“You can’t fix this tonight.”
Luca looks at my mother. Some silent question.
She glances at me. “Anna.” Her voice is careful. Measured. “Are you sure about this?”
I know what she’s asking. Not whether I’m sure Luca is a liar. She already knows the answer to that. She’s asking whether I’m sure I can close this door. Whether I’ve thought about what’s on the other side of it. The twins. The life we’d started to have. The version of Luca who read bedtime stories and wore flower crowns and said he wasn’t going anywhere.
I wait for something in me to crack. Some hesitation. Some small voice saying wait, or not yet, or think about this more.
It doesn’t come.
“I can’t trust him,” I say. “That’s the only answer I have.”
My mother holds my gaze for a moment, then looks away.
Luca doesn’t move right away. He’s watching me the way he watched me the night of the wedding when I walked down that aisle, like he’s cataloging something, filing it away. But there’s no calculation in it this time. It’s something else that I don’t let myself sit with.
Then he nods, once, and looks at my father. “I’ll call tomorrow about seeing the twins.”
My father says nothing.
Luca walks past me toward the door. I don’t turn to watch him go. I just stand there listening to his footsteps on the old hardwood and then the sound of the latch and then silence.
My mother puts her hand on my arm.
I don’t pull away. But I don’t say anything either.
The house settles back into itself. The same quiet it’s always had. Small and familiar and nothing like the life I’ve been living for the past four months.
I go back upstairs and check on the twins. They’re still asleep. Mila has her fist curled under her chin. Alexei’s arm is still around his sister.
I stand in their doorway for a long time.
The documents in my old room don’t lie. That’s what I told him, and it’s true. The plan he made three years ago is real, andofficial, and every word of it holds up. That’s not something new terms on a new paper can erase.
But my mother’s voice is still in my head.
Are you sure about this?
29
LUCA
I’ve never beggedfor anything in my life.
Not money, not mercy, not a second chance from any man who ever tried to take something from me. In thirty years of building this operation from nothing, begging was never a tool I needed. I had leverage. I had patience. I had the kind of ruthlessness that makes asking unnecessary because the outcome was always going to be what I decided it was going to be.
And yet tonight I stood in Viktor Kestrel’s living room, talking to my wife like a man who had run out of every option except honesty.
“I’m not doing that anymore,” I told her. “The acquisition, the takeover, all of it. I’ve been restructuring for six weeks. Real partnership. Real profit-sharing. Your father keeps operational authority, and your mother gets a leadership role with actual weight behind it. I’m not taking the company. I’m building something with it.”
Anna looked at me the way she looked at me at the wedding altar four months ago. Like she’d already made up her mind and was waiting for me to catch up.
“You told me this afternoon,” she said.
“I’m telling you again.”
“It doesn’t change what I found.”
