Harbinger Of Glory

Chapter 329: Seeing Someone!

Despite the couch not being made for two people, it didn’t bother the two lovers at all.

Vittoria’s head now lay somewhere across Leo’s neck, after she had snuggled up for comfort through the night.

The stillness in the apartment prevailed as the two kept sleeping, but that stillness was soon broken by the sound of the doorbell and at that, Leo’s eyes opened.

He lay still for a second, orienting himself, and then the doorbell went again.

Hearing that, he sat up slowly while Vittoria stirred beside him, but didn’t fully wake.

Her eyes were half open, but her expression told that she had no intention to be conscious.

Then the intercom crackled.

"Vittoria, darling, are you awake?"

The effect of those words was immediate and total.

Vittoria was upright before the sentence had finished, her eyes wide and every trace of sleep gone from her face.

She sat there for one frozen second, listening to her mother’s voice come through the intercom, like someone hearing an alarm they had completely forgotten to set.

"Tori, I would come up myself, but I seem to have left the key card in the car, and I really don’t want to go back down to the garage. Be a darling and buzz me up."

Vittoria was already on her feet.

She turned and looked at Leo, who was sitting on the couch watching all that was going on with an entertained expression.

"You never told me your mom was British," Leo said after hearing the distinct accent in Vittoria’s mother’s words.

He had woken up to find the morning considerably more interesting than expected, but before he could make any more remarks, she crossed the room in three steps, grabbed him by the arm and pulled.

"Come," she whispered.

"Where are we—"

"Bedroom. Now and quietly."

Leo went because the look on her face made going the sensible choice as she pulled him through the bedroom door and turned to face him with her finger already raised.

"Do not make a sound," she said.

Leo looked at her and her stern expression, as well as the slight panic underneath it.

He pressed his lips together to keep the smile from getting out of hand as he raised two fingers and drew them slowly across his mouth.

Vittoria pointed at him once more for emphasis and then pulled the door close, and Leo, left standing alone in the middle of the room, began to look around.

His first sight was a row of Funko Pops along the shelf above the desk, which was something he didn’t know about Vittoria.

"Huh," he muttered as he approached the shelf.

He picked up one of the Funko Pops from the shelf, which was a small figure in a yellow coat with the distinct oversized head and painted large eyes of Funko Pops.

He turned it over in his hand and examined it with genuine interest.

.....

Back outside, Vittoria made her way towards the door, fixing herself and making sure that there was little evidence of the previous night’s lip activity with Leo.

"There you are," Vittoria’s mother said as she came through the door.

"You look like you just woke up," she said as she kissed Vittoria on the cheek.

"I was asleep," Vittoria said.

"At this hour?"

"It’s only 8 mum, and I was tired. Not everyone is an early fox like you!"

"Why not an early bird?" Vittoria’s mother said with a smile as she moved further into the room.

Vittoria followed, but not before her eyes went to the couch, and so did her mother’s, whose eyes even went further towards the jacket sitting on the arm of the couch.

At that, she stopped and nodded toward it.

"What’s that?"

Vittoria looked at it, eyes flickering in recognition before she recovered.

"A birthday gift," she said. "For a friend."

Her mother looked at the jacket, then at Vittoria, then at the jacket again.

She stepped forward and pinched Vittoria’s cheek with the gentle firmness of a woman who had been doing this since Vittoria was four.

"I taught you better than that," she said. "Why have you taken it out of the packaging?"

Vittoria said nothing as her mother let the cheek go, moved to the couch and sat down while Vittoria sat beside her, eyes asking what her mother was doing in her apartment.

"Don’t be too hostile," her mother said with a smile.

"I wanted to talk to you about the Marchetti gala," her mother said, settling in.

"You remember the Ferraro boy? The younger one, not the one with the beard."

"Vaguely."

"He called and asked after you."

Vittoria closed her eyes briefly.

"Mama."

"I’m simply telling you what happened."

"Is that why you came up here? To tell me that?"

"Is it not a reasonable thing to tell your daughter?"

"At this hour?"

"Vittoria."

Her mother’s voice shifted into the register it shifted into when she wanted to be taken seriously.

"You are going to be twenty-one in a few days! These things are worth thinking about. That is all I am saying. I am not saying go and marry, but you have to at least consider it. You are in your prime!"

"You said the same thing when you were 47," Vittoria said, causing her mother to raise a brow and touch her chest with an arm like she’d been hurt.

"Bad girl," she said as she hit Vittoria on the arm, something Leo would recognise and finally understand where Vittoria got it from.

In the bedroom, Leo lowered another Funko Pop slightly.

Twenty-two.

He turned it over in his hand again and raised his brow at the painted eyes, which had nothing to say about it.

Vittoria was quiet on the other side of the door as her mother filled her in on whatever was going on, moving from the Ferraro boy to a cousin’s engagement.

And then to something about the family’s appearance at an upcoming event, and Vittoria listened to all of it with the patience of someone waiting for the right moment.

Then she said, "I’m seeing someone."