Chapter 21
Lucia
I wake up wrong.Not from a dream. From space. The ceiling is too high. Too smooth. No familiar crack running like a scar I’ve memorized in the dark. Light pours in from windows I didn’t choose, framed by curtains that fall perfectly, obediently, like they’ve never been yanked shut in a panic. The bed is enormous. Heavy. Dressed in linen that smells clean and expensive and untouched by fear.
Luxury presses in from every direction.
My chest tightens. For half a second, I don’t know where I am, and that’s enough. My body reacts before my mind can catch up. Heart slamming, breath shallow, nerves screamingwrong, wrong, wrong.
Then memory rushes in all at once.
The gala.
The hotel.
The gates.
Turo.
Nico.
I sit bolt upright, scanning the room. Empty.
And then…
“Mama?”
Down the hall.
My blood turns to ice. I’m out of bed before my feet fully hit the floor, moving on pure instinct. Fear doesn’t wait for logic. It doesn’t pause to remember there are guards and cameras and men who kill for a living stationed between my son and danger. All it knows is that Nico isn’t where I left him.
I run. The hallway stretches longer than it should, carpet swallowing the sound of my steps, which somehow makes it worse. My mind races ahead of me, already imagining hands, doors, mistakes I can never take back.
I round the corner and skid to a stop. Nico is sitting on the floor. Alive. Upright. Fine. He’s kneeling with intense concentration, lining up his toy cars in a perfect row, explaining something very seriously to a guard crouched in front of him.
“And this one,” Nico says, pushing a green car forward exactly one inch, “is the boss. He tells the other ones where to go.”
The guard listens like this is the most important briefing of his morning. Big man. Broad shoulders. Gun visible at his side. He nods solemnly.
“Smart,” he says. “Every team needs a boss.”
Nico considers this, then adjusts the spacing between the cars so they’re perfectly even. “Yeah,” he agrees.
I stand there, frozen, my breath trapped somewhere between my lungs and my throat. This isn’t what I expected. I expected shouting. Or indifference. Or men who look at my child like he’s an inconvenience attached to a woman they barely tolerate.
Instead, I’m watching my son be treated like a person.
That doesn’t calm me. It makes my skin prickle. Because this kindness exists inside a fortress. Because we’re in the don’s private wing, surrounded by his people, absorbed completely into a world I spent three years running from with my son tucked under my arm.
The guard notices me immediately. He straightens just enough to acknowledge me without towering over Nico.
“Good morning, ma’am.”
Nico looks up, grins. “Mama! He knows about racecars.”
I drop to my knees and pull Nico into my arms, holding him too tightly, breathing him in like oxygen. My heart thunders against my ribs as I catalog him.
“I was right here,” he says, mildly confused by my reaction.
