He lifts his head to look at me, and the expression on his face is conflicted. He looks uncertain. “I don’t know,” he admits quietly. “This wasn’t—I didn’t plan for this.”
It’s not reassuring. Not even close, but the raw honesty in his voice, and the way his hand tightens on my hip like he’s anchoring himself—it’s more vulnerability than I expected from him.
Why am I not terrified? This should remind me that we’re still captor and captive. My father is still imprisoned somewhere, and this whole situation is seriously fucked up regardless of whatever just happened between us.
But instead of terror, all I feel is a complicated knot of emotions I can’t untangle.
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” I admit, my fingers tracing idle patterns across his chest, moving over the swirling patterns of his tattoo. “None of this makes sense.”
“No.” His thumb traces my collarbone absently. “It doesn’t.”
“We’re a disaster,” I remark.
“Yeah.” He doesn’t try to deny it or offer false promises or reassurances. “But maybe—” He stops, a weird look crossing his features before he locks it down again. “Maybe we figure it out as we go.”
It’s not a declaration or a commitment. It’s barely even hope. But it’s some acknowledgment that whatever this is between us has shifted into territory neither of us knows how to navigate.
I need to pull away and go back to my suite and my guilt and put distance between us before this gets any more complicated.
Instead, I press closer, letting his warmth surround me, and try not to think about all the ways this could end badly.
If he’s capable of becoming something more than the monster grief made him.
If the lies I’m still carrying don’t destroy us both before we get the chance to figure out what this is.
If my father would ever forgive me for sleeping with our captor.
But for now, I let those thoughts drift away and let myself exist in this fragile space between enemies and something else entirely, where the rules aren’t clear and the future is uncertain.
Where the only thing I know for sure is that I’m in far,fardeeper shit than I ever intended to be.
And I’m not sure I want to find my way back out.
16
LUCA
The estate feels different lately.
It’s been a week since that night in my study. A week since Giuliana told me about the recording, since we ended up in my bed with boundaries blurred beyond recognition. A week since everything between us shifted into territory I don’t know how to navigate.
A week of pretending things are normal when nothing about this situation is anywhere close to normal.
I notice the difference first thing in the morning when I’m reviewing reports in my office. It’s the way sunlight streams through windows that Maria used to keep perpetually curtained. Fresh flowers sit on the side table, white peonies and pale roses that Giuliana must have had delivered. The scent is subtle, nothing like the cloying perfume my mother used to favor, just…clean. Alive.
I hate that I notice. I hate that it matters.
But it does.
The reports in front of me blur as my mind drifts—again—to last night. Giuliana was in my bed again, her dark hair spread across white sheets. Her expression was soft. So soft with something I don’t deserve and definitely don’t know what to do with. The way she traced the scars on my chest with careful fingers, like she was trying to memorize the map of violence written across my skin makes me shiver.
She once again fell asleep in my arms instead of going back to her rooms. She trusted me not to hurt her even though I’ve given her every reason to expect exactly that.
Fuck.
I scrub a hand over my face, trying to focus on the shipping manifests Danny needs me to approve. But the numbers won’t cooperate. My concentration is fractured by the memory of soft skin and softer sighs, of vulnerability I wasn’t prepared for and don’t know how to handle.
This wasn’t supposed to happen. She was supposed to be?—
