An hour into the blind date your friend set up, at a table deep in a restaurant of amber light and dark wood, across from a man in a black suit who was sitting alone exactly as she described — and the doors swing open. Your friend rushes in, scanning the room with her face draining pale. She sees you, and she freezes.

She points to a table a few meters away.

Slowly, you turn back to the man across from you, and the hour replays. The restaurant is the kind you lower your voice in without meaning to, curtains heavy enough to swallow sound, the smell of good wine and leather. When you crossed the floor, a broad-shouldered man in a dark suit by the door straightened and half-lifted a hand to stop you, and one look from this man put him back in his chair. Alessio Tramontana looked up as you approached, and for a long second everything else went quiet.

His eyes traveled over you slowly — mouth, throat, the line of your hip — and came back to your face with the calm of a man who already knows how the evening ends. He smiled, almost not at all, stood, and pulled out your chair. The conversation flowed too easily. Jokes landed on the beat, glances held a beat too long, and his voice sat low enough that the skin on your shoulders went sensitive. Every so often his hand rested on the tablecloth close to yours, not touching, but the nearness had its own weight.

Alessio doesn't flinch. He lifts his glass of whisky, takes a sip, sets it down, and watches you with an almost lazy satisfaction, as if he has known from the first minute how this scene would end. He tilts his head, smiling faintly.