ChapterOne
Isabella
The pool at La Sirena looks like it belongs to someone else’s life, a sheet of melted sapphire stretched taut beneath the Italian sun. The water is warm where the light lingers and cooler where the palms cast their long shadows. Even paradise has places it prefers to keep hidden.
The island itself feels barely tethered to reality. A rumor in the Tyrrhenian Sea, a speck of rock and money, a helicopter hop from Capri. It’s the kind of place men like my father buy out for a weekend. The kind of place where the maître d’ knows which vintage you’ll drink before you ask, and the security cameras are there to be seen so you know they have better ones you’ll never find.
I didn’t come here to hide.
I came to breathe.
I came with a name that isn’t mine. Sera Vale. I practiced it on the flight until it felt like a silk dress that fits too well. Sera smiles at waiters. Sera tips in crisp bills. Sera swims in a white one-piece with a slit at her hip and doesn’t look over her shoulder.
Isabella always knows who is watching.
My real name has a gravity that pulls every eye. There’s a ring on my finger that weighs more than thediamond. The truce is coming next week, which means the city is hungry now. My father calls, my fiancé calls, and the consigliere calls, and I send every call to voicemail. I throw my phone in the room safe and set the code to a date I will never forget.
Then I come down to the infinity pool that spills into the Mediterranean sky and order a Hugo spritz. In thin crystal, I taste summer. Prosecco laced with elderflower, mint bruised just so, lime’s clean bite. While it snows back home, I pretend I’m someone I invented.
Someone who’s unbothered enough to notice the delicious man swimming up in the ripple of his own shadow, his broad shoulders cutting the blue. He has the kind of face you notice for the angles first, and then the eyes come for you after, dark and steady as if he’s already made up his mind.
I'm on his mind.
He braces his forearms on the marble lip beside my chaise and water runs in clean lines down the tendons of his wrists.
“You look like you’re making a run for it,” he says. His accent travels. There’s Italy in it. There’s something else I can’t place but sounds faintly familiar. Familiar enough to unsettle me.
Unsettle Isabella.
Sera tells Isabella to shut it.
“Run is a strong word,” I say. “I prefer swim.”
“Is that your plan or your preference, Bella?” he asks.
“Bella?” I ask as Sera. Isabella starts to panic because the name is too similar. I wonder if he recognizes me.
“Beautiful, in Italian,” he explains.
“I know,” I reply, relieved.
“You know you’re beautiful?” One exquisite corner of his mouth curves, small and private, like we share a joke no one else can hear.
He smiles, only a bit.
And I melt anyway.
“My Italian is okay. I prefer English,” I’m lying, my Italian is flawless.
“So, beautiful, is swimming away your plan or your preference?” he asks.
“Preference,” I say, getting his meaning. I’d like to run away. I won’t. “Sera is my name.”
The lie slides out easily, delivered with the kind of confidence people don’t challenge.
His eyes stay on my face, studying without urgency, without blinking, and I sense the attention like fingers on bare skin.
“I do notwant your name,” he says at last, like he can see right through me. “I only want your yes.”
