47. Luna
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
LUNA
My question goes unanswered, and it’s clear as day. Nico wouldn’t have interfered. I was on my own. “I wanted him dead so I could survive!”
Nico’s face distorts. The room sways, or maybe it’s just me, but he takes a step back. Good, I think. Let him feel the devastation. Let him drown in the truth.
“Giovanni made sure there’d be no heir,” I say, my voice flat, clinical. “He never took me in the conventional way that could create life. Only in the ways that broke it.”
Nico pales. I see his mind scrambling to unsee the truth. How often had he heard his brother sigh about my “aversion to wifely duties”? Or how easily I bled?
“Every. Night.” I let the words land like knives. “He wanted a child, but not enough to touch me like his wife.” My laugh is brittle. “You can’t create a child without planting the seed.”
His gaze drops to my stomach, and for a moment, I think he might collapse. Good. When his eyes rise to meet mine, brimming with an understanding that I craved, my fury wavers.
“He thought he broke me,” I say, pressing a hand to my womb. “But your brother never accounted for this, for us.”
Nico steps forward, his hand lifting as if to touch me, then falters. “Luna. I swear I didn’t… I never?—”
“You never asked.” My words bite, but my throat tightens.
“Not when my hand brushed yours as we passed in the gardens, or when I bumped your leg while eating dinner. You thought it was just an accident. So many subtle hints were ignored. But you never noticed my cry for help since you were too busy honoring him to see I was dying inside. And when I asked you to fuck me, it was because I wanted to hate you for being as sadistic as your damn brother.”
A tear slips down his cheek. I want to hate him for it, for the way his grief takes precedence over mine, but his whisper disarms me.
“Bria was telling the truth. You were supposed to be mine. But Gio insisted on a virgin bride.”
I want to scream, to undo time, to claw my way back to the version of me that belonged to Giovanni. But she’s gone.
“They might have given me to him,” I say, voice trembling. “But I’ve always belonged to you. I chose you. I’m yours now.”
“Let me fix this.” His voice breaks, raw and pleading. “Let me love you. Both of you.”
Love. The word fractures me.
I see it then, the man who’d sneak me books after Giovanni locked me in our bedroom.
The man who steadied me with a quiet hand when I stumbled.
Who left a flower on the bench in the gazebo, knowing I always sat there before swimming.
Maybe he was trying to tell me something, and I didn’t know how to recognize love.
“You don’t get to fix me,” I say, but my hand trembles as I press it to his chest. “But you can stay. If you swear never to walk away again.”
His fingers brush mine, tentative. “I’m here and present. That is my promise to you and the baby.”
I don’t believe in promises and fairy tales. But when his palm rests over our child, I let myself lean into him. Just this once.
“He never deserved you,” he growls, so low I feel it in my bones.
My knees buckle, and Nico catches me, his arms cradling me like I’m something sacred. I want to hate him. I need to hate him. But his heartbeat thrums against my ear, and I know I made the right choice.
“Look at me, Luna,” he murmurs. A long-ago memory slices through the mist; the scent of lemon trees is as bright as Nico’s stolen glance as we pass each other on the path. We’d exchanged nothing but frigid pleasantries, but Giovanni had seen. He always did.
“Careful, little brother.” His laughter slithers from the shadows. “Wives are like church wine, meant to be sipped, not stolen.”
I tilt my head up. Nico’s smoldering gaze is filled with rage and remorse. “I should’ve killed him myself,” he says.
His words are laced with regret. I let myself imagine it for a heartbeat. Nico’s loyalty fractured for me, his hands drenched in family blood. But the fantasy curdles. “You wouldn’t have,” I say. “You loved him.”
“No.” His grip tightens. “I loved him as he was. The boy who took beatings for me when we were kids. Not the monster he became.”
The storm brewing outside mirrors the wildness in his eyes. I want to claw the truth from his throat. Why didn’t you save me? But his thumb brushes the scar on my ribcage, which Giovanni carved with his signet ring. The touch is a confession.
“You want forgiveness?” I ask, tilting his chin up. “Then earn it.”
He stills, a man poised between salvation and damnation. Then his hands slide to the small of my back, and for the first time, I let myself believe love exists.
“Tell me how,” he says, searching for answers.
I guide his palm to the pulse thrumming at my neck. “Leave the past where it belongs so we can move forward together.”
“Luna,” he breathes. “You ask for the impossible.”
“Then lie to me,” I challenge. My fingers thread through his hair. “Pretend we’re not damned.”
A ragged sound escapes him. “I’ve spent years pretending not to want you. Let me spend the rest loving you.”
The admission rips me wide open, and I drag him to our bed, pulling him down beside me, needing something real to hold onto. “Show me,” I whisper, arching into him. “Show me what love looks like.”
His hands slip beneath my dress, calloused palms skimming my thighs. Not with Giovanni’s possessive fury, but with a commitment that terrifies me. “It looks like this,” he says, kissing the inside of my knee. “Like choosing you. Every scar. Every sin.”
His mouth moves higher, and I fist the fabric of his shirt, torn between shoving him away and wanting him closer. “Even the child?”
He stills. When he looks up, his eyes are smoldering. “Especially the child.” His lips brush the swell of my stomach, a promise I know he’ll keep. “Our baby will be born into light, not blood. You have my word.”
The vow is a death sentence. We both know the mafia doesn’t deal in light.
But as his hands map out the curves and his mouth retraces every scar, I thought I’d buried, I let myself believe, just for tonight, that we might carve out a new future with the next generation.