Chapter One Hundred and seventeen: seventeen Days

Nobody woke her.

Eve realized it slowly, the way you notice silence only once you've been sitting inside it a while — no comms crackling through the house, no Ryan's keyboard audible three rooms away, no footsteps on the stairs at some ungodly hour. Just morning light, plain and unhurried, and Alex's arm heavy across her waist, and the particular luxury of having absolutely nowhere to be.

She lay there a long moment before she let herself move, cataloguing it. Nineteen days left on the clock, and for the first time since the thirty had started counting down, today wasn't going to ask anything of her.

Alex stirred when she finally shifted, one eye opening, taking in her face before anything else in the room. "You're smiling."

"Am I not allowed to smile before coffee?"

"You're allowed. It's just rare enough that I notice." He pulled her back against him instead of letting her up, chin finding her shoulder. "Ryan cleared the morning. Told everyone the war room's closed until noon and threatened Vincenzo's coffee privileges if he disagreed."

"Ryan threatened Vincenzo."

"Ryan is apparently braver with four hours of sleep in him than I gave him credit for."

She laughed, low and easy, and let herself stay exactly where she was another ten minutes before either of them bothered getting up.

---

They ended up in the kitchen the way they always did lately, Alex at the stove with more confidence than skill, Eve perched on the counter with coffee, half-heartedly correcting his technique.

"You're going to burn the garlic again."

"I have not once burned the garlic."

"You've burned the garlic three times this month. I've started timing it." She took a sip, watching him bristle with the particular offense of a man who ran an empire and could not, apparently, be told anything about eggs. "Giuseppe would have opinions."

"Giuseppe isn't here. Giuseppe is in Como being smug about roses." He pulled the pan off the heat a half-second before disaster, visibly pleased with himself. "See. Fine."

"Barely."

"Fine counts." He plated the eggs, imperfect and slightly too brown at the edges, and set the plate in front of her like an offering he expected to be praised for. She ate it anyway, because it was his, and because some days that mattered more than the eggs being good.

"I want to do something today that has nothing to do with anything," she said, once she'd finished. "No maps. No debriefs. Just — something."

He considered her over his own coffee. "The village market's on again this afternoon."

"You already used that one."

"I have more than one card." He set his mug down. "There's a cove past the boathouse nobody uses. Rocky, cold water, terrible for swimming. Perfect for sitting somewhere no one can find us for a few hours."

"That's not nothing. That's a plan."

"It's a plan with no laptops in it. I consider that nothing, by our current standard."

She couldn't argue with that.

-

The cove was exactly as unremarkable as promised — a narrow shelf of grey rock, the lake sharp and cold where it met stone, a view of nothing but water and the far hills going soft blue in the afternoon haze. They brought bread and cheese and a bottle of wine neither of them had bothered to check the label on, and sat with their feet nearly in the water, saying very little for a long time.

"Seventeen days," she said eventually, mostly to herself.

"I thought we weren't counting today."

"I'm allowed one mention." She leaned back on her hands, face tipped toward the sun. "It's just strange. Having an actual number attached to when this ends. Most of my life didn't come with a countdown. It just kept going until it didn't."

Alex was quiet a moment, turning his wine glass slowly by the stem. "I used to measure time by quarterly earnings. Before any of this. Ninety-day cycles, forever, no actual ending in sight — just the next ninety days, and the ninety after that." He looked at her. "Nineteen days feels almost generous, by comparison. At least I know what's on the other side of it."

"What is on the other side of it? Really. Not the strategic version."

He thought about that honestly, which she'd learned to recognize as the pause before he said something true rather than something efficient. "You. Mostly. Whatever version of this life is left standing once nobody's hunting either of us anymore." He reached over, tucked a strand of hair back from her face. "I don't actually know what that looks like day to day. I've never had it. But I know I want to find out with you specifically, which is more than I've been sure of about anything in a long time."

Eve looked at him a moment, something warm and unguarded moving through her chest — the specific ache of being wanted for something as small and enormous as an ordinary future. "That's a good answer."

"I have my moments."

She leaned over and kissed him, unhurried, tasting wine and sun-warm skin, and felt him smile against her mouth before he properly kissed her back.

They didn't make it back to the house until the light had gone gold and low, and by then neither of them was in any particular hurry.

In their room, with the last of the afternoon still catching the curtains, she pulled him down onto the bed with none of the day's urgency and all of its warmth — no war to outrun, no clock demanding either of them move faster than they wanted to. She undressed him slow, deliberate, mapping the day's sun-warmed skin with her mouth in no particular rush to reach anywhere specific, and he let her, hands loose in her hair, breath catching only when she wanted it to.

"We have all afternoon," she said, when he reached for her like he meant to hurry things.

"I'm aware." But he slowed anyway, hands smoothing down her sides instead of pulling, learning her over again like the day had earned him the right to take his time. He laid her back against the pillows and followed with his mouth, patient and thorough, until she was arching up into him and any thought of taking things slow had dissolved into something more urgent than either of them had planned on.

When he finally settled over her, gold eyes catching the last of the window light, he moved unhurried and certain, and she met him the same way — no performance left between them, just the honest give and take of two people who'd earned this particular kind of quiet. She came apart slow and complete, his name breaking soft rather than sharp, and felt him follow a moment later with his face pressed to her throat, murmuring something in Italian she didn't catch and didn't need to be translated to understand.

Afterward, tangled in the late light, she traced idle circles against his chest.

"a day is over now," she said, smiling against his skin.

"You said one mention."

"I lied. It was a good day. I wanted to mark it."

He laughed, low and real, and pulled her closer, and the lake outside kept its quiet water, and for one full afternoon, the war stayed exactly where they'd left it — somewhere outside the door, patient, and entirely willing to wait.