Chapter 28 Natalia
NATALIA
The beach house feels wrong.
Nothing’s moved. Nothing’s changed. But I came back a different person, and now the whole place feels like a set built for someone else’s life.
I made it as far as the couch. Bag on the floor, deadbolt thrown, shoes still on. I’m still in my clothes from yesterday. I didn’t sleep on the flight home. Hard to close your eyes on a plane owned by the family that wants you dead.
I stare at the wall and try to think about nothing. It doesn’t work, because Luca’s jacket is still draped over the back of the kitchen chair. His flip-flops are still on the mat by the front door. One of his sketches is still pinned under a magnet on the fridge.
The whole house is full of him, and I am trying very hard to sit still on this couch and not tear every trace of the man out of these walls with my bare hands.
Instead, I pull out my phone.
The screen lights up, and my thumb goes straight to his contact before I can stop it.
Luca
No last name. Just a number.
My thumb hovers over the call button, and I hate myself for it.
I walked out of a hotel room in tears because this man was sent here to kill me, and my first instinct now is still to call him.
Because he would pick up.
Because he would listen.
Because for almost a month, he was the only person on this planet who made me feel like a human being instead of a chess piece, and my stupid, starving heart hasn’t caught up to the part where that should matter less than the truth.
Except it doesn’t matter less. That’s the problem.
It wasn’t all fake, I know that. The amnesia was real. The way he looked at me was real. The pasta and the sketches and the way he held me in the dark were real, and that makes the betrayal worse, not better, because it means I fell for the actual man and the actual man is Luca Andretti.
I lock the phone and drop it on the cushion beside me like it burned me.
Coffee. Coffee is a thing I can do.
The kitchen is too quiet without him in it. I stand at the counter while the machine sputters and hisses, and when my eyes drift back to my phone, I tell myself I’m only checking my messages out of habit.
There’s a text from his number, sent a few hours ago while I was somewhere over Virginia, staring out a dark window at nothing.
I just need you to know that I won’t let my family hurt you. You’re safe from us. From me.
I stare at the words until they blur. The phone dims in my hand and goes dark.
Of course he’d say exactly the thing that gets under my skin. Not I miss you. Not please talk to me. Not some dramatic declaration.
You’re safe.
I set the phone down like it might bite me and turn toward the coffee maker because caffeine is the only stable relationship in my life.
By the time it finishes brewing, my hands have steadied a little.
I pour a cup, wrap both palms around the mug, and tell myself I am absolutely not going to call him.
A knock cracks through the house so sharply that hot coffee sloshes over my fingers.
My whole body goes rigid.
Nobody comes here. Nobody knows this address except my father and Nikolai and now, apparently, the Andretti family. My eyes dart to the kitchen drawer where I keep the mace. Then to the front door, where the deadbolt is still thrown.
“Nat?”
The tension bleeds out of my shoulders so fast I almost sag.
Luca.
Another knock, harder this time. “Natalia, please. I know you’re in there.”
I set the mug down with a clack that sounds much louder than it should in the stillness of the kitchen. My pulse has gone haywire, slamming at my throat hard enough to make swallowing difficult.
I walk to the door. My hand goes to the deadbolt.
I don’t turn it.
“I’m not opening it,” I call back.
Silence for half a beat. Then, “Okay.”
“If you came here to apologize again,” I say, “save your breath.”
“I’m sorry,” he says immediately, voice rough through the door. “And I know that doesn’t do shit right now.”
My eyes sting. Annoying. Very annoying.
“Then why are you here?”
There’s a pause. Long enough that I know he’s choosing his words carefully.
“Because my uncle already knows about this house,” he says. “He’s been here once. And I told my brother I’m not doing it. That means this situation won’t stay buried for long, and I don’t know how fast the fallout is going to move. You may not be safe here alone.”
The coffee turns to acid in my stomach. The house suddenly feels less like shelter and more like a target with a cute coastal paint job.
“So, you’re saying they’ll send someone else.”
“I’m saying I don’t know what they’ll do, and until I do, you being here alone is a problem.”
I swallow. My throat clicks. “So you didn’t come here to win me back. You came here because you think I’m going to get killed.”
“Both,” he says, and at least he doesn’t pretend. “I came because both of those things are true and I couldn’t sit in that hotel room and let you be here alone.”
Silence stretches between us with the door as its spine.
“I know you’re sorry,” I say. “I believe you’re sorry. That’s not the question.”
“Then what is?”
I’ve been turning this over since somewhere around thirty thousand feet, with nothing to do but sit with my choices.
“You said your family wanted revenge. That someone was killed, and I was supposed to be the answer.” My voice is steady, and I’m proud of that. “So what I want to know is: why were you the one who said yes? Out of everyone in your family, why did it have to be you?”
The silence on the other side stretches. I can practically feel him shift his weight on the porch.
My voice sharpens. “No more broad strokes. No more revenge and war and family business. Why you? Why this? Why was proving whatever the hell you wanted to prove worth my life?”
That one must hit. I know it does, because when he speaks again, his voice sounds stripped.
“I was sixteen when I did something stupid.”
I lean my shoulder against the wall beside the entryway and close my eyes, listening.
“It was the kind of stupid that doesn’t just blow up one night and disappear.
It sticks. Gets built into the way people look at you.
Or maybe just the way you think they do.
” He lets out a breath that sounds scraped raw.
“After that, I spent years feeling like I was standing outside my own family, trying to earn my way back in.”
I don’t say anything.
On the other side of the door, the porch boards creak.
“So when my father needed someone to handle this, when he looked at me and said this matters, I didn’t think. I just said yes. Because for the first time, he was looking at me like I was the son who could actually get it done.”
I press my forehead against the door.
“So my life,” I say carefully, “was worth less to you than a pat on the head from your father.”
“Yes.” No hesitation. “That’s exactly what it was. And I will live with that for the rest of my life.”
I breathe. In through my nose, out through my mouth. I’m not sure it helps.
“You took one bad thing and let it turn into your whole life,” I say. “Nobody even had to keep punishing you. You were already doing it to yourself.”
He doesn’t answer.
Which, somehow, is answer enough.
I pace two steps into the living room before turning back again.
“You stood in my house and told me I didn’t have to be my family,” I say. “You looked me in the face and said I could choose something different. Meanwhile you were still out here acting like the only way to matter was to do the ugliest thing your family asked of you.”
“Natalia—”
“No.” My voice cracks through the house hard enough to sting my own ears. “You don’t get to turn this into some sad story about how hard your life has been. This is my life. My body. My name in your family’s mouth. Do you understand that?”
“Yes,” he says immediately, his voice rough. “I do.”
Silence presses against the door between us.
“When you ask why I said yes,” he says, “that’s the answer. I said yes because I was still stupid enough to think if I proved myself useful in the worst possible way, it would finally make me worth something.”
A sick twist moves through my stomach.
Because that, at least, I understand. The hunger in it. The humiliation of wanting so badly to be chosen that you’ll let yourself be used by the people doing the choosing.
“But then I met you,” he says, voice barely there.
I shut my eyes.
“And all at once I had both things in my hands. The chance I’d been chasing for years, and you.
A woman who could’ve learned to be hard a long time ago and somehow didn’t.
Who still takes care of people. Who still makes room for people.
Who looked at a half-dead stranger on a beach and decided not to leave him there. ”
My eyes burn, and I refuse to examine why. I do not need him out there naming the softest parts of me like he still gets to have them.
“And every day after I remembered who I was, every hour I didn’t tell you, I knew exactly what I was doing. I was choosing the version of me that got to keep you a little longer over the version that did the right thing.”
I believe him. Not because it excuses anything. It doesn’t. Because it makes every good moment we had feel even more real, and therefore harder to survive.
“You don’t get credit for knowing better while you were doing it,” I force out.
“I know.”
My throat burns.
“I still don’t trust you.”
Silence stretches on the other side of the door.
“Then don’t,” he says quietly.
I frown. “Don’t what?”
“Don’t trust me. Not yet.” His voice roughens. “But I still don’t think you should be in that house alone.”
My hand tightens at my side.
“Nat, please.” A beat. “Can I come in?”
I straighten up. Wipe my face with the back of my hand.
He’s not the man I thought he was two days ago. He’s also not the monster I tried to make him into on the flight home. He’s a person who did a terrible thing for a pathetic reason, and the pathetic reason is one I understand down to the bone.
That doesn’t mean I trust him.
That doesn’t mean I forgive him.
But I’m alone in a house that’s no longer safe, and the only person telling me I’m in danger is the same person who put me there. And I need to know what I’m dealing with.