"You handed her enough ammunition to destroy every person you love."
"I did."
"Why?"
"Because she deserves to hold the weapon I should never have pointed at her. What she does with it is her choice. Not mine."
Luna studies me for another long beat, her eyes boring into mine with an intensity that makes me understand, on a visceral level, why three dangerous men fell in love with this woman. Whatever she sees in my face makes her jaw tighten with an emotion I can't fully identify, something balanced on the knife's edge between grudging respect and fury held on a leash so short it's practically a collar.
"She'll see you." Luna's chin lifts, and the streetlight catches the sharp angles of her cheekbones, turning her delicate features into something carved from stone and moonlight. "But Luca? This is your last chance. You break her again and Jasper, Voss, and Shayne will make sure no one finds what's left of you." Her lips press together in a line that carries no trace of humor. "And I'll hand them the shovels."
I don't doubt her for a second.
She steps aside and I walk into the warehouse, crossing the threshold into a world that smells like oil paint and strong coffee and jasmine, my wife's scent woven through someone else's home. She's been here long enough to leave her mark on everything. The warmth thaws my fingers and my face but does nothing for the cold sitting in my chest.
Through a doorway to my left, warm light spills from a kitchen that smells like chamomile and toast. I glimpse Ilona's mother seated at the table with a cup of tea cradled between thin hands, her posture straighter than I remember from the estate, her eyesless vacant, as if three weeks in a house full of women who refuse to be silenced has begun to teach her that her own voice still exists. She looks up as I pass and our eyes meet for a fraction of a second, long enough for me to see the complicated mix of wariness and something that might be hope flickering behind her expression before she returns her attention to her tea.
Three women under one roof, all of them rebuilding lives that men dismantled. The irony of being one of those men is not lost on me.
Luna leads me down a hallway lined with canvases in various stages of completion, some vibrant with color and life, others dark and brooding and streaked with the kind of aggressive brushwork that speaks to emotions too large for words. She stops before a closed door at the end and knocks softly against the wood.
"He's here."
A pause that lasts a lifetime. I feel every heartbeat of it in my throat.
"Let him in."
My wife’s voice.
My heart rate spikes.The door opens, and Luna steps aside, and I walk through.
The curve beneath her shirt is unmistakable now. Our baby grew without me, and the evidence of everything I missed hits harder than any fist I've ever taken.
The window behind her frames the evening sky in shades of deep blue and amber, the last light catching her silhouette in a way that makes my chest ache. Her hair hangs loose around hershoulders, the electric ends catching the lamplight. Her hands rest on the curve of her belly with protective certainty.
She turns to face me, and her eyes are red but dry. She's done crying. Whatever comes next will be decided with clarity, not tears.
Just a man in a doorway, exhausted and aching from missing his wife, asking to be let back in.
The silence between us holds the weight of everything we've been and everything we might never be.
I let it press against my chest without fighting it, because fighting is what got me here, and the only move I have left is surrender.
Seventeen
Ilona
Luca looks how I feel. Wrecked.
The careful grooming is gone. His beard has grown past the meticulous trim he maintains with the same discipline he applies to everything in his life, the dark hair thicker along his jaw and climbing higher on his cheeks, threaded with silver that wasn't visible before.
His hair hangs loose around his face. No leather cord. No low knot at his nape. Just dark waves falling past his collar in a way that makes him look younger and more exposed than I've ever seen him. He wears a dark sweater and jeans, no suit, no gold cufflinks, no armor of Italian tailoring designed to project power. Just fabric and skin and the raw architecture of a man stripped of every costume he's ever used to keep me at a comfortable distance.
His eyes find mine across the room. The gold flecks that usually catch the light when he's scheming or wanting are dim. Banked. Shadows bruise the skin beneath them, and the warm tan I remember has bled out of his face, like even the sun has been avoiding him.
The sunshine smile is gone. The devastating charm that made me weak at the masquerade, that infuriated me in his office, that softened me in our bed, all of it absent. What remains is the man underneath, and for the first time since I met him, I'm not sure if what I see is someone I recognize.
The lamplight from the bedside table casts the room in warm amber. My reflection ghosts in the window behind me, the October evening darkening beyond the glass, and I stand with my arms wrapped around the belly that has changed the geography of my body in the three weeks since he last saw me. The curve is unmistakable now beneath the soft wool of my sweater dress. Our daughter, making herself known.
