I sit very still and I listen.
I feel very cold and very still.
"What about my mother?" I ask, my voice barely above a whisper. "How was she supposed to know when to get out?"
Luca swallows.
His jaw tightens and he looks at me and I wipe my eyes with the back of my hand and I wait.
"She wasn't," he says.
The room is very quiet.
"She wasn't part of the arrangement."
Tears stab my chest, he leans forward and his hand comes up to wipe my face and I turn away from it and I look at the window and I exhale through my nose until the worst of it passes.
"I want to go home," I say flatly.
"Nathalie, you're still weak, you were drugged last night and you need—" He stops himself. I feel him looking at me and then he says, very quietly, "I know you hate me."
I sit with that for a moment.
I don't know what I feel. There is too much of it and it is all arriving at the same time and none of it has had the chance to settle into anything I can name yet.
"Nathalie." He moves closer and his hands cup my face, tilting it up toward his, and his eyes are desperate in a way I have never seen them before. "Your father is dangerous. You know what heis now, you know what he is capable of. Let me protect you. I can keep you safe, I swear it."
I look at his face.
I take his hands from my face slowly, deliberately, and I hold them for a moment and I set them down in his lap.
"After you protect me," I ask, "then what?"
He leans forward. "Then you stay with me. Be mine. I'll protect you forever, I swear it on my honor and my life."
I look at him.
If he had said this an hour ago I would have melted. I would have folded into him without hesitation and I would have felt something close to peace. I know this about myself and I know that it is the truest thing about who I am when I am near him.
But an hour ago I didn't know about my mother.
"I can handle my father," I say.
"Nathalie—" Frustration moves through his voice. He stands abruptly and grabs my shoulders, his grip firm but not rough, and he looks at me with something close to pleading. "If this is about my father's role in this, stay and hate me for it. Stay andI'll take it. I'll avenge your mother, I'll keep you safe, I'll give you everything I have. Just stay."
I look at his face. The jaw, the pale eyes, the weight he has lost, the desperation in him that he has never shown to anyone and is showing to me now, and I feel it move through me like something breaking.
"You're right," I tell him quietly. "I hate you."
It is the biggest lie I have ever told. How could I hate a man I desired deeply?"
I throw back the sheets and I feel his eyes on me. I don't look at him because looking at him will undo everything and I say, "My family affairs are my business. I don't need your revenge or your protection." I make myself say the next part. "Why would I want anything from a man whose father helped murder my mother?"
The silence that follows is the worst silence I have ever stood in. I make myself look at him this time.
His face has gone pale. I feel my heart sink through the floor because fate is genuinely, spectacularly cruel and I cannot think of another word for what this is.
The door opens.
