Chapter 5 - The Heat in the Dark
At two in the morning, sleep was an impossibility.
Frankie had spent an hour in the guest suite on the second floor—a sprawling room with silk wallpaper, a king-sized four-poster bed, and a private bath the size of her apartment living room. She had scrubbed the city dirt and flour from her face, changed into an oversized black flannel shirt and a pair of worn leggings, and stared at the ceiling for forty-five minutes.
Every time she closed her eyes, she heard the metallic crack of Tino’s gun cocking. She saw the laser sights cutting through the night outside her shop. And worse—she felt the steady, burning weight of Massimo Riva’s hand on her wrist, checking her pulse with the terrifying intimacy of a predator who had decided not to bite.
She slipped out of bed, her bare feet making no sound on the heavy wool runners in the hallway.
She found her way back down to the kitchen by instinct. The mansion was dead silent, save for the faint hum of security monitors hidden in the wainscoting.
When she pushed open the frosted glass doors, she froze.
The kitchen was not dark.
A low, crackling orange glow emanated from the brick hearth. Thick birch logs were burning steadily behind the iron grate, throwing flickering shadows across the marble islands and heating the vast room with a dry, resinous warmth.
Sitting on a low leather stool directly in front of the hearth was Massimo.
He had stripped off his dress shirt and tie. He wore only a soft, charcoal-gray henley with the sleeves pushed up to his elbows, and his dark trousers. In his right hand, he held a glass containing two fingers of dark, amber bourbon. He wasn't drinking; he was merely watching the flames consume the wood.
In the firelight, the scars were unmistakable.
Across his left forearm, a long, jagged pale line cut through dark hair—the remnants of a knife wound that had required dozens of stitches. Below the collar of his shirt, near his right collarbone, the puckered, circular tissue of an old bullet entrance showed clearly against his tan skin. He was a man whose body was a ledger of every violence he had survived.
Frankie hesitated on the threshold, her hand on the door frame.
“You don't have to stand in the cold,” Massimo said without turning around.
Frankie stepped into the room, the heat of the fire washing over her bare feet. “Do you have eyes in the back of your head?”
“The hinges on those doors have a vibration,” he said, turning his head slightly to look at her. His gaze dropped from her face, taking in her bare feet, her leggings, and the soft, rumpled cotton of her oversized shirt that barely concealed the heavy curve of her hips. His eyes darkened, but his face remained steady. “You should be resting.”
“My sourdough starter needed feeding,” Frankie said, using the excuse like a shield. She walked over to the island where her duffel bag lay, retrieved the plastic container, and set it on the marble. “And I can't sleep in rooms where the ceiling is twenty feet high. It feels like being at the bottom of a well.”
Massimo took a slow sip of his bourbon. “My father died in the room next to yours.”
Frankie paused, the lid of the plastic container half-opened in her hands. “I’m sorry.”
“Don't be. He was not a gentle man,” Massimo said, staring back into the fire. “He built Riva Shipping on extortion, intimidation, and blood. When he was fifty-two, his heart gave out while he was screaming at an alderman over dock permits. I was twenty-three. I had spent four years at Northwestern studying logistics, pretending I was going to be an ordinary corporate officer. The day he died, six different families sent men to our warehouses to see if the Riva boy knew how to hold a weapon.”
Frankie slowly walked toward the hearth, drawn by the quiet, brutal weight of his voice. She pulled up a wooden prep stool and sat down four feet from him, pulling her knees up to her chest.
“What did you do?” she asked softly.
“I learned,” he said simply. “I killed two men before the week was out. Not because I enjoyed it, but because if I hesitated, they would have butchered Gemma in her bed and thrown my cousins into the lake. In my family, power isn't ambition, Frankie. It’s the only wall between life and annihilation.”
The silence that followed was heavy, filled only by the pop of birch sap in the fire.
Frankie looked at his hands. They were large, scarred, capable of horrific brutality. Yet she remembered the ridiculous gentleness with which he had held the pastry bag earlier that afternoon, his brow furrowed in desperate concentration, trying not to burst the delicate parchment while piping frangipane.
“My mother died of cancer when I was nineteen,” Frankie said, her voice barely louder than the flames. “She left me the bakery, forty-two thousand dollars in debt to a local credit union, and an industrial mixer that leaked oil into the gearbox every Tuesday.”
Massimo looked at her, his eyes fixed on her profile.
“I worked eighteen hours a day for six years,” she continued, a faint, wry smile touching her lips. “I kneaded bread until my wrists had tendonitis. I argued with flour suppliers, I chased away junkies from the alley, and I cried in the walk-in cooler every Friday night when the payroll didn't balance. But every morning at five, when the ovens heated up and the smell of bread filled the street, I knew that whatever happened that day, I was feeding people. I was creating something real. Something that brought joy instead of blood.”
She turned her head to meet his gaze.
“You build walls to keep people out, Massimo. I build tables to bring people in. That’s why we don't belong in the same room.”
Massimo didn't look away. He set his bourbon glass down on the hearth stone with a soft, decisive click. He leaned forward, resting his forearms on his knees, closing the distance between them until she could feel the heat radiating from his skin.
“You think I don't see the difference?” he whispered, his voice rough with an emotion he had kept buried for decades. “For fifteen years, every person who entered a room with me wanted something. Money, territory, blood, mercy. My own captains look at me and calculate the odds of my survival.”
He reached out. His fingers, calloused and warm, brushed against a loose curl near her temple, tucking it behind her ear. His knuckles grazed her cheek, and Frankie’s breath hitched in her throat. Her heart hammered against her ribs, but she didn't pull away.
“Then today,” Massimo continued, his thumb tracing the curve of her jaw with agonizing slowness, “a woman with flour on her nose yelled at me for thirty minutes because I folded a puff pastry in four turns instead of three. She looked at me and saw Max. A man who was clumsy. A man who was allowed to fail without someone ending up in a concrete pylon.”
His face was inches from hers now. The scent of him—woodsmoke, bourbon, and clean skin—filled her senses.
“Do you have any idea,” Massimo breathed, his dark eyes dropping to her mouth, “how long it has been since someone treated me like a human being?”
Frankie’s lips parted. “Massimo...”
Before she could speak, before he could bridge the final inch between them, the red emergency intercom on the kitchen wall let out a shrill, piercing tone.
Tino’s voice barked through the speaker, breathless and frantic:
May you like
“Boss! It’s the Bridgeport shop! Silvio’s father didn't wait for morning—they just threw incendiaries through the front display windows! Bello’s Bakery is on fire!”
***
