Chapter 32 Natalia
NATALIA
Luca is warm against my back, one arm draped over my waist, his bare skin still carrying a faint trace of smoke from the bonfire. When I shift, his hand moves with me, tightening for a second before settling again.
The way he held me after we came inside, all that heat and steady weight, until my body finally unclenched and the noise in my head went quiet for a little while.
Apparently not for long.
Now I’m wide awake again, staring into the dark with Luca curled around me and my father back where he always ends up, elbowing his way into every decent moment of my life.
I ease out a breath and shift onto my back.
Beside me, Luca lifts his head off the pillow. “You okay?”
“Can’t sleep.”
He makes a quiet, dissatisfied sound and tips his head toward mine. Even in the dark I can feel him focusing on me.
“Yeah,” he says. “Me neither.”
For a minute, neither of us says anything.
Moonlight lies pale across the foot of the bed, the curtains breathing faintly at the window.
Luca’s hand stays loose over my waist, but there’s nothing sleepy about the silence now.
It feels full. Like we’re both circling the same thing, waiting to see who says it first.
Then he asks, quietly, “What are you thinking about?”
“I keep thinking about what we said,” I tell him. “About my father. I have no idea what comes after this. How do we actually do it?”
Luca exhales through his nose. Not a sigh exactly. More like the sound of someone who’s been holding a thought and is almost relieved to let it out.
“Been thinking that too.”
“Because deciding is one thing. But my father...” I trail off, then make myself finish. “He’s not a careless man, Luca. He’s survived twenty years as Pakhan. People have tried before. He’s still here.”
“I know. I don’t think a direct move would work. He’s too insulated, too protected. You don’t come at a man like that head-on.” He lets that sit.
I turn in his arms so I can see him. The room is dim, but not black.
There’s enough light for the line of his jaw, the dark mess of his hair against the pillow, the serious set of his mouth.
He looks younger for exactly one second.
Then the expression in his eyes catches up, and he looks like himself again.
“So what, then?” I ask. “We just agreed to something impossible?”
“No.” He says it fast, but there’s a beat before anything else comes, and that tiny hesitation is all it takes.
I stare at him in the dark, dread settling heavier in my gut.
My father is still moving forward. The arrangement is still moving forward. And agreeing that Anton needs to die doesn’t actually change anything if we can’t figure out how to make it happen before he ships me off.
The thought lands hard enough that I feel suddenly, stupidly close to tears.
“If we can’t figure it out soon,” I say, throat tight, “then none of this matters anyway.”
Luca goes still beside me. “Nat—”
“I mean it.” I swallow. “We can lie here and say he has to go, but there’s still a deadline. My father isn’t going to pause his plans because I finally admitted I want him dead.” My voice thins, and I hate it. “If we don’t find a way to stop him, I’m still going to end up on a plane to Colombia.”
Luca’s arm tightens around me so fast it almost hurts.
“You’re not.” His voice is hot and fierce against my hair. “I’m not letting that happen.”
My throat aches.
I know he means it. That’s the problem. He means everything with his whole body, like sheer force of will ought to be enough to bend reality around the people he loves.
For a second he just holds me there, breathing hard.
Then he pulls back just enough to look at me. “What do you know about him?”
“Who? The Colombian?”
“Yeah.” His jaw is tight. “Anything.”
“Not much. His name is Luis Restrepo.”
Luca mutters a curse as his body goes rigid next to me.
“You know the name,” I say.
He swallows. “I know the name.”
He doesn’t elaborate. He doesn’t need to. The way his body changed when I said it tells me my fear of the man isn’t unfounded.
“What else do you know about the arrangement?” he asks. “Anything you’ve heard about how this alliance is supposed to work.”
“Almost nothing.” I let out an ugly laugh. “I wasn’t exactly included in the logistics.”
His thumb moves softly against my waist. “Think about it again. Anything you might’ve overheard. It might not have seemed important at the time.”
I exhale and stare past him at the ceiling.
I spent years teaching myself not to listen too closely. In my father’s house, understanding too much could be its own kind of danger. Most of it turned into noise after a while. But sometimes a detail still lodged where I didn’t want it.
After a second, a fragment tugs loose.
“Nikolai was on the phone,” I say slowly. “When he was here. I heard him talking about a shipment. Weapons, I think. He sounded impatient about timing, like it was supposed to happen soon and he wanted it done already.”
Luca’s thumb stops moving.
“He said something about it being the first real exchange. Show of good faith, I think. That was the phrase he used.” I’m putting the pieces together as I talk. “I didn’t think much of it then. I was just trying to get through the visit.”
I look at him. “Could that be about the alliance? About Restrepo?”
He doesn’t answer right away. His hand has flattened against my hip, warm and deliberate now, like he’s holding me in place while his mind races ahead.
“It could.”
I push myself up a little higher on the pillow.
“I think if your father’s building an alliance with a man like Luis Restrepo, it starts with something tangible. Something that proves both sides are serious.” He lets out a breath. “Weapons would do it.”
A pulse starts beating harder at the base of my throat. “So what does that mean?”
“It means this might be our opening.” He sits up now, the sheet falling to his waist, and the lazy warmth is gone out of him completely.
I can see the shift happen—the way his shoulders square, the way his eyes go flat and focused. This is the Luca that existed before he washed up on my beach. The one who was trained for exactly this kind of thinking.
“How?” I ask.
“Because if that’s the first real piece of business between your father and Restrepo, it’s the one thing neither of them can afford to have go wrong.”
I sit up and pull the sheet higher around myself.
“The trust isn’t there yet.” His eyes sharpen. “Not between men like that. If the first exchange goes bad, nobody shrugs and says ‘better luck next time.’ They start asking who screwed them. Who got sloppy. Who lied.”
A sick understanding starts to form inside me.
“And if it looks like my father did...”
Luca nods once. “Then Restrepo doesn’t have to wonder whether Anton’s worth doing business with. He has his answer.”
“You think he’d retaliate?”
“I think a man like that doesn’t take a public embarrassment and move on.” Luca’s eyes hold mine. “If that shipment disappears or gets hit or goes sideways in a way that points back to your father, the alliance may not survive it. Your father might not either.”
For a second, neither of us says anything. The ocean fills the silence. I can see the outline of it now. Not a plan yet, but the first sharp edge of one. A way to turn my father’s ambition into the thing that destroys him.
Luca looks at me. “Did Nikolai say when?”
I shake my head.
“Where it was coming in?”
“No.”
“Who was handling it on your father’s side?”
“I don’t know that either.”
Luca mutters a curse and drags a hand through his hair. The idea is there now, sharp enough to see, but every edge of it keeps catching on the same problem.
We don’t know enough.
For a moment, neither of us says anything. Moonlight cuts across his shoulder, pale against his skin. I stare at the ceiling and try not to let the panic come back, but it presses in anyway, cold and steady.
And the more I turn it over, the less room there seems to be for any other answer.
“No one is going to get closer to him than I can,” I say at last.
Luca turns his head toward me, and even in the dim light I feel the change in him. Something darker than that. Something that goes still all at once, like every part of him has locked on to what I just said and hates where it leads.
My pulse kicks harder, but I keep my voice steady. “If we need to know more about the shipment, I’m the one who has the best chance of finding out.”
“No.” The word comes out flat and immediate. “Absolutely not.”
I hold his gaze. “What’s the alternative? You go to your father with half a theory and nothing to back it up. No timeline. No details. No proof. Just a guess that maybe there’s a shipment somewhere and maybe it matters.”
“I’ll figure it out.”
“How?” I ask, not softly now. “You can’t get near my father.
Your family can’t get near my father.” I look at him in the dark.
“But I grew up in that house, Luca. I know his routines. I know when he sleeps, where he takes calls, when his office is empty. And he has never once in my life paid enough attention to me to notice what I’m doing. ”
He’s shaking his head before I finish, eyes hard in the dark.
“Nat, you’re talking about walking back into that house and putting yourself within reach of him again. You’re talking about handing yourself back to the man who has controlled every piece of your life since you were born and hoping he doesn’t notice you’ve stopped obeying him.”.
The words hit so close to the bone I have to pull in a careful breath before I answer.
“I know.” My voice doesn’t waver. “I know exactly what that house is.” I look at him, at the fury and fear fighting behind his eyes, and make myself say the rest. “But I also know I can survive it for a little longer, if that’s what it takes.
I’ve been surviving him my whole life. The difference now is that this time it would be for something.
This time it would be to get out for good. ”
He scrubs both hands over his face. The muscles in his forearm are tight. So is his mouth. I can hear the way he is breathing, controlled only in the loosest sense of the word.
“If he catches you,” he says at last, and his voice is lower now, roughened down to something that sounds scraped raw, “if he even starts to suspect—”
“He won’t,” I say, though the certainty of it feels thinner now that it is out in the open between us. “He never looks at me that closely. That’s the point. He never has.”
Luca turns his head back toward me. “That may have been true before. It may still be true most of the time. But the minute something shifts, the minute he feels something off, the minute one person says the wrong thing in the wrong room, you are the one standing there when it happens.”
His hand closes over the blanket between us so hard his knuckles show pale even in the dark. “Listen to me. If anything feels wrong, you get out. I don’t care if you have one useful detail or twenty. I don’t care if you think you’re close to finding something. You get out.”
Emotion presses so suddenly against the back of my throat that for a second, I can’t speak. There’s too much in his face, in his voice, in the force of the fear he’s trying and failing to keep under control.
“I know,” I whisper.
He lets out a breath that sounds more like pain than relief. “I hate this.”
A small, broken piece of warmth moves through me.
“I know that too,” I say.
The words settle between us for all of half a second before the next obstacle rises up behind them.
“There’s a problem, though,” I say. “My father sent me here because Vegas was too dangerous. He’s not going to call me home while your family is still breathing down his neck.”
Luca’s chest expands on a long breath.
“Which means I need to tell my father,” he says. “Everything.”
“I think you do.”
He’s quiet for a beat before determination flickers across his face.
“I will,” he says, “This helps. All of it. The shipment, the alliance, Restrepo. I’ve finally got something my father can actually use.”
He settles back against the pillow and pulls me into him, my cheek against his chest, his hand spread flat between my shoulder blades. I listen to his heartbeat. It’s slower than mine. Steadier. Like he’s already decided this is going to work and his body got the memo.
But the tension coiled tight inside of me doesn’t loosen.
Because now the shape of it is clear.
Luca goes to his family.
I go back to mine.
And somewhere in the middle of all that, we try to end a war without getting buried in it.