Chapter 7 Lucia
LUCIA
Irefuse his nightcap.
Tell Giovanni I’m tired, that the day has wrung me dry and I need sleep more than I need another measured conversation in which my life is discussed like a hostile takeover.
He studies me for a moment too long, eyes sharp, assessing, but he lets me go with a faint nod that feels less like permission and more like postponement.
The moment the door closes behind me, the house swallows the sound.
Emerald House is too quiet at night.
Not the comforting hush of safety, but the deliberate stillness of a place designed to hear everything. Thick walls. Endless corridors. Security so subtle it feels organic, like the house itself is watching.
I pace.
Back and forth across the guest bedroom, bare feet sinking into the plush rug, then lifting again as if the floor might burn me if I stay still too long.
My thoughts race in ugly, overlapping loops.
There are no good options. No clever exits. No scenario where I walk away cleanly and intact.
Giovanni has already closed every door I can see, and several I suspect I haven’t found yet.
I stop by the window, stare out at the darkened grounds, then turn away again because looking at freedom from behind glass makes something inside my chest ache too sharply.
I pace again.
My hands curl, unclench. I tell myself to breathe… tell myself panic is useless.
But panic doesn’t listen.
When the nausea hits, it’s sudden and alarming, a hot, hollow churn low in my belly that makes me gasp and brace my hands on the dresser.
No.
Not this.
Yet I swallow hard and reach for my phone, already knowing exactly what I’m going to do even as I tell myself I shouldn’t.
I sit on the edge of the bed, shoulders hunched, screen lighting my face in the dim room.
Isabella Bellandi.
The name looks wrong typed out in black and white. I hesitate for half a second, then hit search.
The internet answers mercilessly.
She’s insanely beautiful. Because of course she is.
Dark hair, glossy and disciplined. Features sculpted rather than softened. The kind of elegance that doesn’t need explanation or apology. Photographed at charity galas, art openings, events where money whispers instead of shouts.
She’s cultured, composed. And nothing like me.
Jealousy slithers through me, hot and unwelcome, winding itself around my ribs with vicious precision.
I scroll faster than I mean to, pulse thudding, my chest tight. As I surmised, she looks like she belongs in Giovanni’s world.
And the thought of her in my place, standing where I stood, wearing his name with ease, understanding his silences instead of flinching from them, makes my stomach heave again.
I drop the phone onto the bed as if it’s burned me.
God help me, I’m still wildly attracted to my husband.
The realisation lands hard, humiliating in its clarity.
I want him.
I hate him.
I want him.
And the thought of another woman in his arms makes something feral rear up inside me, something venomous and furious and sharp-edged enough to scare me with its intensity.
If that isn’t a weakness just waiting to be exploited by Giovanni Dragoni, I don’t know what is.
I drag a hand through my hair and laugh softly, breathless and brittle.
Isn’t this better?
The thought creeps in quietly, insidiously.
Surely my absence clears the path. Surely my removal solves his problem. He marries the woman he was meant to marry, the woman bred and trained for this world, and the knives aimed at my throat turn elsewhere.
I hadn’t had the courage to say it at the dinner table.
But the logic is there.
Clean, cold. Relentless.
Unless… I stop pacing as a different thought takes shape, heavier, darker.
Sicilians don’t believe in divorce.
The phrase surfaces unbidden, something I once half-joked about, half-dismissed when Giovanni brushed off my early attempts to understand his family’s traditions.
He never said it outright but he never denied it either.
Is that it?
Is my life hanging in the balance because of some primal, unyielding belief that marriage is permanent, unbreakable, worth spilled blood?
I close my eyes, a chill rippling through me that has nothing to do with fear of Bellandi and everything to do with the man downstairs.
I pace until the clock on the bedside table ticks over to 12:47 a.m. The house remains silent. Too silent.
Finally, I stop in front of the dressing room, my heart beginning to pound harder. I don’t… can’t think.
Thinking will stop me.
I spot my running shoes first, then keep searching until I see my gym bag.
My pulse spikes.
My phone is already in my hand. My bank card sits tucked into the slim wallet I never unpacked fully, as if some part of me always knew I’d need it quickly.
I strip off my dress and pull on shorts and a fitted top, movements brisk and efficient, muscle memory taking over where courage wavers. Then I shove the phone and card into my pockets.
No passport; I don’t even need to look to know Giovanni will have taken possession of it by now.
No luggage to weigh me down. Card and phone are just enough to run.
I move back into the bedroom and stand before the window, resting my palms against the cool glass.
The grounds stretch out below, dark and manicured, paths winding through shadow and moonlight towards the sea beyond.
My reflection stares back at me, eyes bright, skin pale, jaw set with a determination that feels equal parts desperate and defiant.
I don’t know if this will work.
But I know I can’t stay still and wait.
I slide the window open.
The night swallows me whole the moment my feet hit the stone terrace.
The air is cool, salt-sharp, scented faintly with jasmine and the ocean beyond, and for one wild, reckless heartbeat, I believe I might actually make it.
I run.
Not carefully or even quietly.
I run like a woman whose blood has turned to fire, whose lungs are already screaming, whose only coherent thought is forward, forward, forward.
The grounds stretch out ahead of me in long, deceptive curves, pale gravel paths winding through dark hedges and sculpted palms that feel suddenly predatory in their stillness.
I don’t look back.
I don’t want to see his men and I most definitely do not want to see him. Because if I see Giovanni Dragoni standing there in the moonlight, calm and inevitable and already certain of how this ends, something inside me will shatter.
My breath comes ragged. My heart pounds against my ribs hard enough to bruise.
I make it halfway down the slope before I hear it. The soft, unmistakable murmur of men speaking into earpieces.
My blood turns to ice.
They’re already moving. Of course they are.
I veer left, cutting off the path and plunging through a stand of low palms, gravel flying as I skid, barely catching myself before I go down hard.
The jetty glimmers faintly ahead through the trees.
The sea beyond it is a dark, restless mass, silvered by moonlight.
Hope flares again, stupid and desperate as I burst out of the palms and sprint for it. The boards of the jetty thud under my feet, echoing obscenely loud in the stillness.
The small motorboat tied at the end bobs gently against the cleats. My hands are shaking so badly I fumble the rope twice.
“Lucia.”
His voice is behind me. Calm and even and, fuck him, certain.
My breath catches. My vision blurs. “No,” I whisper, even as my fingers finally get the knot loose.
The engine key is already in the ignition.
Of course it is. I twist it— Just as strong arms close around my waist, hauling me backwards so violently I scream.
“No! Let me go!” I thrash, clawing at him, nails scraping uselessly over wet linen. “Fuck you, Giovanni! Just let me go! Tell them you couldn’t find me! Let me go and marry your Isabella!”
He stops. Actually stops. The sudden stillness is so complete it makes my chest seize. His grip tightens with unmistakable finality.
Then he bends his head until his mouth is close to my ear. “…Is that what this is about?” he asks softly.
My entire body goes rigid.
“You’re jealous?”
I spin in his arms and shove at his chest with both hands. “Don’t you dare,” I hiss. “Don’t you fucking dare reduce this to—”
He laughs. A low, dark sound that vibrates straight through me.
“Madonna santa.” He shakes his head slowly, eyes burning. “You run from armed men into the ocean at one in the morning, and you want me to believe this isn’t at least a little about another woman wearing my name?”
“I hate you!” I choke.
An almost resigned look flits across his face, but it’s gone in the next instant. “I know you think you do.”
A low, feral scream rises in my diaphragm. I twist again, desperate, and this time my foot slips on the wet boards.
We go down together.
Hard.
The jetty tilts violently and then we’re in the water, the shock of cold stealing my breath, salt flooding my mouth as I surface spluttering and furious.
Giovanni comes up with me instantly, one arm locked around my waist, dragging me back against his chest.
“You are absolutely impossible,” he snarls into my hair.
“Let me go!”
I beat at his chest, weak and furious and shaking all over.
“No.”
He wades out of the water with me still locked against him, boots thudding back onto the jetty, water streaming from both of us.
I don’t stop fighting. “Stop pretending I’m not giving you a great way out!” I scream. “I’m sure she’s laid out on a silver platter right now, waiting her turn to be Isabella Dragoni!”
He freezes again. Slowly, deliberately, he looks down at me. Moonlight cuts his face into something brutal and beautiful and terrifying.
“Amuri mio,” he says softly, dangerously. “If you say her name one more time, I will make you regret it.”
I laugh hysterically. “Why? Because she’s everything I’m not?”
His jaw tightens. “No,” he says quietly. “Because you’re everything she will never be.”
I open my mouth to scream something else at him. But he hoists me up into his arms instead, slinging me over his shoulder like I weigh nothing.
“Put me down!”
“No.”
“I swear to God, Giovanni, I will—”