Nothing outwardly changes on paper after the suitcase incident.
Security is still seamless, Caterina still moves through Dragoni Estate with quiet competence, Giovanni still commands entire rooms with the same calm authority, and I am still his wife in every legal and public sense that matters.
But something has shifted anyway.
It lives in the way he watches me now. Sure, the rabid hunger is very much present, and his intense attention hasn’t changed. But there’s a sharper awareness beneath it, as though some part of him is waiting for the moment I prove him right to be suspicious.
I tell myself I am not imagining it; that he has always been intense, always been too much, the kind of man who makes emotions feel like weapons.
But I know what I saw in his eyes when he found that suitcase. Something worse than rage or betrayal. Something like… loss, arriving early and catching him off guard.
The next day, I sit at the edge of the bed long after he leaves the room that morning, my hands folded in my lap, my mind circling the same thought with nowhere to land.
I tell myself I didn’t run and I didn’t betray him. That should surely count for something, shouldn’t it?
And yet I still feel as though I have done damage. Kicked a fracture into being that no amount of second thoughts and justification will fix.
The simple truth is, self-preservation kicked in and I wanted… needed to know if I could.
Now I know it was a test I never should have taken, because the cost of testing a man like Giovanni Dragoni is that he will never forget you were capable of it.
He’s lived his entire life with the certainty that people leave.
People turn and people betray. Experience has taught him that trust is for fools, and softness gets you buried.
And then I came into his life like a wildfire, loud-mouthed and stubborn and furious at the world, and somehow he let himself believe that I might stay.
The irony is almost unbearable.
I ran. He brought me back.
And now I’ve shown him that the instinct still exists in me, even if I hate it, even if it shames me, even if it is the last thing I want to be.
I’m still the girl who flees when the ground feels unstable, the girl who thinks survival demands immediate distance.
And Giovanni is the kind of man who believes survival is possession.
We are a collision waiting to happen.
My phone is in my hand before I fully decide.
I don’t have much of a plan, and I definitely don’t know what I’m doing, but I need to hear something normal, something familiar, something that existed before men like Giovanni andSalvatore Bellandi and his daughter turned my life into a chessboard and my heart and soul into pawns.
I call Queens.
Uncle Lazlo answers on the second ring, his voice warm and rough in a way that hits me somewhere deep.
“Lucia,” he says immediately, and I can hear the relief he tries to hide. “You okay?”
I close my eyes, basking in his uncomplicated warmth. “I’m fine.”
A pause. “That’s a lie.”
I exhale, because of course he knows. “I’m… here,” I say finally. “And I’m safe.”
Safe is a strange word now.
Safe in Giovanni’s world means locked gates and armed men and velvet luxury that feels like a gilded warning. So my kind of safe comes with a hundred strings.
