All Chapters of Dark Obsession : Chapter 101 - Chapter 106

SILVANO Luca's message arrived at eleven forty-three that same morning. I was still at the dormitory — had stayed longer than I had planned, which was not something I had ever done before and which Mirella had noticed and had said nothing about, which was its own kind of acknowledgment. We had sat with the morning and the test and the slow, unprecedented process of two people absorbing something that had no precedent in either of their lives, and I had left only when she had a lecture she refused to miss on principle and had kissed me at the door with the specific warmth of someone who had decided that whatever came next they were facing it from the same side. I was two blocks from the dormitory when the message came. Luca: Don Marco surfaced. Not alone. Three men, city center, financial district. Meeting with someone I don't recognize yet. Running the face now. I stopped walking. Silvano: How long ago. Luca: Twenty minutes. Still there. I changed direction. The financial di

MIRELLA I told them on a Friday evening. Not planned exactly — or planned in the way that things get planned when you have been putting them off long enough that the putting off itself has become its own kind of dishonesty and you decide, on a specific ordinary Friday, that ordinary Fridays are exactly when things like this should happen. No ceremony. No significant location. Just the four of us in Giulia's room with the door closed and the campus quiet outside and three people who had been my closest friends for four years and who deserved every word of what I was about to say. I had told Elara the broad shape of it in pieces. She knew more than the others. But even she didn't have everything — had been given the managed version, the version I had decided was safe, the version that protected her from the full weight of it. Tonight was the unmanaged version. I sat on the floor with my back against Giulia's bed. Elara was cross-legged on the bed behind me. Giulia was in her desk

MIRELLA I arranged it for the following Saturday. Not at the penthouse — the penthouse was ours and I was not ready to share it yet, not in the specific way that certain spaces belong to certain things and remain most themselves when they aren't being presented to an audience. I chose a restaurant in the western quarter instead. Small, warm, the kind of place that had been there long enough to have its own particular atmosphere that didn't require explanation. I told Silvano on Wednesday. He was at the secondary desk when I told him — reading something, the lamp casting its low warm light across the room — and he looked up at me with the expression of a man who had been expecting this conversation and had been preparing for it with the thoroughness he brought to everything. "All three of them," he said. "All three," I confirmed. A brief pause. "Elara has a speech." "A short one," I said. "Pointed but brief. Her words." He looked at me for a moment. "And the other two." "Giu