The city had been asleep for hours, its streets reduced to distant ribbons of headlights and scattered pools of amber beneath the streetlamps, but Alderico Severini remained awake in the darkness of his bedroom, exactly as he had been for countless nights before this one, staring through the enormous windows overlooking the sleeping city while his exhausted body begged for rest and his mind stubbornly declined to give it to him.

At 2:31 a.m., the room was almost completely silent, apart from the faint hum of the heating and the occasional distant sound of traffic far below, while Alderico sat against the headboard with the sheets gathered loosely around his waist, his broad shoulders bare and his thick black hair slightly dishevelled from the number of times he’d dragged his fingers through it that night, looking every bit as tired as a man who had spent years learning that sleep was something he could never rely upon.

He had tried reading.

He had tried working.

He had taken a shower, turned off every light, closed the curtains, opened the curtains, changed position more times than he bothered to count and deliberately tried to empty his mind, although that particular exercise had always seemed ridiculous to a man whose thoughts never seemed to understand the meaning of silence.

Nothing worked.

His phone sat untouched on the bedside table, deliberately placed just beyond his reach because Alderico had learned that staring at a screen when he couldn’t sleep seldom helped, and for several minutes he simply stayed there, listening to the silence and waiting for the familiar heaviness behind his eyes that never quite came.

Then the phone vibrated.

The sound was startlingly loud in the quiet room.

Severini’s almost-black eyes moved toward the screen, his expression immediately hardening when he saw the words Unknown Number glowing against the darkness.

Nobody important contacted him without being identified, and nobody who knew him personally would have any reason to appear as an unknown number, which meant the sensible thing would have been to ignore it and let whoever had sent the message work out their mistake.

Instead, Alderico reached across the mattress and picked up the phone.

There was only one message.

He stared at it for several seconds, honestly unsure why he found the question nearly amusing considering that it was now 2:31 in the morning and whoever had sent it clearly had no idea they’d just interrupted one of the most sleepless men in the city.

His thumb moved across the screen.

The response came almost immediately.

Severini’s eyebrow lifted, and despite himself, the slightest trace of amusement crossed his expression as he settled further against the headboard.

He could have left it there.

He probably should have.

Instead, he typed:

The three little dots appeared almost at once, disappeared, then appeared again, suggesting that whoever was on the other end was apparently taking this conversation far more seriously than a wrong number deserved.

Alderico looked at the message for a long moment, his thumb hovering above the screen while something about the stranger’s total lack of caution amused him more than it should have.

Another pause.

That question made him stop.

Severini wasn’t used to being asked things simply because someone was curious, particularly by strangers who had no idea who they were speaking to, and yet there was something strangely disarming about the fact that this person didn’t appear to want anything from him beyond an answer.

His gaze shifted briefly toward the city outside before returning to the screen.

This time, the reply didn’t come immediately.

Then his phone lit up.

For the first time that night, Alderico didn’t feel quite so alone in the darkness.

He didn’t know your name.

He didn’t know what you looked like.

He didn’t know where you lived, what you did, or why you were awake at an ungodly hour sending messages to a complete stranger.

All he knew was that somewhere on the other side of the city, another sleepless person was staring at a phone screen just like he was.

Then another message appeared.

Severini stared at those words, already knowing that he should end the conversation before it became anything more than an amusing accident, yet for reasons he couldn’t explain—not even to himself—his thumb moved across the screen again.