Chapter 32
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Luca
The doorman calls up at ten past nine, and by the time he finishes his first sentence I'm already at the elevator with my coat over my arm.
Vico Orsini stands in the middle of my lobby with his hands in his pockets, studying the mailboxes like he's thinking of buying the building.
Two of his men wait by the glass doors. Liam is here for the Pietro meeting.
He came early. He's already positioned near the front desk, angled so he can see all three of them.
Gemma is upstairs making Nina's lunch. That fact drives my legs faster than they want to move on the bad one.
"Farro." Vico turns. His smile arrives before the rest of him. "Nice place. Good light."
"You don't get to come here." I stop close enough that his men shift their feet. "You want to talk, you fucking call. That was the deal."
"My father doesn't like phones." He examines the ceiling, taking his time, letting me watch him do it. "He wants another dinner. Just her this time. Him and Gemma. A small table. No Sartori escort, no husband hovering behind her chair."
"No."
"You didn't think about it."
"I don't need to think about it. The answer's no, and it's going to stay no, so get the fuck out of my lobby."
Vico's smile doesn't slip. He leans in, close enough that his cologne reaches me, and drops his voice to a level the doorman can't hear.
"He's her father," he says. "He has the right."
My hand is on his collar before I've decided anything. The fabric bunches in my fist and his heels leave the floor half an inch, and his two men reach into their jackets at the same moment Liam says my name, one word, flat.
"Luca."
Vico doesn't fight the grip. That's the worst part. He hangs there loose and comfortable, eyes on mine, waiting to see what I'll teach him about myself.
Liam's hand closes on my shoulder. He steps between us with the ease of a man separating dinner guests, straightens his tie, and looks at Vico's men until their hands come out of their jackets empty.
"Mr. Orsini was just leaving," Liam says.
Vico smooths his collar where I creased it.
He's still smiling. He's been smiling since I stepped off the elevator, and I understand now that the smile was the whole point of coming in person.
"Think about the dinner, Farro. The old man's patient now until he stops being. Give my best to your wife."
He walks out with his men flanking him, and the glass doors sigh shut behind them. I stand in my own lobby breathing through my nose with my hands aching to be around his throat.
"You're bleeding rage all over the floor," Liam says. "Stop it."
"He came to my fucking building."
"Yes. And you gave him exactly what he came for." He nods at the window, where Vico's car pulls from the curb without hurry. "He'll tell his father you lost your composure in under a minute. Don't let them see you like that again. It reads like they've won. Car's out back."
I take the stairs down to the garage because the elevator would mean standing still, and standing still isn't available to me right now. The cold in the stairwell helps. By the time I drop into the passenger seat, my hands have stopped wanting things.
Liam drives. Ten blocks pass before my jaw unclenches enough to talk.
"He said it out loud," I say. "Father. In a public lobby, with a doorman twenty feet away. He wanted to see if I'd react."
"You did."
"I know I fucking did." I look out at the gray lake between the buildings. Gemma is cutting the crusts off a sandwich, and she doesn't know, and every day I don't tell her the lie gets a floor added to it. "If she'd come down for something? If Nina had been with her?"
"She didn't." Liam changes lanes. "Deal with the problem in front of you, not the six that didn't happen."
I let that sit. He's right, which doesn't improve my mood, so I change the subject to the first thing that isn't Orsini.
"How's Ava?"
Liam clears his throat. It's a small sound, but I've been in cars with this man before, and he doesn't make small sounds. "I haven't seen her."
I turn my head and look at him. He keeps his eyes on the road, both hands correct on the wheel, and the silence in the car changes weight.
Ava has been in Chicago almost a month. Liam and Riccardo were best friends. Liam stood at Riccardo's grave in the rain and didn't move for an hour. I know because I was posted forty meters behind him. And he hasn't seen Riccardo's widow in the four weeks she's been back in the same city?
"Something wrong?" I ask.
"No." He says, and I know that it’s pointless to push him.
"Riccardo asked me to watch her," I say. "If anything happened to him. He was joking when he said it. Mostly."
"He asked me the same thing." Liam's voice stays level, but his jaw sets, and the London comes up under his accent the way it does when he's tired. "He wasn't joking with me."
Neither of us says anything after that.
Gemma
The phone is warm against my ear because we've been talking for twenty minutes, which is longer than any call I've made in a year and a half.
"The dishwasher's making a noise again," my mother says. "Your father won't call anyone. He watched a video about it and now he owns a wrench he doesn't know how to use."
"That sounds right," I say.
Nina looks up from her crayons at the kitchen table. She's been quiet the whole call, drawing a dog she's not getting, but now she slides off her chair and comes to me with both hands out.
"Can I talk to Grandma? Please?"
My mother hears her through the line and says, "Is that my girl? Put her on, Gemma," and I hand the phone over because I don't have a reason not to that I can say out loud.
Nina holds the phone with both hands like it's full of water.
"Hi, Grandma. I'm drawing a dog. He has spots." A pause. "Brown ones." Another pause. "No, we don't have a dog. Mama said the building doesn't allow it."
I wipe the counter.
"We have a big TV now," Nina says. "And I have a yellow blanket and my own bed and Mr. Luca made pancakes. He burned one but I taught him the bubble trick and then they were good."
I stop wiping.
"He's very nice to us," Nina says. "He bought me a bear. Her name is Bear."
I cross the kitchen and put my hand out. "Okay, baby, Mama needs the phone back. I have a lot to do."
"But I was telling her—"
"I know, sweetheart. You can tell her more next time. Go finish your dog."
Nina hands the phone over and goes back to her crayons without arguing, which is a thing about her I still hate, how easy she gives things up. My mother is waiting.
"Sorry," I say. "It's getting late and I've got—"
"Gemma. Who is Mr. Luca?"
"He's someone who's been helping us," I say. "I'll explain someday. I promise. Just not on the phone."
My mother sighs.
"I don't know what I did," she says. "I've gone over it. Your whole childhood, I've gone over it. I don't know what I did wrong that made you stop trusting me."
Her voice cracks on the last word. My mother doesn't cry on the phone. She saves it, the same as I do, and hearing her get close to it settles in my chest as an actual weight, low, under the sternum.
"Mom. It's not about trust."
"Eighteen months of two-minute calls, Gemma. A new number every time I turn around. A man my granddaughter calls Mr. Luca that I've never heard of. What am I supposed to think?"
"You didn't do anything wrong." I lean against the counter. "I trust you with my life. That's the truth. It's the only part of this I can say plain, so believe it."
"Then why—"
"Because I don't want you to know how bad I let it get.
" It comes out level, the way I say everything, but my eyes are burning and I turn so Nina can't see my face.
"I don't want you, Dad and Aidan sitting at that table thinking I did everything wrong.
Picked wrong, stayed wrong, ran wrong. I couldn't stand it, Mom.
I'd rather you be hurt with me than done with me. "
"Gemma." Her voice is steady now, steadier than mine. "You are one of the kindest people I have ever known. You were kind before you could talk. There will never come a day when your father or your brother or I think you did everything wrong. That day doesn't exist. Do you hear me?"
I do hear her. That's the problem. The tears come and I don't stop them.
A small hand tugs my shirt. Nina is looking up at me, crayon still in her fist.
"Mama? Do you need my bear to feel better?"
A laugh comes out of me, wet and sudden, right through the crying. My mother hears it and laughs too, and for one second the three of us are in the same room even though we're in three different ones.
"I'm okay, baby," I tell Nina, and put my hand in her hair. "Finish your dog."
"That laugh," my mother says. "There she is." Then, quieter, "Whenever you're ready, I'll be here. I want to hear about Mr. Luca. All of it. Take your time, sweetheart. I'm not going anywhere."
"Okay," I say. "Love you, Mom. Give dad a kiss from us."
"We love you too, honey."
Luca's keys hit the bowl by the door hard enough that they bounce out onto the floor. He doesn't pick them up.
I'm at the sink with a dish towel in my hand and Nina asleep down the hall, and I know before he's taken three steps that tonight something went wrong.
His limp is worse, which means he's tired, and his jaw is set so tight I can see the muscle jump under the stubble.
I look at his hands. His knuckles aren't split.
So he didn't hit anyone. He wanted to, though.
It's all over him, in his shoulders, in the way he shrugs his coat off and drops it over the chair instead of hanging it.
"What happened?" I ask.
"Nothing." He goes to the cabinet, takes down a glass, sets it on the counter, and then doesn't pour anything into it.
"Okay," I say. Then, because the empty glass bothers me more than the answer, "That's not nothing."
"Gemma."
I put the towel down. Every instinct I own is telling me to be quiet. I don't. Whatever this is, it isn't aimed at me, and I'm done pretending I can't see things.
"You came in the door like you wanted to break it," I say. "Your glass is empty. So either tell me what happened or don't, but don't say 'nothing'."
He turns. The green of his eyes has gone dark in the low kitchen light, and he crosses the space between us in three steps. His hands land on the counter on either side of my hips, caging me in, and his mouth comes down on mine hard enough that my head tips back.
I grab his shirt in both fists and kiss him back harder, and the sound he makes against my mouth is low and rough.
He breaks off an inch. His breath is ragged. "Tell me to stop."
"No."
"I'm not going to be fucking gentle."
"Good."
He spins me. My palms slap the counter and the edge of it presses cold through my shirt, and behind me his hands are already at my waistband, shoving the sweatpants down my hips.
Dish soap and lemon in my nose, the city lights smeared across the dark window in front of me, his belt buckle hitting the floor.
Then his hand gathers my hair at the back of my skull, closes into a fist, and he pulls my head back until my spine curves.
"You feel that?" His voice is at my ear, wrecked and low. "That's me losing my goddamn mind over you."
He pushes into me in one long stroke and I have to bite my own forearm to keep quiet.
He doesn't ease me into it. He fucks me against the counter with his hips snapping hard enough to move me onto my toes, one hand fisted in my hair, the other gripping my hip so tight I'll find the marks tomorrow and be glad of them.
"Mine," he says. "You hear me? Every fucking inch of you. Nobody takes you. Nobody."
I can't answer. I'm past words, past everything except the counter edge, the stretch of him and the pull at my scalp that keeps me right here, right now, in my own body.
He shifts his angle and reaches around, his fingers finding my clit, rough and exact, and it builds fast, too fast, a tight coil low in my belly that snaps all at once.
"Luca." I say it into my arm. Then again, quieter. Then a third time, when the shaking takes my legs out and his grip is the only thing holding me up, his name over and over like it's the last word I know.
He pulls out with a curse and comes hot across my lower back, his forehead dropping to my shoulder, his whole chest heaving against me.
For a while neither of us moves. Then he cleans me with the dish towel, careful now, and pulls my clothes back into place like he's dressing something breakable. He turns me around, wraps his arms all the way across my back and hauls me into his chest.
His hands are shaking.
I feel it through my shirt, a fine tremor in both of them, and I don't say a word about it.
He kisses my temple. My cheekbone. The corner of my eye, my jaw, the bridge of my nose, small pressed kisses covering my whole face, and his arms don't loosen.
This is a man checking that I'm still here. Counting me.
I want him like that again, hard and certain, every time. But that wasn't want just now. He held me the way you hold a thing someone tried to take from you.
"Luca," I say into his collar. "What did they say to you?"
His arms tighten. He doesn't answer.