwhelmed by his own thoughts was terrifying, not because he scared me, but because I could see how much he was hurting.
Since then, I'd seen it happen a couple more times.
The mania ones hit hardest. The ones where his mind raced. They were always the hardest to watch because he looked like he was trying to outrun something only he could see, getting frustrated with himself because he couldn't seem to quiet the noise in his own head. The quieter days hurt too, though, because that was when he withdrew into himself and convinced himself he was a burden, or that he was somehow too broken for anybody to stay.
At first, I thought I needed to fix it. Then I realised that wasn't what he needed. Most of the time, Roman didn't need perfect words or clever advice. He just needed somebody who stayed. So I'd sit beside him, even if he insisted he was fine. I'd make sure he ate something, or got some sleep, or simply had somebody there while the storm in his head settled down. I'd let him know, over and over again if I had to, that he wasn't facing it by himself anymore.
I think the days when his mind wasn’t trying to convince him that the world was ending were my favourite.
Not because I loved him any less on the bad days, because I didn’t, but because the good days let me see the version of Roman that I was pretty sure almost nobody else got to know. The quiet, awkward one who never really knew what to do with himself when he was happy, the one who followed me around my apartment pretending he wasn’t, the one who would stand in the kitchen with his arms folded while I cooked and somehow act like he wasn’t waiting for the exact moment I looked away so he could steal a piece of half-cooked pasta straight out of the pot.
And he always did it.
Every. Single. Time.
I’d hear the lid move behind me, spin around, and there he’d be, holding one pathetic little piece of spaghetti between his fingers like he’d been caught stealing state secrets instead of uncooked dinner.
The idiot.
Then there was the day he decided he wanted to make dinner himself.
I came into the kitchen because it had gone suspiciously quiet, which, in my experience, usually meant either Roman had fallen asleep somewhere or something had gone wrong.
He was standing over the pot with the box of spaghetti beside him.
The spaghetti...which was in pieces.
Little broken pieces.
I actually just stood there.
He looked at me. He looked down. Then back up.
I’m not joking when I say I think my soul left my body for a second.
I had to sit down.
He should’ve been grateful nobody from my family had seen that, because I’m almost certain one of my relatives would’ve materialised out of thin air just to slap him.
But those quiet evenings were my favourite.
Or those nights at his place where we'd sit on the roof with our legs dangling over New York, the two of us sewn together by Roman's ancient pair of wired headphones while we listened to something one of us wanted the other to hear. Usually, it was me introducing him to stuff, because Roman had absolutely zero ball knowledge when it came to good music, which I found deeply concerning.
It was kind of sad.
So far, I'd only managed to get him hooked on sombr, because he vibed hard with we never dated, and I'd slipped a few Conan Gray songs into the playlist too. He also liked escapism by RAYE and 070 Shake, which basically confirmed my suspicion that underneath the scary face and all the tattoos, my boyfriend loved sad people music.
I'd work on fixing his music taste later.
Also, unfortunately, I still had nightmares. I still had therapy.
I still had moments where something stupid, a smell, a sound, a scream that wasn’t roman’s, would drag me somewhere I didn’t want to go, back into memories I tried to forget. But the difference now was that I didn’t have to claw my own way back out every time. Roman always noticed. Sometimes before I did.
He’d pull me onto the couch and put on one of those movies I loved and he thought were absolutely ridiculous, or make me hot chocolate that somehow always tasted slightly different because he never measured anything, or just sit there beside me until my breathing settled down.
And sometimes I was the clingy one.
Actually, most of the time I was the clingy one.
I’d practically glue myself to him for entire evenings, following him from room to room until he finally gave up and accepted that whatever he was doing was now a 2 person activity. Sometimes he’d be lying in bed reading, completely absorbed in one of his books, and I’d just crawl over and flop down on top of him with my head against his chest, peeking up at him from underneath the pages. He never complained. He’d shift the book a little so I could still see his face if I wanted to, then one hand would find my hair almost automatically, his fingers running through it slowly while he kept reading like this was the most normal thing in the world.
With me.
With Yves.
With Josie, who had somehow managed to reduce one of the most dangerous men in New York into a human climbing frame.
With Morana.
Actually, speaking of her, we'd gotten to know each other a lot better over the last few months, mostly because she kept showing up whenever I was at the building and immediately deciding that whatever I was doing was now her business too.
She was...a lot.
She had this energy about her that made it feel like she'd walk into a room and immediately become the centre of it without even trying. She was loud and hilarious and had absolutely no filter, and I don't think I'd ever met somebody who could switch so effortlessly between threatening to stab somebody and then going out shopping because, apparently, her wardrobe was "a humanitarian crisis."
One afternoon we'd ended up getting coffee together while Roman was working, and somewhere between her insulting my shoes and stealing half my pastry, she'd admitted that she didn't actually want to stay in the Brotherhood forever.
She wanted out eventually.
She wanted more.
She wanted parties and runways and fashion shows and stupidly expensive clothes, she wanted fame and drinks and red carpets and everything. Roman had apparently offered to just give her the money to leave and start over about a thousand times, but she'd refused every single one.
She wanted to earn it.
She wanted to build something that was hers.
Honestly, I couldn't even argue with that.
There was something kind of incredible about watching a 22 year old assassin talk about how she’d gotten scouted by modelling agencies so many times with the exact same passion most people talked about falling in love.
Right now, it was raining like hell outside, and somewhere in the last twenty minutes the rain had started turning into snow, the little white flakes spinning through the air before disappearing against the wet black streets below. It was the middle of November, and New York had reached that weird point where the whole city looked cold enough to break.
We were at my place because Roman hadn't been over in a while. And Roman wasn't with me.
He was outside on the balcony, the hood of his hoodie pulled over his head and his headphones tucked over his ears, leaning against the railing while he looked out over the city. I couldn't hear what he was listening to from inside, but considering I'd spent the last three months aggressively educating him on what constituted good music, I was choosing to believe it was one of my playlists.
Contrary to what I'd yapped about earlier, I did actually leave Roman alone when he wanted to be alone.
It took me a while to understand (and an even longer while to stop taking it personally) that as much as Roman needed somebody beside him, he also needed to be alone every now and then, to just sit with his thoughts and let his mind settle. At first I'd always wonder if I'd done something wrong, if I'd annoyed him or said something stupid, but eventually I realised it had nothing to do with me.
It was just introvert bullshit. Very dramatic, very mysterious, introvert bullshit. But I respected it anyway.
I poured some hot chocolate into two mugs and wandered over to the door, giving the glass two little knocks. Roman looked over his shoulder. I held one of the mugs up. His eyes dropped to it for a second, then back to me, and after a moment he pulled one side of his headphones off.
"...For me?"
I blinked.
"No, baby, I made two mugs because I thought it'd be fun to drink both."
He stared at me.
"...That's fair."
I laughed so hard I nearly spilled the hot chocolate.
He took the mug from my hands and had a sip, and after a second he let out this tiny little hum of approval that most people probably wouldn't have even noticed.
I did.
I'd gotten pretty good at translating Roman by now.
That little noise was basically the Roman Davenport equivalent of awarding me three Michelin stars and declaring me the greatest chef to ever walk the Earth.
"It's really good," he said after a moment.
"Thanks."
He took another sip, both hands wrapped around the mug because it was freezing outside, and I watched him over the rim of mine while the snow slowly settled in his hair where his hood had slipped back. He didn't seem to notice. Or maybe he did and just didn't care. Roman had a habit of forgetting about little things like the weather once he got lost in his own head.
For a little while, we just stood there, our shoulders brushing every now and then whenever one of us shifted.
Then he held the mug out towards me. I frowned. "What?"
"Try it."
"Roman, I made it."
"Try it anyway."
I took a sip.
"...It tastes exactly the same."
"No."
"No?"
"It cooled down."
I looked at him for a second before I started laughing.
"You dragged me into the freezing cold to tell me my hot chocolate got cold?"
"I didn't drag you anywhere."
"Right, sorry. You stood out here looking mysterious until I voluntarily followed you."
He didn't answer. He just looked back out over the city again, but I caught the tiniest twitch at the corner of his mouth. I bumped his shoulder with mine.
"You know, normal people say things."
"I am saying things."
"No, you're saying three words every five minutes and expecting me to piece together the rest through divine intervention."
"You manage."
"I do manage," I admitted, taking my mug back from him. "It's kind of concerning how good I've gotten at understanding you."
“Really??”
"Now I just assume you thought the cocoa would taste better if I had some too."
He looked down at his own mug.
"...It did."
The words came out so quietly that I almost missed them. I didn't say anything after that. I just smiled into my hot chocolate while the snow drifted down around us, and after another minute or so Roman reached up, pulled one side of his headphones off, and held it out towards me without even looking.
I slipped it over my ear.
The Exit by conan gray was playing, one he'd claimed was "alright, I guess" before accidentally listening to it enough times that he knew all the words.
"I thought you said you didn't like this one."
"I don't."
"Roman."
"It's...fine."
I looked at him. He kept his eyes fixed on the skyline.
"You made a playlist, didn't you?"
Silence.
“Baby.”
A longer silence.
Then, without even a hint of embarrassment, he muttered,
"You put too many songs in the one you made me."
I think my heart actually melted a little. "So your solution was to make your own?"
"The good ones are easier to find now."
I stared at him. "You are officially the cutest person I've ever met."
That finally got him to look at me.
"Don't call me cute."
"Why not?"
He smirked. “I have a reputation."
I snorted. "Oh yeah? The scary assassin reputation?"
"Yes."
"The same guy that's currently standing in the New York chill, sharing headphones and hot chocolate with his boyfriend because he made a playlist?"
His ears turned the faintest shade of pink.
"Shut up."
I bumped his shoulder again.
"Make me."
He looked at me for a long second, completely unimpressed, before quietly taking my mug out of my hands and holding it with his own so I wouldn't spill it while I laughed.
Honestly, I don't think either of us noticed he'd done it. It just sort of happened and somehow that made me happier than anything else.
“So, uh, I’m going out tonight,” he said.
I immediately perked up, my eyebrows shooting up so quickly they practically disappeared into my hairline.
“Where?” He looked away for a second, taking a sip of his hot chocolate before answering.
“Uh... Brotherhood stuff. I might stay at mine tonight then.”
I blinked.
“Can I come?”
“No.”
The answer was immediate, not even a second of thought, not even the courtesy of pretending to consider it.
“Why?”
Roman sighed softly and stared into his mug for a moment, and when he spoke again, his voice had gone completely flat and detached, like he was discussing grocery shopping instead of something that was clearly bothering him.
“Look, I’ve managed to keep you away from danger so far, don’t make me risk it. Sure, people know you’re my boyfriend but that puts a huge target on your back. Just stay here. I’ll send you a text if I'm not that tired afterwards.”
Have I mentioned he could be really annoying sometimes?
“Roman,” I said, exasperated, straightening up properly. “I’m your boyfriend. We've been dating for, like, almost four months now. You can't keep me out of your business forever.”
His expression changed almost immediately. It was just the slightest tightening of his jaw, the faintest crease appearing between his eyebrows as he looked away from me and out towards the snow gathering on the balcony.
“Luca...” He exhaled slowly, sounding exhausted already. “Look, I know it’s unfair, I know. But I really don't want you getting hurt again. I can't survive a second time. It fucking broke you. Do you think I'd really risk that happening again?”
My mouth slowly fell into a thin line.
Not because I was angry. Honestly, I didn't even know what I was.
Because one part of my brain was immediately screaming that this was unfair. We were dating, for fuck's sake. I knew he was dangerous. I knew about the Brotherhood. I knew his life was complicated and messy and occasionally involved disappearing for hours without explanation. He couldn't keep me tucked away from an entire half of his existence forever.
But the other part of me understood exactly where he was coming from. Because he wasn't saying this to punish me. He wasn't saying it because he didn't trust me. He was scared. And that made it infinitely harder to argue.
Because the thing about Roman was that he remembered everything. Every nightmare I'd had. Every zone out episode. Every time I'd frozen while we were fucking or gone quiet because something had reminded me of that basement. He remembered every bad day with horrifying accuracy and carried them around with him like little ghosts.
And apparently, despite all of my progress, despite the fact I was doing better now, he was still terrified of seeing me become that version of myself again.
I sighed.
“Can you at least tell me what kind of gathering this is?” I asked eventually, deciding I was willing to take literally any scrap of information he was prepared to throw my way.
Roman looked at me for a long moment, his expression unreadable.
“It's a... ceremony.”
I stared at him. A ceremony. Very fucking vague.
He kept looking at me, though, and after a few seconds something in his expression softened. It was subtle, so subtle that somebody who didn't know him probably wouldn't have noticed, but I did. I'd gotten good at noticing.
He took my mug from my hands, then handed it back again a second later after adjusting his grip on it for absolutely no reason whatsoever.
“Listen,” he said quietly. “I have to go back home and get ready and then head out, okay? But when I'm done, I'll call... maybe we can watch a movie or something. Yeah?”
I looked at him. He looked...tired. Distracted. Like his mind had already left the balcony and was halfway to wherever he needed to be.
“Okay,” I said.
Some of the tension left his shoulders.
“Okay,” he repeated softly.
He took a small step backwards towards the door.
“I gotta go, though.” Then he paused for a fraction of a second and added, almost absent-mindedly, “Love you.”
And then he left.
The door clicked shut behind him, I didn't move. I just stood there, holding my mug and staring at the door.
Because that...That was another thing currently eating away at my sanity.
We hadn't said I love you.
Well, we had, technically. We'd said love you before hanging up the phone sometimes or when one of us was half-asleep. We'd used the word love casually in sentences and jokes and teasing comments. It existed between us comfortably enough.
But neither of us had ever looked at the other and actually said, I love you.
Not seriously, not in a way that meant I am completely and entirely in love with you and I need you to know that.
But I shouldn't have been complaining. God knew I'd had opportunities. Plenty of them.
There had been nights where he'd been reading in bed while I used his chest as a pillow, one hand absent-mindedly stroking through my hair for an hour straight. There had been mornings where he'd made me breakfast because I'd had a nightmare. There had been moments on rooftops and balconies and in kitchens and in the quiet spaces between conversations where I had looked at him and felt my chest get so painfully full of love that I thought I might explode.
And every single time, I'd chickened out.
Because I just...I wasn't sure. I knew he cared about me.
I knew that.
I knew he'd protect me with everything he had and that he'd hold me after diassaocisating and let me steal his too-small-for-me hoodies and somehow put up with me talking for 40 minutes straight about something stupid.
But loving me?
Being in love with me?
I didn't know.
And now he'd casually thrown a love you over his shoulder while leaving for some mysterious Brotherhood ceremony and disappeared before I could even process it.
I looked down at my mug. Then back at the door. Then back at my mug again.
I was going to lose my fucking mind.
Also, just for confirmation, I did love him. So fucking much. Though, to be fair, I'd only realised it last week.
We'd been lying on the floor of his living room after having the fuck fest of our lives, too comfortable to bother moving, the city humming quietly outside while we existed in our own little pocket of silence. Roman had been tracing absent-minded patterns against the carpet with his fingertips before he turned his head to look at me, those sage-green eyes softer than I'd ever seen them, and after hesitating for just a second too long, he'd asked, almost so quietly I could've convinced myself I'd imagined it,
“Are you, uhm... around? For Christmas?”
It wasn't a big question. To anyone else, it probably would've sounded ordinary. But Roman didn't ask ordinary questions.
Every word he spoke was chosen carefully, held in his mouth for a while before he decided it was safe enough to let it exist, and somehow that tiny, hesitant question held more hope than a thousand love letters ever could. He wasn't asking about Christmas.
He was asking if, when he pictured the winter, I could be in it too.
And when I looked into those impossibly gentle sage green eyes, I realised something that made my chest ache in the nicest way imaginable.
Somewhere along the line, without either of us noticing, he'd become my favourite place.
Not his apartment.
Not his arms.
Just...him.
The sound of his voice after a long day. The little crease between his eyebrows whenever he was concentrating. The way his hand always found mine without thinking about it. The quiet moments where we didn't need to speak because simply existing beside each other somehow felt like enough.
I loved the extraordinary parts of him, of course.
But I loved the ordinary ones even more.
I loved the version of Roman Davenport that the rest of the world never got to meet.
And as I laid there looking at him, I remembered thinking that if someone had offered me every beautiful thing the world had to give in exchange for never hearing him ask another shy little question like that again...
I would've turned them down without a second thought.
Because I didn't want a grand life anymore.
I just wanted one with him in it.
Anyway.
Enough yearning and standing in my kitchen like the world's most pathetic Hallmark protagonist.
I had a mystery to solve.
Roman Davenport thought he was being slick. He thought he could hit me with the incredibly informative explanation of "Brotherhood stuff" followed by an even more incredibly informative "it's a ceremony," and disappear into the night and expect me to just...accept that.
Absolutely not.
Curiosity had been one of my defining personality traits since birth. My mother probably popped me out and I immediately started asking where we were going.
Which meant a plan was already beginning to bloom inside my head, growing bigger and more questionable by the second, and like every spectacularly terrible idea I'd ever had, it depended almost entirely on one very specific person.
One very important young woman with an untamable halo of brown curls, enough confidence to tell the devil he was being dramatic, and an attitude sharp enough to go head to head with Roman's without either of them backing down.
Morana Caldwell.
If anybody was going to accidentally - or intentionally, depending on how much she liked the chaos that day - tell me what the hell was going on tonight, it was her.
So, I dialled her number.
By the third ring, she picked up, and before I even had the chance to say hello, her voice came through the speaker with enough confidence to make it sound like she'd been expecting my call all along.
“Hello, dearest and most probable future brother-in-law.”
I snorted, shaking my head as I wandered aimlessly into the living room.
“Woah, calm down. For someone who claims to despise Roman so much, you seem awfully determined to remind me that I'm dating your best friend.”
“He's not my best friend, and we're not friends,” she corrected immediately, sounding genuinely offended by the accusation.
Yeah. Right.
They were about as convincing as Roman pretending he didn't enjoy cuddling. Those two bickered with enough commitment to fool anyone who didn't know them, but I'd seen the way Morana quietly checked whether he'd eaten after disappearing for three days, and the way Roman always somehow knew when she needed picking up after a job without her ever asking.
They weren't friends. They were siblings who'd forgotten they weren't actually related.
“Whatever helps you sleep at night,” I laughed. “Anyway... I need to chitchat.”
There was a pause. A you definitely want something pause.
“Oh?” she hummed, amusement dripping from every syllable. “And does this delightful little chitchat happen to involve my emotionally constipated roommate, or have you suddenly decided you enjoy my sparkling personality?”
“Well...”
“It involves Roman.”
“It might involve Roman.”
“So it definitely involves Roman.”
I sighed dramatically.
“I hate how quickly you figured that out.”
“Luca,” she said with a laugh, “you've called me exactly 2 times since we met, including now, and the first time was to see if my number worked. You're about as subtle as a marching band.”
“…That's a little hurtful.”
“And yet true. Now, shoot.”
“So…” I started, trying very hard to sound casual and absolutely not like I was fishing for information, “I’ve been made aware that there’s some sort of special ceremony happening today?”
“Luca.”
“What?”
“You are so bad at pretending you’re not trying to get information.”
I frowned, even though she couldn't see me.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You called me out of nowhere, started with a suspiciously sweet greeting, and now you’re bringing up a mysterious ceremony that Roman definitely didn’t explain properly.”
I opened my mouth. Then closed it. Because, unfortunately, she was right.
“Okay, first of all, I object to the word suspiciously. I’m always sweet.”
“Sure.”
“I am.”
“Luca.”
“Fine, maybe not always.”
She laughed quietly on the other end of the phone, and I could practically picture her rolling her eyes.
“So Roman told you about the ceremony?”
“Technically.”
“What does technically mean?”
“It means he told me there was Brotherhood stuff happening and that he might stay at his place afterwards, and when I asked what kind of gathering it was, he looked at me like I’d asked him to reveal state secrets and said it was a ceremony.”
Morana was quiet for a second.
Then I heard her sigh.
“That man.”
“Exactly.”
“He really does think giving people the tiniest amount of information possible counts as communicating.”
“THANK YOU.”
“I didn’t say you were right.”
“You didn’t have to.”
“I really did.”
“Anyway,” I said, ignoring that, “what is it?”
“Luca…”
“Please.”
“You’re doing the voice.”
“What voice?”
“The one where you sound like a very determined golden retriever who has discovered a locked door.”
I gasped.
“Thats incredibly specific.”
“Because it’s accurate.”
“Wow. Rude.”
“Accurate and rude are not mutually exclusive.”
I tried not to laugh and I failed.
“Okay, so are you going to tell me or are you going to let me sit here and dramatically suffer?”
“You’re already being dramatic.”
“Yes, but now I’d be dramatically informed.”
Morana sighed again.
And I knew I had her.
“So you want to know what the ceremony is.”
It wasn’t a question.
“Yeah.”
“Luca…”
Immediately, my joking faded, because there was something different in her voice now. It was weirdly careful.
“It’s not just a Brotherhood thing,” she finally said. “Not really.”
I stayed silent, letting her continue.
“The Brotherhood is connected to a lot of people. A lot of powerful people. The kind of people who don’t need to announce they have power because everyone already knows.”
A small chill ran through me.
“And the ceremony is…”
“It’s a meeting.”
I frowned.
“A meeting?”
“A meeting between families.”
The way she said the word families made it sound nothing like the way normal people used it.
Not warmth or Sunday dinners or childhood memories.
These were names.
Legacies.
Organizations built on reputation and fear.
“What kind of families?”
Morana was quiet for a second before answering.
“The Allisters. The Caines. A group coming in from Brazil. A representative from the Bianchi family is supposed to be there too.”
I stopped moving, because even I knew enough to understand that those names weren’t being thrown around casually.
These weren’t random people meeting for drinks. These were people who carried histories behind them. People whose names meant something.
“So basically…” I started slowly, “this is a crime meeting.”
Morana didn’t correct me.
“It’s more complicated than that.”
“That’s never a good sentence.”
“No, it usually isn’t.”
She sighed.
“Think about it like this. These families have been around for years. Decades. They have businesses, connections, influence. Some of them have legitimate power, some of them have power that exists in the shadows, and most of them have both. The ceremony is where certain things are discussed, where alliances are maintained, where everyone reminds each other who they are dealing with.”
The room suddenly felt quieter. There was something unsettling about realising that Roman’s world wasn’t just dangerous because of the things he personally did. It was dangerous because he existed inside something much bigger. Something old that had survived because people protected it. Because people feared it.
“And Roman has to be there?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Morana didn’t hesitate. “Because Roman is one of the people they pay attention to.”
That answer landed harder than I expected. I knew Roman was respected and I knew people feared him, but there was a difference between knowing someone was dangerous and realising there were rooms full of dangerous people where his presence actually mattered.
“He hates that, doesn’t he?”
Morana laughed quietly.
“Oh, he hates almost everything.”
“Fair.”
“But yes. He hates being seen as important because he knows what comes with that.”
“And what comes with it?”
“Expectations.”
Her voice softened.
“People think Roman is cold because he doesn’t care. They’re wrong. He cares too much, and that’s why he’s careful.”
I looked down at my phone.
Because suddenly I understood why he hadn’t told me, not fully, but enough. Roman wasn’t keeping me away because he thought I was incapable. He was just keeping me away because in his mind, loving me meant making sure the darkest parts of his world never touched me.
Which was very Roman.
UGH.
“So,” I said after a moment, trying to bring back some of the lighter mood, “you’re telling me my boyfriend is secretly attending terrifying mafia meetings while I’m sitting at home drinking cold hot chocolate?”
Morana hummed.
“When you say it like that, it sounds dramatic.”
“It is dramatic.”
“It’s also accurate.”
“Great. Love that for me.”
“You chose him.”
I sighed.
“I know.”
And the worst part was, I really did.
“So... what exactly am I supposed to do then?” I asked, trying, and failing, to keep the hopeful edge out of my voice. “Can you, like...sneak me in, or-”
“NO.”
The answer came so fast and so loudly that I instinctively pulled the phone a few inches away from my ear.
“Jeez,” I muttered with a sheepish laugh that disappeared almost as quickly as it'd come. “Sorry.”
My shoulders slumped, and I found myself absentmindedly staring out into the distance as the disappointment settled in my chest a little heavier than I'd expected. It wasn't even that I desperately wanted to attend some terrifying gathering of organised criminals (I absolutely did not) but I hated the feeling of standing outside a door that seemed determined to stay locked.
Morana sighed, and when she spoke again, the firmness in her voice hadn't disappeared, but it had softened around the edges.
“Luca, listen to me, okay? This isn't me being dramatic, and it isn't Roman being overprotective just for the sake of it. This is a really big deal, and it's dangerous enough that the only people Roman is bringing with him are me and the two heads of the defence section. Meetings like this can turn ugly without warning, and if they do, nobody gets time to react before everything goes to shit. I know you're frustrated, but if you were there and something happened, you could get hurt, and neither of us is willing to take that risk.”
I stayed quiet.
“I promise I'm not trying to keep you out just because it's easier,” she continued. “It's genuinely because we'd rather have you annoyed at us than caught in the middle of something you should never have had to see in the first place. If I get the chance, I'll take a few pictures before everything starts and show you later, but that's honestly the best I can do. So... just trust me. Trust Roman on this one.”
I let out a long sigh through my nose.
“…Fine.”
“Thank you.”
There was a small pause before her voice brightened ever so slightly, like she was deliberately trying to steer us away from a conversation that had become heavier than either of us wanted.
“In the meantime,” she said, “maybe spend your evening figuring out what you're getting Roman for Christmas.”
My eyebrows knitted together. “…How do you know we're spending Christmas together?”
“Don't sound so offended,” she laughed. “I only know because he told me he isn't staying with my mum and I this year. He normally does. But I don’t care. I got tickets for me and mom to go to London for 5 days anyways.”
She said it lightly, almost carelessly, but there was something underneath it that caught my attention, a tiny thread of disappointment she'd buried so quickly that I probably wasn't supposed to hear it at all.
“Oh,” I said quietly. “...Okay.”
“So,” she continued before the silence could linger, “find him something good while you wait. This whole shitshow should be over by around ten-thirty, maybe eleven if everyone behaves themselves, and then either he or I will call you from the hospital and you can come pick us up.”
I blinked.
“…Why would you be calling me from a hospital?”
“Because somebody always ends up there.”
Then the line went dead.
After waiting, and waiting, and waiting and waiting….my phone finally rang.
ROMAN.
“Baby?” “Luca.”
He sounded...broken. Anguished. Tired. Exhausted. Scared.
What happened?
I could hear faint screams in the background, glass shattering, gunshots-
“Things went south,” Roman's rasp cut through the chaos. “I'm okay, but Morana's stuck and-”
“You're going back for her.”
A beat of silence.
“…I have to, moya dushka.”
I froze.
“You... you gave me a nickname...”
A quiet, breathless chuckle reached me through the speaker, somehow surviving all the noise around him.
“Better late than never.”
“Listen here, you little shit,” I said, my voice already cracking despite how hard I was trying to keep it together. “You are going to be okay, okay? And when you get back, I'm making you all the hot cocoa and pasta in the world, and you're going to complain about the marshmallows like you always do, and you and Morana are both going to get out of there okay and it’ll all be fine and we’ll all be-”
“I love you, Luca.”
What.
The.
Fuck.
“I think...” he whispered, the words almost disappearing beneath another burst of shouting somewhere behind him, “I think I have for a long time. Longer than I knew how to admit to myself. I just...I needed you to hear it.”
My eyes burned.
“Roman...”
“You walked into my life and somehow made it feel... lighter,” he continued, his voice trembling in a way I'd never heard before. “You made me laugh when I didn't think I could. You made ordinary days feel worth surviving just so I could see the next one with you. Every time you smile at me, every time you ramble about something I know absolutely nothing about, every time you fall asleep on top of me because I'm your favourite mattress...” He let out another tiny laugh. “...I remember what it feels like to live instead of exist.”
I covered my mouth with my hand, tears spilling over before I could stop them.
“Don't cry,” he murmured.
“You're literally in the middle of a shooting!”
“I know.”
“So don't tell me not to cry!”
Another soft laugh.
“I just...wanted you to know that I'm yours, dushka, just as much as you're mine. Thank you...for making me happier than I ever thought I was allowed to be. I need you to know what. To remember that if I-”
“Don’t. You. Dare! You tell me all of this when you get home,” I said immediately, wiping furiously at my face. “Not over the phone. You hear me? You get Morana, you both get out of there, and then you come home and tell me again!”
A pause. I could hear him running.
“Alright,” he said, his voice rough with exhaustion, “I'll tell you again later. As many times as you want.”
“You better.”
“I will.”
Another crash erupted somewhere behind him, followed by overlapping voices shouting orders that dissolved into static before I could make out a single word.
“Roman...?”
“I have to go.”
“Be careful.”
“I always-”
BANG!!
The gunshot cracked through the phone so violently that I instinctively yanked it away from my ear. Glass exploded somewhere nearby, people were screaming over one another, more shots rang out in quick succession, and for a split second all I could hear was the deafening chaos swallowing everything else.
“Roman!”
My own voice sounded tiny against the noise.
“Roman, answer me!”
There was a burst of static, footsteps pounding across what sounded like broken glass, someone shouting his name in the distance, that I recognised as Morana.
The last thing I heard was “Luca…my Luca…”
And then the call ended.
