Chapter 23 Natalia
NATALIA
Thank god for Plan B.
I wash it down with the last of my coffee, grimacing at the bitter swallow as I lean against the kitchen counter.
My body still feels used in all the ways that make my face heat when I think about last night for too long. My neck is tender where Luca bit me. My hips ache. There’s a lingering soreness between my thighs that makes every shift of my weight feel a little too intimate.
From the bedroom, I hear Luca move. He’s been restless all night. Twitching, murmuring things I couldn’t catch, pulling me closer in his sleep like I was something he was afraid of losing. When I woke this morning with his arm locked around my waist, I snuck out to the pharmacy and let him sleep.
The way he touched me last night wasn’t like the afternoon. The afternoon was discovery. Careful. Tender because I was new, and he wanted it to be right.
Last night, he fucked me like he was running out of time.
I press my thumb into the bruise on my hip. Purple blooms under the pressure, and my stomach does something complicated. Not pain. Not quite pleasure.
Something changed in him yesterday. Not just the memory he drew on paper. Something underneath it. Something he still isn’t saying.
My phone buzzes on the counter, yanking me out of my thoughts. Anna’s care facility. My throat tightens before I even answer.
“Hello?”
“Ms. Kozlov? This is Patricia Langford, Director of Care at Sunrise Meadows. I’m calling about Anna Petrova.”
Everything else falls away.
“Is she okay? What happened?”
“Ms. Petrova had a fall this morning during breakfast. EMS transported her to Summerlin Medical Center about an hour ago. She’s been stabilized, but the ER team is evaluating her for a likely hip fracture.”
My hand braces against the counter. Hip fracture. In a woman Anna’s age, with her cognitive decline, the words land like a blow. Surgery. Anesthesia. Rehab she may not understand, let alone tolerate. I know enough to understand how bad this could get.
“Is she in pain? Does she know what’s happening?”
“The hospital has her comfortable. She was confused at the scene, but that’s consistent with her baseline.
The reason I’m calling is that Dr. Okafor and the surgical team need to speak with you as soon as possible.
Given Ms. Petrova’s cognitive status, she may not have capacity to consent.
They can discuss surgical authorization with you by phone if they need to move quickly, but they also want you there in person as soon as possible for post-operative decisions, discharge planning, and rehab placement. ”
My fingers grip the counter’s edge. I close my eyes.
“Okay,” I say, even though my voice shakes. “I’ll wait for their call. And then I’m on my way.”
“We’ll let the hospital know.”
“And please, if anything changes before I arrive, call me immediately.”
“Of course, Ms. Kozlov.”
I barely have time to lower the phone before it rings again. This time it’s Dr. Okafor. She confirms the hip fracture, walks me through the surgery and the risks, and asks for my consent as Anna’s guardian. My voice shakes when I give it, but I do.
By the time the call ends, they’re prepping her for the OR, and I’m promising Dr. Okafor I’ll be there as soon as I can.
I stand there in the silent kitchen with the phone still pressed to my ear long after the line goes dead.
Anna is in a hospital. Confused, in pain, surrounded by strangers in a place she doesn’t recognize. And I am over two thousand miles away on a beach, exactly where my father wanted me.
My mind spins, a frantic Rolodex of impossible options, each one worse than the last.
I could call my father. Tell him Anna fell. Ask him to let me go.
The thought barely forms before it curdles.
My father never cared about Anna. She was the help.
The woman who raised his inconvenient daughter so he wouldn’t have to be bothered, and he tolerated her for exactly as long as she made his life easier.
He’s only paying for her care as a way to keep me under this thumb.
He is not going to hear “she’s in the hospital” and suddenly grow a conscience.
He sent me here to stay put until the wedding, and a sick old woman is not going to outweigh risking an alliance he desperately needs.
Fine. Then I go without asking.
Just buy a ticket. Walk out the door and deal with the fallout later.
But the credit card in my wallet is a leash, not a key. The moment I swipe it for a plane ticket, my father will know. He’ll see the charge before the gate agent even calls my boarding group.
Do I have enough cash? Ugh. Barely over a hundred dollars. Definitely not enough for a flight to Las Vegas.
Panic claws at my throat, hot and sharp. Anna needs me. And I’m trapped.
“Nat?”
I look up. Luca is standing in the doorway, his hair damp from a shower. The concern on his face is immediate, his brow furrowed.
He crosses the room in three long strides, his hands landing on my shoulders. “Natalia, what is it? You’re pale as a ghost.”
“It’s Anna,” I choke out, the words tasting like ash. “She fell. They think she broke her hip. I have to… I have to get to Vegas.”
I pull away from him, pacing the small kitchen like a caged animal.
“I don’t have enough money for a flight. And even if I did…” I trail off, the unspoken threat of my father hanging between us.
“I’ll take you,” he says.
The words are so simple, so certain, they stop my frantic pacing cold. I turn to stare at him.
“What? How? Did you suddenly remember you have a pilot’s license and a jet stashed in a local hangar?”
“Something like that.” He doesn’t quite meet my eyes.
I stare at him, my mind catching on the impossibility of it all. “Luca, that’s not an answer.”
“I can get a plane. A private one. We can be in the air in a couple hours.”
I stare at him.
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 then disappears 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.
His touch is gentle, but his eyes are not. They’re dark, intense, watching me with a hunger that has nothing to do with comfort and everything to do with possession.
“Let me help,” he murmurs. His hand slides higher on my leg.
He’s right. I hate that he’s right. My brain is a hamster wheel of worst-case scenarios. I can’t stop it on my own, and he knows that.
I know exactly what he’s doing. He’s building a wall of sensation high enough that I can’t see over it. Replacing one unbearable thing with another, more bearable one. It’s a deflection. It’s a kindness. It might be both.
His fingers trace the inseam of my leggings. Featherlight and devastating, and my breathing turns shallow.
“The attendant...”
“Is behind a curtain and getting paid not to care.”
His fingers slip inside my waistband.
Heat floods my face instantly. My thighs part before I tell them to. He brushes me once through my panties and draws in a sharp breath against my temple.
That tiny sound almost undoes me.
I turn my head and look at him.