Watching them both openly, Morana’s eyes did a scan of the area and came to a halt on a man on the opposite hill, behind a tree. From the vantage of the funeral procession, nobody would be able to see him, hidden as he was. But she, still standing on the hill, could make out his silhouette.
He is face was hidden under a beard, and he was leaning on some type of a cane, just hiding behind a tree and watching the two men she had been watching. Frowning, she quickly opened her texts.
Morana: There’s a strange guy at my 5’o’clock watching my father and Lorenzo.
Morana: You can’t see him from your spot. Come stand by me.
She saw Tristan look down at his phone before he casually walked up the hill to where she stood. Finding a spot beside her, he nonchalantly ran his eyes over the place she’d seen the man and Morana turned to see the man watching them now.
He was too far away for her to make out anything about him but she could feel his eyes on her, a shiver going down her spine.
“You know who he is?” she asked Tristan quietly.
“No,” he replied, his voice calm. “But he’s watching us.”
“I know.”
They stayed silent for a few minutes as the procession continued below. Dark clouds gathered in the sky, casting a doomed glow over the hills and though it was fall, the winds were cold. Standing there silently, Morana found her gaze drifting to the strange man over and over again.
“Anyone suspects anything?” she asked, her lips barely moving.
He stood stony beside her, his mask on, speaking equally quietly. “Everyone suspects something, they just don’t know what.”
Morana huffed a silent laugh at that, looking down at her father, who was talking to Lorenzo Maroni with his head bent.
“He might be trying to take me back,” she commented, studying the body language of both the men. “Not out of any love, but for his pride.”
“He has no pride,” Tristan noted beside her. “He won’t be able to take you, not even over my dead body. You’re too smart for him.”
Morana glanced up at him, her heart softening at how much respect he had for her intellect. It wasn’t something she’d expected but the more he told her little things like this, with no pretense or guile, the more she felt herself bloom on the inside.
“Thank you,” she murmured softly, squeezing his forearm.
He shrugged. “It’s a fact. You’re smarter than most of these men put together, and I don’t just mean with your tech stuff. Anyone who denies that is stupid.”
“You’re not stupid.”
He turned to look at her, his blues locking with her hazel. “I’m the smartest of them. I claimed you long before any of them had a chance.”
Heart fluttering, Morana looked back down with a slight smile on her lips. It slowly died. “You know we’ll have to talk about that day someday, right?”
He didn’t respond.
Morana stayed silent, letting it go. Pushing him when he was just starting to slowly open up would be irresponsible. He would talk when he was ready, if he was ever ready.
“I came across a very interesting theory the other day about the Alliance,” she started, changing the topic to more neutral ground. “It mentioned how the Alliance broke because there were, in fact, three parties involved and one of them got out. Have you heard anything about that?”
The silence from the man beside her stretched for long, long minutes, to the point that Morana had to look up at him, just to make sure he’d heard her. His eyes were staring into space, somewhere far away. She didn’t know where he’d gone but wherever it was, it was unpleasant.
Sliding her hand into his, she interlinked their fingers, hers smaller and softer sliding against his rough, abraded, longer digits. Squeezing tightly, she kept her eyes on him and waited for him to come back to her, “Tristan?”
He blinked, looking down at her, suddenly aware of his surroundings. He scanned the hills once and then took a deep breath in, showing her a flicker of vulnerability she would never have been aware of a few weeks ago. Not saying a word, he quietly retreated into his own mind and Morana let him, knowing this perhaps wasn’t the time or place to ask.
One of the men from the gathering called Tristan and, after giving her hand a small squeeze like a secret while his face remained completely expressionless, he walked down with the coiled gr
ace of the predator he was notorious for, his body encased in a black suit and black shirt.
The more she got to know him, the more she realized how deeply he felt these little things and how expertly he pretended not to.