4. Nova #2
He lets me go immediately, no resistance, no hesitation. Just a clean release, his hands returning to his own space like they were never in mine.
“I’ll rewrap this,” he says, and his voice is perfectly steady, perfectly controlled.
Like he wasn’t just wiping tears off my face with his thumb.
Like I wasn’t just leaning into his touch like a woman starving for contact.
“The doctor will want to see it this afternoon, but for now, it should stay covered.”
I watch him work. Watch those hands - capable, steady, so impossibly gentle - wind fresh bandages around my broken wrist. Watch the concentration on his face, the furrow between his brows, the way his lips press together when he’s focused.
Two years married, I think, and I never once felt this.
A week in this house and I can’t stop.
“There.” He fastens the bandage with a small metal clip. “Try not to move it too much.”
“Thank you.”
He looks up at me, and something passes between us - something electric, something perilous, something I’m too scared and too smart and too broken to name.
“Get some rest,” he says. “I’ll send lunch up at noon.”
He stands. Walks to the door. Pauses with his hand on the frame.
“Nova.”
“Yes?”
“You’re going to be safe here. I promise.”
He leaves before I can respond.
I sit in the sunlit room, cradling my bandaged wrist against my chest, and I think about the way he said it - steady and certain, like the simplest fact in the world. The way his thumb felt on my cheek. The way he looked at me like I was something worth protecting.
Dangerous, I think. This is a mistake.
But for the first time in two years, it doesn’t feel like something to run from.
It feels like something to run toward.
***
Luca
I make it to the end of the hallway before I have to stop.
I brace my hand against the stone wall, press my forehead to the cool surface, and breathe. In. Out. In. Out. The same rhythm I used last night in my study, the same desperate attempt at control.
It’s not working.
I touched her face.
The thought loops through my brain like a fever. I touched her face. I wiped her tears away with my thumb. I sat on her bed and held her wrist and listened to her story and looked into her eyes and I wanted-
God, what I wanted.
I wanted to pull her into my arms and hold her until she stopped shaking.
I wanted to kiss the tears off her cheeks and then kiss lower, her jaw, her throat, the pulse beating rapid beneath her skin.
I wanted to lay her back on that ridiculous velvet bed and worship every inch of her body until she forgot every cruel word, every careless touch, every moment of pain my family inflicted on her.
I wanted to take her apart with my hands and my mouth and put her back together into something new. Something unbreakable. Something mine.
And I couldn’t do any of it.
Because she’s fragile. Because she’s traumatized. Because she came to me broken and bleeding and the last thing she needs is a man who’s been obsessed with her for three years deciding that now is the appropriate time to stake his claim.
She’s not yours to claim, I tell myself savagely. She’s not yours at all. She’s a guest. A person in need of protection. You are going to keep your hands to yourself if it kills you.
It might actually kill me.
I push off the wall. Straighten my shirt. Run a hand through my hair and try to look like a man who has his shit together, a man who didn’t just spend twenty minutes touching his brother’s ex-wife and imagining what she’d sound like if he touched her somewhere else.
The study. I need the study. I need a locked door and a glass of whiskey and about an hour of staring at financial reports until my blood pressure returns to something approaching normal.
I’m halfway there when my phone buzzes.
Marta, the screen reads.
I answer immediately. “What’s wrong?”
“She’s looking.” Marta’s voice is barely a whisper - she must be somewhere in the house, stealing a moment between duties. “The signora. She’s asking questions. Where did Nova go? Who helped her? How did she disappear so completely?”
“Let her ask.”
“Signore, she’s-” A pause. The sound of footsteps in the background. “She’s bringing in investigators. Real ones. The kind who don’t stop until they find answers.”
I think about Nova upstairs, sleeping in my guest room, wearing bandages I put on her myself. I think about my mother’s investigators, sniffing around my territory, getting close to my walls.
I think about what I’ll do if anyone tries to take her from me.
“Keep your head down,” I tell Marta. “Stay invisible. Report only when it’s safe.”
“And if she gets close?”
“She won’t.”
“But if she does-”
“Then I’ll handle it.”
I hang up.
The study. The whiskey. The financial reports.
But first, I make another call.
“Double the security on the gates,” I tell my head of staff. “No one in or out without my personal approval. And the east wing - I want someone stationed there at all times. If anyone gets within a hundred meters of that room, I want to know about it before they draw their next breath.”
“Expecting trouble, signore?”
I think about Nova’s tears on my thumb. The way she leaned into my touch like she’d been starving for gentleness her whole life.
“Always,” I say. “But this time, I’m ready for it.”
***
Somewhere across the city, I know my mother is standing in her marble foyer, staring at a photograph of the son she disowned - the one she couldn’t break, the one who got away. And for the first time in years, she’s beginning to understand that she underestimated me.