I glance back. Her eyes are softer than usual.
“She cares for you… despite everything,” she says simply. “Do not waste it again.”
I leave the kitchen with that lodged somewhere deep, sharp and undeniable. And as I walk back towards the terrace, towards my wife, towards the life I have been trying to hold together with brute force instead of truth, I realise something else.
Tomorrow night is not about dinner.
It is about surrender.
Mine.
Lucia
I’m not running.
Not really.
I simply absent myself in a way that feels almost wicked, because Giovanni and I have spent months turning avoidance and inertia into a weapon, and tonight I am turning it into a gift.
He’s looking for me.
I know he is.
I can picture it with painful clarity: the way his gaze will sweep through rooms, the way his jaw will tighten when he doesn’t immediately find what belongs to him, the way irritation will sharpen into something darker, more anxious, more intimate than he ever admits.
The way he’ll start barking at his men if I continue to elude him.
The truth is, I haven’t gone far at all.
I’m still in our home, still on Dragoni Estate, inside the borders of his world, but tucked into a small staff cottage at the edge of the estate with Ella hovering like an excited sprite and my uncles standing awkwardly in the corner as if they cannot decide whether this is the most romantic thing they have ever witnessed or the most insane.
Perhaps it’s both.
My security detail is outside.
Every single one of them has been blackmailed, bribed, emotionally manipulated, or outright threatened into silence.
It turns out men who have sworn loyalty to me as Donna are not immune to the kind of pleading that comes from a woman who has finally decided she is finished with half-measures.
“You tell him,” I had said earlier, voice deadly sweet, “and I will make your life unbearable in ways even Giovanni has not yet imagined.”
They had stared.
Then, one by one, they had nodded. Ella had laughed until she nearly cried.
Now she stands behind me, adjusting the fall of fabric at my shoulders with trembling hands.
“You look… divine,” she whispers.
I glance at my reflection, and for a moment my breath catches.
I’m not wearing the kind of gown Giovanni would have chosen. It’s softer than that, simpler in its lines, the kind of elegance that does not scream wealth so much as certainty.
Tonight is not about proving anything to the world.
Tonight is about proving something to him.
And to myself.
