Last night, I watched him sit on the edge of the guest bed with his uncle’s face on the page and shadows moving behind his eyes. I watched him refuse to speak. I watched him turn into something rougher and darker than the man I’d brought home from the beach.
Today he’s looking at me like there are pieces already moving on a board I can’t even see.
Ice slips down my spine with cold fingers.
“Luca. You need to hear how that sounds.”
“I know how it sounds.”
“Do you? Because two days ago, you told me you didn’t want anything to do with your family. Now you can produce a plane?”
He exhales through his nose. He crosses the kitchen and takes my hands. His grip is steady.
“I need you to trust me right now. I know that’s asking a lot. But I can get you to Anna, and that’s what matters.”
It’s not an answer. It’s a door slammed shut, politely but firmly, and I can feel the draft through every crack. Every instinct I inherited from my father’s house is screaming that something doesn’t fit.
He has remembered more. I know he has. Enough for me to understand that men like Luca don’t simply stop being powerful simply because they want to. Not really. Whatever name he comes from, it still opens doors. It still makes people move.
And now, with Anna in a hospital bed, Luca is standing in my kitchen looking like a man who knows exactly which door to open.
I don’t miss any of it. I just set it aside, sharp-edged and waiting.
And I choose.
“Make the call.”
The jet is an obscenity of cream leather and polished wood.
It’s smaller than I expected, intimate rather than sprawling, with four oversized leather seats facing each other in the main cabin. A discreet flight attendant offers us champagne and thendisappears behind a curtain, leaving Luca and me alone in a private, pressurized bubble cutting through the air.
Luca hasn’t spoken since we boarded. He sits across from me, his long legs stretched out, his gaze fixed on his hands. The silence is a living thing, thick with everything we’re not saying. The air crackles with it.
I’m rigid in my seat. My knee won’t stop bouncing. Every time I shut my eyes, I picture Anna crumpled on the floor, confused and in pain while the room blurs with staff and sirens. I should have been there.
“You’re thinking so loud I can hear it,” he says, his voice startling me.
I turn from the window. “I’m worried.”
“We’ll be there soon.”
I don’t answer.
“Hey.” Luca unbuckles and moves to the seat next to me once we level out. “Look at me.”
I do. His eyes are dark and steady.
“You’re going to get there. It’s going to be okay.”
“You don’t know that.”
“But I know you. The second you walk into that facility, she’s going to have the most stubborn, overprepared advocate on the planet in her corner.”
Something in my chest loosens. Just a fraction.
He lifts my hand to his mouth, pressing a soft kiss to my palm. Then he brings it to my thigh, his fingers lacing with mine, a warm, heavy pressure that’s meant to ground me.
His other hand comes up to my face, his fingers tracing my cheekbone. “You need to get out of your head,” he whispers.
