“No.” The word comes out flat and immediate. “Absolutely not.”
I hold his gaze. “What’s the alternative? You go to your father with half a theory and nothing to back it up. No timeline. No details. No proof. Just a guess that maybe there’s a shipment somewhere and maybe it matters.”
“I’ll figure it out.”
“How?” I ask, not softly now. “You can’t get near my father. Your family can’t get near my father.” I look at him in the dark. “But I grew up in that house, Luca. I know his routines. I know when he sleeps, where he takes calls, when his office is empty. And he has never once in my life paid enough attention to me to notice what I’m doing.”
He’s shaking his head before I finish, eyes hard in the dark.
“Nat, you’re talking about walking back into that house and putting yourself within reach of him again. You’re talking about handing yourself back to the man who has controlled every piece of your life since you were born and hoping he doesn’t notice you’ve stopped obeying him.”.
The words hit so close to the bone I have to pull in a careful breath before I answer.
“I know.” My voice doesn’t waver. “I know exactly what that house is.” I look at him, at the fury and fear fighting behind his eyes, and make myself say the rest. “But I also know I can survive it for a little longer, if that’s what it takes. I’ve been surviving him my whole life. The difference now is that this time it would be for something. This time it would be to get out for good.”
He scrubs both hands over his face. The muscles in his forearm are tight. So is his mouth. I can hear the way he is breathing, controlled only in the loosest sense of the word.
“If he catches you,” he says at last, and his voice is lower now, roughened down to something that sounds scraped raw, “if he even starts to suspect?—”
“He won’t,” I say, though the certainty of it feels thinner now that it is out in the open between us. “He never looks at me that closely. That’s the point. He never has.”
Luca turns his head back toward me. “That may have been true before. It may still be true most of the time. But the minute something shifts, the minute he feels something off, the minute one person says the wrong thing in the wrong room, you are the one standing there when it happens.”
His hand closes over the blanket between us so hard his knuckles show pale even in the dark. “Listen to me. If anything feels wrong, you get out. I don’t care if you have one useful detail or twenty. I don’t care if you think you’re close to finding something. You get out.”
Emotion presses so suddenly against the back of my throat that for a second, I can’t speak. There’s too much in his face, in his voice, in the force of the fear he’s trying and failing to keep under control.
“I know,” I whisper.
He lets out a breath that sounds more like pain than relief. “I hate this.”
A small, broken piece of warmth moves through me.
“I know that too,” I say.
The words settle between us for all of half a second before the next obstacle rises up behind them.
“There’s a problem, though,” I say. “My father sent me here because Vegas was too dangerous. He’s not going to call me home while your family is still breathing down his neck.”
Luca’s chest expands on a long breath.
“Which means I need to tell my father,” he says. “Everything.”
“I think you do.”
He’s quiet for a beat before determination flickers across his face.
“I will,” he says, “This helps. All of it. The shipment, the alliance, Restrepo. I’ve finally got something my father can actually use.”
He settles back against the pillow and pulls me into him, my cheek against his chest, his hand spread flat between my shoulder blades. I listen to his heartbeat. It’s slower than mine. Steadier. Like he’s already decided this is going to work and his body got the memo.
But the tension coiled tight inside of me doesn’t loosen.
Because now the shape of it is clear.
Luca goes to his family.
I go back to mine.
