Ilona sits upright in the bed, her hands folding over her belly in a protective gesture that has become as natural as breathing over these past weeks.
Her hair falls around her face like a curtain she's using to hide behind, and the determination in the set of her jaw tells me she's been building toward this moment since the car ride from the estate.
"Tell me everything." Her voice cuts through the sterile air with a precision that reminds me she learned to read deception from a master. She was raised in a world of calculated men and taught to recognize deception by living inside it. "From the beginning. I need to hear you say it."
I pull a chair closer, the metal legs scraping against the linoleum. The plastic seat is cold even through my trousers, unyielding in the way hospital furniture always is.
My hand settles on my knee, palm down, fingers spread against the fabric of trousers still smudged with dust and dried blood from the estate. My other arm is in a sling and screams with pain. But I lean into it and use the fire tearing through me to help keep me focused.
I don't reach for her hand this time. The comfort of touching her while I dismantle every lie I've built between us belongs to a man who earned it, and that man is not me.
"I was surveilling your father for months." The words come out with the flat cadence of an after-action report, stripped of charm, stripped of warmth, delivered with the clinical precision that built my career and destroyed my marriage.
"His operations, his connections, his vulnerabilities. The Syndicate had been building a case against Enzo Marchetti for a few months now, and I was the intelligence officer responsible for assembling the dossier. The files covered his entire operation, his lieutenants, his financial networks, his trafficking routes." I pause, and the pause costs me more than any of the words that came before it. "And his family. Including you."
The monitor beeps. Our baby’s heartbeat fills the space between my sentences, a steady rhythm that sounds like counting, like a clock measuring the remaining seconds of a life I built on sand.
"I had everything. Your schedule, your routines, your bodyguards' rotations, your coffee order. Every detail of your life documented and filed. At that time you were a point of intelligence." My fingers tighten against my knee, the fabricbunching beneath my grip. "I had your medical records. I knew things about your body and your history that no stranger should know, and I catalogued all of it with the detachment of a man who convinced himself that information was neutral. That knowing someone's secrets didn't make you responsible for how you used them."
Her breathing changes, a slight hitch that tells me she's listening even though her eyes haven't moved from the wall. The bruise on her cheek darkens under the harsh lighting, purple bleeding into blue, and I force myself to look at it because looking away would be another kind of cowardice.
"When I saw you at the masquerade, I recognized you instantly from the surveillance photos. The body paint, the blue tips in your hair, the way you moved through the crowd like a woman who had just discovered what freedom tasted like and was terrified she'd have to give it back." My voice roughens against the edges of a memory I've been carrying like a wound. "I approached you deliberately. I seduced you with the intent of using the relationship as leverage against your father. Or as a way into his inner circle. Whatever was needed to stop him."
The fetal monitor marks time with our baby’s heartbeat, steady and completely unaware that her father is confessing sins that might erase him from her life before she's born.
"But something happened that I didn't plan for. You weren't what I expected. You were real and fierce and you looked at me like I was worth trusting. Somewhere between the first kiss and dawn, the operation stopped mattering." I swallow against the thickness building in my throat, the taste of antiseptic and regret coating my tongue. "I gave you a cover name because the operation required it. I let you leave because pursuing youfurther would have compromised the mission. Those were the reasons I told myself."
The pause stretches between us, taut as a wire bearing too much weight.
Seeing her torment from my actions kills me.
“Ilona.”
“Don’t Ilona me, Luca.”
My arms ache to hold her, but there’s more to say and I’ll never get it out if I touch her. "The truth is simpler. I couldn't face being the man who used you after what you gave me that night. I didn’t deserve you."
“And yet you blackmailed me when I showed up needing your help.”
Her fingers tighten almost imperceptibly over her belly, the only sign that my words are landing anywhere inside the fortress she's built around herself.
“All I thought about was protecting you by any means necessary.”
She stares at me in stunned silence.
"I spent eight weeks telling myself the operation mattered more than what I felt with you. Then you sent those photos, and fate handed me a second chance. I told myself this time I'd do it right." A bitter sound escapes me, something too hollow to qualify as a laugh. "I didn't do it right. I used the photos as leverage. I blackmailed you into marriage, yes."
“I was vulnerable and you took advantage of me.”
“No, of the situation,” I try to counter.
She scoffs. “Don’t split hairs with me, Luca.”
Tears fall furiously down her face.
A tortured laugh escapes her lips. Her eyes close, her lashes pressing dark crescents against her cheekbones. Her fingers spread wider across her belly as if shielding our baby from the sound of her father's sins. “Do you even hear your words?”
“I do. They disgust me and even knowing they are cold and calculated, I want you to know them.”
