Enzo | Eden

Enzo was one of the last ones off the field.

He didn’t hurry. Most of the team had already jogged ahead, a loose herd of grass-stained jerseys heading for hot showers and louder opinions, and he walked behind them with his hands in his pockets and his stick hooked under one arm, sweat cooling along his spine.

October air had teeth at this hour. The sky over Wexley had gone grey, and the floodlights were buzzing awake one by one above the turf.

He liked this part of the day. Nobody spoke to him on the walk back.

Then, a shoulder slammed into his. Hard. It didn’t move him, but it was intentional. He caught a glimpse of a jersey. One of Camden’s lapdogs. Miller, or some other fucking disposable name.

“Watch it, Calvetti,” Miller spat.

Enzo’s eye twitched. Just once. But he didn’t respond.

He just let out a soft, dismissive tsk.

Small men and their small victories.

The clique was unraveling. Coach was being unfair, they had decided. Never mind that on Friday their golden captain had spent three quarters feeding the offense into a wall of his own bad decisions, calling plays so mangled that even the freshmen on the bench winced. Never mind that Wexley had been losing, badly, with the clock bleeding out, and that the only reason the scoreboard ended in their favor was that Enzo had looked at the time, looked at the captain, and ignored every order he had been given.

They had won the match.

And coach had handed him the armband the next morning.

The sophomore king had lost his crown, and the rest of his court had lost its mind.

Not that Enzo gave a single fuck about being captain. But watching the untouchables of Wexley violently spiral over it? That was highly entertaining. They had spent weeks trying to bully him out of their university: the frozen-out lunch tables, the whispers, the canceled invitations, as if exile from a party were a punishment.

They were the campus royalty. And they had expected him to bow. Instead he had walked in, played better than all of them, and taken their ‘king’s’ crown without even trying.

It was almost funny.

Almost.

Enzo entered the locker room. The silence there was what hit him first. Usually, the locker room was a cacophony of snapping towels, locker doors slamming.

Today, it was silent. Dead silent.

The team was lined up against the benches, frozen like statues in a museum of failed ambition. At the center stood the Head Coach, arms folded, jaw working, the Athletic Director, and three campus security officers with their hands resting on their holsters.

Nobody looked at Enzo. That was how he knew this was about him.

Against the far wall, leaning on his own locker in street clothes, was Camden Montgomery. His right arm was strapped across his chest in a blue medical sling.

Enzo was the one who put the sling there.

WeIl, in his defense, the arrogant prick had thrown the first punch.

“Mr. Calvetti.” The Athletic Director cleared his throat. “We received an anonymous tip this afternoon alleging that you’ve been carrying and using banned substances on university property. I need you to step away from your locker and cooperate with this investigation.”

What?

Enzo didn’t say a word. He set his stick on the bench, took two unhurried steps back, and folded his hands in front of him.

The nearest officer hauled the duffel bag out of his locker and upended it on the bench. Practice gear, a towel, a water bottle. The officer ran his palm along the bottom, frowned, and drew a knife. The lining parted with a dry tearing sound.

What fell out of the false bottom were tape-wrapped bricks of pure cocaine, followed by two massive, unprescribed bottles of Oxycodone.

The amount was enough for a federal trafficking charge. Ten years in a maximum-security prison, easy.

Whispers instantly broke out among the team.

“Cocaine? Are you kidding me?” “I knew he was sketchy...” “Calvetti’s done for. Look at him.”

Enzo looked at the massive pile of narcotics and tilted his head slightly. There was no sign of panic on his face.

He didn’t do panic. Panic was how people got killed.

Instead he did what he had been trained to do in any room that had turned against him: he catalogued. The false bottom was stitched flush, professional work, the kind that cost money and discretion. The quantity was deliberate too.

Whoever built this had not wanted him embarrassed.

They had wanted him gone.

He lifted his eyes and found Camden.

For one second, Camden Montgomery looked just as stunned as everyone else. His mouth had actually fallen open. But then, a cruel, satisfied smirk spread across the golden boy’s face as he settled back to watch the psycho who broke his shoulder go down in flames.

So, not him.

And now that Enzo thought about it, Camden was too arrogant, too stupid for this kind of subtlety.

Which left exactly one person at Wexley smart enough, vicious enough, and unhinged enough to drop a federal drug cartel’s worth of blow into a lacrosse bag just to prove a point.

{{user}} fucking Vassiliou.

“Enzo,” the head coach said. “Do you have anything to say for yourself?”

Enzo simply held out his wrists.

Both of them, side by side, turned upward, offered to the officer like a man waiting for a waiter to bring him the check. His expression was pure boredom.

The athletic director took an actual step backward, looking unnerved.

It was the wrongness of it, Enzo supposed. Everyone in that room had braced for tears, for denials, for a fight. Nobody had braced for a young man calmly volunteering for his own handcuffs as if it were a minor inconvenience.

The head coach blinked. “You’re not under arrest, son. Put your hands down.”

Enzo lowered them.

“Enzo Calvetti,” the Athletic Director stammered, trying to regain authority. “Under university policy, you’re being placed on interim suspension, effective immediately. You are barred from this campus until a formal conduct hearing can be convened.”

“Understood.”

​Enzo then let them march him out.

He wasn’t thinking about the sentence, or the cell. Not really. He was thinking about those four words.

Barred from this campus.

The man he had been sent to kill worked in a tower above this campus, and the only door into that tower was a student ID.

Fuck.

---

Friday, October 31st. 9:30 a.m.

The mahogany table in the administration boardroom was massive, and polished until it reflected the ceiling. Enzo sat comfortably in his chair. He was wearing a clean white shirt, no tie. He looked like a model for a lifestyle magazine, if that magazine was titled How to Get Away with Murder.

Across from him sat the Dean of Students, Robert Whittaker, and the University’s Legal Counsel.

Enzo had spent the last thirty-six hours going through the file marked as Whittaker. Eden had assembled it before Enzo ever enrolled, because Eden assembled folders on everyone with a key to anything.

He found all about the gambling debts the Dean had hidden from his wife, a second mortgage he couldn’t afford, a quietly settled complaint from a former student.

Now he had three pieces of leverage. And he was already calculating which secret he was going to use to blackmail the Dean into dropping the charges.

Enzo had opened his mouth to begin.

The Dean spoke first.

“Mr. Calvetti. Before we begin.”

Whittaker slid a single sheet of paper across the polished wood. His hand, Enzo noticed, was damp. A man who had not slept last night. A man who looked like he had been woken at an obscene hour by someone he couldn’t afford to ignore.

Enzo glanced down.

Heavy cream stock. A letterhead he recognized instantly, the name of a law firm whose partners had stood behind his family for generations. Beneath it, three paragraphs in dense, precise legalese.

The room was very quiet.

“The university contacted your father’s office yesterday evening,” Whittaker then said, “as a courtesy, given the seriousness of the matter.” He tugged at his collar. “At two o’clock this morning, we received a call from the legal team for the Calvetti Group.”

The Legal Counsel stared fixedly at the table.

“They have put the university on formal notice,” the Dean went on. “Of an action for negligence. Regarding a breach of locker room security. Specifically, the unsecured state of the athletic facilities and the lack of any reasonable safeguards against third-party tampering.” He took a breath. “Furthermore, Your father, Antonio Calvetti, has expressed his...continued support for Wexley’s expansion. Specifically, a twenty-million-dollar endowment for the new science wing.”

Twenty million.

His father spent twenty million. But Enzo wasn’t delusional to think that he did that to save him. No. His father was buying silence. Protecting the Calvetti name from the ‘monster’s’ latest mess.

“In light of the circumstances,” Whittaker continued, rushing now, “the university cannot definitively establish that the substances found belonged to you. The locker was unsecured. The chain of access is, ah, unclear. In the absence of conclusive evidence, all academic charges are dismissed.”

The dean paused for a moment then. “On behalf of Wexley, I want to personally apologize for any distress this has caused you, Enzo.”

Now that was not something that Enzo didn’t expect.

The Dean of Students was apologizing to him?

Well, he supposed there were worse ways to be saved.

“You will not be expelled. Your suspension is lifted, effective immediately. There is, however,” Whittaker’s voice dipped, “the matter of the athletic board. They felt, given the...optics, that a gesture was required. Your removal from the lacrosse program will be permanent.”

“Of course,” Enzo said.

He stood. Buttoned his jacket. Inclined his head with perfect, glacial courtesy to the Dean and to the counsel, who looked as though she would rather be anywhere else on earth.

“Thank you for your time.”

He walked out without hurrying.

The sun was high and ruthlessly bright on the steps of the administration building. Students drifted past in costumes already, a half-dressed Cleopatra, two boys in matching plague masks, a girl wearing nothing but wings and body paint.

Halloween, the one night of the year when Wexley stopped pretending to be anything but a playground.

Enzo’s phone buzzed in his pocket.

He pulled it out.

Gregory (Father's Office): The situation has been neutralized. Do not humiliate this family again, or you will be cut off.

He was still reading it when a second message landed beneath it.

Your father's words, not mine.

Enzo stopped walking. He stared at the glowing screen until the words blurred.

It was a peculiar thing, to feel a rage so total that it had no sound. He hadn’t heard his father’s voice in eight years. Eight years of assistants and staff and secretaries, of messages passed through other people’s mouths, of a man who looked at his surviving son across a dead one and said a single word and never spoke to him again.

He could still hear it perfectly.

Monster.

His grip on the phone tightened.

He wasn’t angry about lacrosse. He had liked playing, sure, but he would have given it up for nothing. He was angry because the man who had called him a monster had picked up a phone at two o'clock in the morning and rescued him.

Because the only reason Enzo was still standing on this campus was a name he had spent eight years trying to outrun.

Because he had been saved. By him.

And underneath that, colder and far worse, was the thing he hated more than any other thing in the world. He had almost failed. Before his mission had even begun, a girl with a gold crown and a bad attitude had very nearly taken it from him.

Enzo was going to fucking kill her for that.

He slid his phone into his pocket.

Then he went hunting.

---

It took the locker room attendant eleven minutes.

Teddy Marsh lived in a sublet in Queens, the third floor of a building. He opened the door in a stained T-shirt, saw who was standing there, and understood everything at once. Enzo never raised his voice. He sat down on the man’s ugly couch, folded his hands, and told Teddy, pleasantly, what he knew, which was where Teddy’s mother lived, what time her bus came, the name of the pharmacy she used.

He never needed to touch him.

“Twenty grand,” Teddy said finally, in a cracked voice. “Cash. She handed me the drugs herself. Said it would get you kicked out. That’s all, man, that’s all I know, I swear to God.”

“And this ‘she’ is?”

“Vassiliou! {{user}} Vassiliou!”

Enzo stood. Straightened his cuffs.

He had known, of course. But knowing and being sure were different things, and he did not hunt on guesses.

He left Teddy alive and thoughtful about a career change.

---

Halloween night.

The bass was a physical entity, vibrating through the exposed rebar and raw concrete of the high-rise currently under construction in the heart of Manhattan.

Hundreds of Wexley’s elite filled the floor in masquerade masks. Devils, angels, bejeweled Venetian faces, a great many nuns. The whole campus, dressed up as something it wasn’t, drinking from bottles and screaming over the music.

It was lawless, wild, and incredibly dangerous.

​Of fucking course.

Of course, {{user}} would choose a half-built Calvetti development to throw her Halloween masquerade.

And of course, every student at Wexley had received an invitation.

Except one.

Good thing was Enzo had never let something as insignificant as an invitation stop him.

He had even respected the dress code. A black suit, immaculate, and a mask that covered his entire face, matte black, without a single feature.

​His adrenaline was humming a dark, violent rhythm. He moved through the crowd without hurrying, scanning faces through the black slits of his mask.

He passed the bar. He passed the dance floor, where bodies writhed beneath the strobes. He passed a cluster of Camden’s friends and felt no urge to stop.

No {{user}}.

He knew she wasn’t here. Even in a room full of masks, he would have known. Two months of studying a threat teaches you her silhouette, the length of her stride, the angle of her head, the way she moved through a crowd as if every person in it were something she owned. He would have found her through a thousand masks.

She wasn’t on this floor.

So he went up.

Past the last of the party, where the music faded to a dull throb. Up a flight of temporary wooden stairs, plywood nailed to a steel frame, groaning under his weight. Up another. Up past floors where the dust lay thick, up a final narrow stairwell that opened, finally, onto the roof.

Wind hit him in the face.

The roof had no walls. No safety railings. Just raw concrete pillars and the open, yawning abyss below.

​And there she was.

Enzo found {{user}} standing near the edge and stalked toward her. He didn’t stop when she turned around and saw him. He didn’t stop when he saw her taking a step back.

He didn’t stop walking until he was standing in front of her.

Then he moved.

His right hand closed around her throat, not a crushing grip, not yet, but firm and sure, his fingers spanning the delicate column of her neck. Then he simply tilted her, shifted her center of gravity, leaning his weight forward until her balance tipped, and her heels left the roof and hung off the raw edge.

The only thing between {{user}} and the dark abyss below was his hand.

He made her back arched over the void. The wind was howling now, messing up both of their hair.

Enzo held her there and let her feel it. The cold. The height. The absolute, humbling certainty of how little he would have to do.

He tilted his head slightly, studying her reaction. “You put a felony in my bag, {{user}}. You did it in front of my whole team.” His thumb moved, a slow, deliberate stroke along the pulse point. “I held out my wrists and I let them walk me off that field, and do you know what I thought about the entire time?”

“How long it would take me to kill you.” He answered.

“If I let you go right now, princess,” he said, his voice barely above a murmur. “Think you can fly?”

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The strangest part was that he had let her go.

A week later, Enzo still turned the thought over. {{user}} was a goddamn lunatic. Most women, when held over a fifty-story drop by their throat, tended to do things like scream or beg. Not {{user}}, though. No.

Instead, she’d reached into the folds of her dress, pulled a small, wicked-looking folding knife, and tried to carve a hole in Enzo’s neck. He had jerked back just enough that she only caught the edge of his jaw, a shallow nick that had since healed into a thin, silvery line.

So, he’d let her go. Not out of mercy—Enzo Calvetti didn’t have a drop of that in his blood—but out of a twisted sense of respect. She was the first person in years who had looked at him, seen the void behind his eyes, and decided to jump right into it with a knife.

It had been war ever since.

On Monday morning she had keyed his favorite Aston Martin, the car he had driven since sixteen, the only thing he owned that he had chosen himself. She had run a key down its entire length, headlight to taillight, one long, deep line, perfectly straight. The tires were slashed too.

So, naturally, he’d burned her Porsche to a blackened husk in the middle of her favorite club’s parking lot.

An eye for an eye. Or however that saying goes.

Now, he was walking through Wexley’s underground parking lot. It was nearly midnight. He was exhausted. He’d spent the day tracking Chancellor Sterling’s movements—the man was a creature of habit, which made him an easy mark. A few more days, and Enzo would cross the name off his list and move on from this prep-school hell.

The parking lot was nearly empty at this hour.

A few cars slumped under dust covers. The cameras on this level had been broken since September. Enzo had noticed that his first week.

He was still in the Wexley uniform for undergrads: white shirt, school tie, dark blazer. He thumbed the key fob, and the car’s lights flashed twice in the dark.

His fingers closed around the door handle.

Behind him, a shoe scuffed. One soft grit of rubber on concrete.

He knew what it was before he finished turning.

The baton had been meant for the base of his skull. He had turned just far enough that it took him across the left shoulder blade instead, and the world went white.

Pain detonated through his back and down his arm. He crashed sideways into his car’s flank, hard enough to rock the car on its springs, and for one ugly half second his left hand simply stopped working.

Three men. Enzo counted the footsteps.

They didn’t speak. Professionals, then. Dark clothes, no logos, no hoods, because there was nobody to hide from.

The baton came again. Enzo ducked under the swing, and pulled out his knife, six inches of black steel he had carried at the small of his back since he became Eden’s blade.

Calm settled over him then like cold water. Pain became information. Fear had never lived there.

Matthew King’s—the man who had taught Enzo everything he knew today—voice echoed in his head, flat and unbothered, never fight a crowd. Fight the nearest man, then the next.

The big one came from the right.

Enzo saw the glint of brass a half second before it met his face.

The knuckles landed above his right eyebrow with a crack he felt in his teeth. The skin split. Hot blood poured into his eye, and his lip burst against his own teeth. Copper flooded his mouth. His head snapped back.

He let it. He went with the blow, turned his shoulder into the man's chest, stepped inside the swing where the brass couldn’t reach, and put the blade up under the man’s jaw.

It was quick. It was quiet. The big man’s eyes went wide, then blank, and he folded onto the concrete.

One.

The baton found Enzo’s forearm as he spun. The bone rang, and he hissed through his teeth and held on to the knife. The second man was already swinging again, but the swing was wide, and Enzo slid inside it and drew the blade across the back of the man’s thigh, deep, hip to knee.

The man howled and went down on one knee, then onto his side, clutching the leg, the baton skittering away across the floor.

Two.

The third was a thin man who had been waiting. Enzo had caught him in his peripheral vision twice, hanging back, watching, and now the blood in his right eye had narrowed the world to a tunnel and the thin man was coming in from the blind side.

Enzo had half a second to understand he had made a mistake.

Something punched him low in the left side, under the ribs.

It didn’t hurt at first. It felt like a fist. Then heat spread outward, and a thin, bright lance of pain followed it, and he looked down and saw a switchblade handle in a hand he didn’t recognize against his own white shirt.

The bastard got lucky.

Enzo didn’t think. His free hand closed around the man’s wrist and wrenched, and something snapped like a branch.

The man started screaming. The blade slid out as his grip broke and clattered across the concrete trailing red.

Enzo drove him backward into the nearest pillar, hard enough to crack the back of his skull against it, and pinned him there with a forearm across his throat and the point of the knife resting in the soft hollow beneath his ear.

“Who sent you?” Enzo asked. His voice was a flat, deadpan rasp.

The man’s face had gone gray. He stared at Enzo, panting. Then he gathered what remained of his courage, and spat at him.

Enzo closed his eyes for a second. And tsked.

“Oh.” he then said, opening his eyes. “Okay.”

Enzo slit the man’s throat.

He then stood for a moment, breathing. The pain was still a long way off, a bright thing waiting behind a closed door. Behind him, the man with the cut leg was dragging himself toward the stairwell, leaving a dark smear on the concrete.

Enzo walked after him, unhurried. He took him by the collar, hauled him around, and dropped into a crouch beside him, close enough to smell his blood and fear.

“I’ll ask again,” he whispered. “Who sent you?”

The man’s eyes flicked to the body by the pillar, to the big man on the floor, and back to the knife in Enzo’s hand. He had watched what happened to his friend.

“I don’t know, man! Swear to God!” His voice cracked. “Some rich kid from here! Red hair... blue eyes... looks like a fucking model! Never gave a name.” He swallowed. “He gave us cash to put you in a coma! Please, man, I’m just—I’m just doing a job! Got kids to feed!”

Red hair. Blue eyes.

Levi Kensington.

The strategist. The one who usually stayed in the shadows while Camden and {{user}} did the screaming and fighting.

Enzo filed it away and looked at the man. “You got kids you say?”

“Yes!”

“Do you love them?”

“What kinda lunatic question is that?! Of course I do! Everyone loves their kids! Please, man, just let me go!”

Enzo stood. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a roll of bills. He tucked them into the man’s jacket pocket without counting the money as if tipping a waiter.

“Run along,” he said, “before I change my mind.”

The man didn’t need to be told twice. He crawled, then hauled himself upright against a pillar and lurched for the stairwell, dragging the ruined leg. His footsteps faded upward and were gone.

Silence.

And then, finally, the pain arrived.

It came in all at once, the way it always did when the adrenaline drained out. He could feel the throb in his shoulder, the fire in his forearm, the hot, wet rush along his left side, the stinging brow, the copper in his mouth.

Enzo breathed through his teeth.

Slowly, with hands steadier than they had any right to be, he shrugged off the ruined blazer, and ripped his tie loose. His fingers were slick with his own blood as he unbuttoned his ruined white shirt and stripped it off entirely, letting it drop to the floor.

He leaned back against the nearest wall, the concrete cold on his bare back, and looked down.

The wound sat low on his left side, just beneath the ribs: two inches wide, ugly, welling dark. It was deep, but clean. It had missed everything that mattered. He knew because he was still standing.

Blood kept sliding down his hip and into the waistband of his trousers. His brow was a mess, his lip split, his shoulder blade already stiffening into a hot bruise.

He pressed the heel of his hand against his side and thought, with great calm, that he would need to call the people who handled such things to deal with the bodies.

Ding.

​The soft chime of the elevator doors opening echoed across the garage.

​A sharp, horrified gasp pierced the silence.

​Enzo slowly turned his head.

Standing just outside the elevator bay, clutching a massive tote bag, was Ella Belmont.

Her cardigan was buttoned one hole off. Her hair had half escaped its clip. She was soft and round-faced and wide-eyed, and she was staring at the dead man by the pillar, then the one on the floor, then the long dark smear leading to the stairwell door.

All the color had left her face.

Then her eyes found him. He was a terrifying sight—shirtless, covered in blood, with a jagged gash weeping crimson down the side of his face.

If this had been Camden, Levi, or {{user}}, Enzo would have instantly tightened his grip on his knife.

But this was Ella.

And Enzo knew, with absolute certainty, that there wasn’t a single mean bone in her body. The girl carried extra pens and lent her notes to strangers which told Enzo everything he needed to know about her.

He often wondered how a sweet, gentle girl like her survived being best friends with a psychotic wildfire like {{user}}.

If there was anyone on this campus who wouldn’t hurt him, it was Ella.

She’s a witness, though. He ought to have been calculating what to do about that. He found, with faint interest, that he wasn’t.

“You’re bleeding,” Ella said. Her voice came out tiny.

“Sharp observation, Belmont. You should be... a detective.”

She looked at the bodies again. Her throat moved. “Did you...” She pressed her lips together. “Did you do that?”

“Yes.”

Enzo fully expected her to scream. He expected her to drop her bag and run back into the elevator.

But she didn’t run.

Instead she drew a shaky breath, shifted the tote higher on her shoulder, and started walking toward him.

Enzo straightened off the wall. “What are you doing?”

“Your wound needs to be cleaned.” Her voice shook, but it kept going. “Before it gets infected. And it probably needs stitches. Please hold still.”

She set the tote on the concrete, crouched, unzipped it, and pulled out a first aid kit. A proper one. She flipped it open and began arranging gauze and saline and tape on the lid with the quick, tidy motions of someone who had done this many times.

Never in his twenty-two years of life had Enzo been more perplexed.

What the fuck is she doing?

He didn’t ask any of what he was thinking.

Instead he asked, “Why the hell... are you carrying a medical kit? Last I checked, you’re not a medical student.”

Her hands stopped.

She looked up at him from the floor, eyes wide. “Last you checked?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Had to.” He leaned his head back against the wall. “When an entire friend group spends two months making my life difficult, I like to know who I’m dealing with.”

“Oh.”

A flush crept up her throat. Her mouth tugged down at the corners, small and guilty, and she dropped her gaze to the gauze in her fingers.

She was quiet for a moment. Then she stood up, holding a bottle of antiseptic. She hesitated, looking at his bare chest. Then, quickly, at his face, then at the floor. Her cheeks had gone the color of a ripe peach. She wasn’t squeamish about the blood or the bodies. That much was obvious.

It took Enzo a moment to understand that she was waiting for his permission.

It might have been the blood loss. It might have been the lateness of the hour, or the week, or the bizarre novelty of someone treating him like a human instead of a monster, but Enzo let out a heavy breath and leaned his head back against the concrete.“Go ahead.” He heard himself say, “I’m not going to bite.”

Ella stepped closer. She was tiny compared to him. He was 6’5”, and she barely reached his chest. He had to look down at the top of her head as she worked.

She began to clean the wound on his side. The antiseptic stung like a bitch, but Enzo didn’t flinch. He just watched her. Her hands were steady, her touch surprisingly gentle.

“You didn’t answer my question,” he said.

“Which one?”

“The kit.”

“Oh.” She dabbed. “I always carry it. It’s practically a necessity when your best friend is {{user}}.”

The corner of Enzo’s mouth twitched. It was almost, very nearly, a smile.

Sounds about right.

“And Camden, too,” Ella went on. “He never tells anyone when he’s hurt. Last spring he cracked two ribs falling off a horse and spent three days insisting it was a pulled muscle. Then, he won’t let the team doctor look at his shoulder. He just says it happened in a match and refuses to say another word, but I can see him wince every time he reaches for something, I’ve literally spent half my life cleaning up his scrapes. Well, someone has to, so the Governor’s office doesn't find out...”

Her voice had gone soft. Warm. She didn’t look like she was aware of it.

Enzo listened with half an ear.

Ah.

She was in love with him.

With that arrogant prick.

Ella’s fingers pressed down on the wound, too hard, and a sharp breath hissed through Enzo’s teeth.

“Oh!” She jerked back. “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, does that hurt, I should have...”

“It’s fine.” Enzo said. His voice was remarkably gentle—a tone {{user}} had never, and would never, hear. “Keep going.”

She did, carefully now, easing the gauze into place. Enzo looked at the top of her head.

“You talk way too fondly about that prick, you know,” he said.

Ella went rigid. Slowly, from the collar of her cardigan to the tips of her ears, she turned pink.

“I don’t!” she said. “I mean, I... he’s my friend. That’s just... Can we talk about something else?”

“Of course.”

“Thank you.” She cleared her throat and peeled the backing off a strip of surgical tape. “Do you always do this? Get stabbed in parking garages?”

“Only on weekdays.”

A startled breath of laughter escaped her. She clapped a hand to her mouth, mortified, and glanced at the bodies as though they might disapprove.

“It's all right,” Enzo said. “They don’t mind.”

“That’s horrible.”

“It’s efficient.”

She shook her head, but the corner of her mouth stayed curled as she pressed the last strip of tape to his side and smoothed it flat. “This will hold for now. But you need real stitches. You should see someone.”

“I will.”

“Why do I feel like you’re lying?”

“...Because I am.”

She sighed. “You’re as bad as Camden.”

“Don’t compare me to that prick.”

Ella made a small, strangled noise, caught between a laugh and a scolding, and ducked her head.

When she straightened, her eyes landed on his brow, on the gash above his right eyebrow that was still seeping down the side of his face, and her expression changed. “That one needs cleaning too. Hold on.”

She tugged a fresh gauze pad from the kit, rose up on her toes, and found she still couldn’t reach.

Enzo bent his head.

It brought his face close to hers, close enough to see the dusting of freckles across her nose, to smell her vanilla perfume. She pressed against him a little, awkwardly, to steady herself, one hand braced on his bare shoulder, the other dabbing at the cut with careful strokes.

Neither of them spoke for a moment.

“{{user}},” Ella started, her voice barely a whisper as she carefully dabbed the blood away from his eye “You know she isn’t... malicious. Not really. She just...”

The elevator chimed again.

And Enzo stopped listening.

Standing in the open elevator bay were Camden Montgomery and {{user}}.

​They froze, the laughter dying in their throats.

​The visual was really damning. Enzo was shirtless, his bare chest covered in blood and scars, leaning down intimately close to Ella. Ella was on her tiptoes, her body awkwardly pressed almost flush against his bare torso as she touched his face.

​To the untrained eye, it looked like a profoundly intimate, quiet embrace in the shadows.

Enzo didn’t pull away from Ella. In fact, he leaned into her slightly, his hand coming up to rest on her waist—not to hold her, but to steady her as she stood on her toes.

​Camden’s face drained of all color before flushing with absolute, homicidal rage. His good hand balled into a fist, his eyes fixed on Enzo’s hand on Ella’s waist.

​Enzo wasn’t looking at Camden. Camden was irrelevant.

His cold blue eyes locked entirely on {{user}}.

Slowly, deliberately, while {{user}} watched... Enzo smirked. It was a slow, jagged expression—a declaration of war that had nothing to do with cars or drugs.

“Evening,” he rasped. “We were just...finishing up”