Chapter 30 Natalia
NATALIA
The beach house swallows us in silence.
Luca stops a few feet inside the house and waits, hands empty, shoulders tight beneath his jacket. For a second, all I can think is that he is back in my house, and the sight of him there feels more right than it should. Which is its own kind of problem.
I turn away first, because standing here staring at each other like two idiots is not actually a plan, and because the fact that I let him inside does not magically mean I know what happens next.
“You can sit,” I say, nodding toward the couch. “If you want.”
He takes the far end of the couch, leaving the whole middle cushion empty between us. I sit at the other end and let the distance stay there.
A draft pushes through the house, and I suppress a shiver.
Luca doesn’t say anything, just reaches behind him and pulls the throw blanket off the back of the couch.
Leans across the gap between us just far enough to drape it over my shoulders, his fingers brushing my collarbone for less than a second before he pulls back to his side of the cushion.
The touch is barely there. My skin registers it anyway, fast and disloyal, a spark I refuse to react to.
Eventually I break the silence. “So.”
He looks at me, waiting.
“You said I might not be safe here alone. What exactly does that mean?”
He leans forward, elbows on his knees, eyes on the coffee table. “Honestly? I don’t know.”
I stare at him. “That’s comforting.”
“I know, I’m sorry.” His mouth tightens. “Now that my brother and my uncle both know the situation’s gotten complicated, it’s only a matter of time until my dad hears. He doesn’t have the full picture yet. When he gets it—” He stops. “I don’t know how he’s going to react.”
The refrigerator kicks on with its low, familiar hum, and out beyond the windows the waves do their endless drag and retreat.
A gust catches the loose kitchen pane, the one I reported twice to nobody who cared, and it shivers in its frame with that thin, irritating rattle I’ve been living with for months.
I turn back to Luca. “So what are you going to do about it?”
I watch him choose his words the way you’d pick your way across broken glass.
“I’m going to talk to him.”
The answer comes out steady, but there’s something strained beneath it. Not fear, exactly. More like the knowledge that he’s walking toward a fight he can’t control and hates that I know it.
“My father doesn’t like surprises,” he continues. “And this is going to count as a pretty big one.”
I let that sit there for a second.
“So you’ll talk to him,” I say. “And then what?”
Luca lifts his eyes to mine. “And then I make him understand this isn’t me fucking up again. This isn’t me being a coward or losing my nerve.”
A knot cinches tight between my ribs. I stay silent and wait for him to finish.
“I need him to understand this is real. What happened between us. What I feel for you.” His voice roughens slightly on the last word, but he doesn’t look away. “And I need him to understand killing you doesn’t fix a fucking thing.”
The words catch somewhere under my ribs.
What I feel for you.
Simple. Not dressed up into anything prettier than it is.
And because apparently my heart is determined to humiliate me until the day I die, it softens anyway.
Just for a second. My body does too, traitorous thing that it is, every nerve suddenly aware of the man on the other end of the couch and the empty cushion between us.
I try to push it down. “And you think that’ll work?”
He takes a breath. “I think it might.”
Might.
At least he’s honest. Now, anyway.
“My father loves me,” he says, and something about the way he says it makes it clear that’s not a boast so much as a factor in an equation he wishes were simpler.
“He’ll be furious for a lot of reasons, but he’s not irrational.
He’s going to want to know what the hell I think I’m doing.
He’s going to want something better than this mess.
” He exhales. “I know he is. But first I need to stop this from going any further, before somebody does something we can’t take back. ”
My head comes up at that. “Something you can’t take back.”
His stare holds mine. “You know what I mean.”
Of course I do.
I look away first.
Because this is the part where a normal person would probably feel reassured. He has a plan. Sort of. A father who listens to him—sometimes. A family that, for all its violence, apparently still leaves room for persuasion.
I should find that comforting.
Instead a tired, bitter heat crawls through my whole body.
“That’s nice,” I say quietly.
Luca goes still. “Nat.”
“No, really.” I stand and carry the blanket with me, needing movement all of a sudden, needing the distance. “That must be nice. To believe this can be fixed by one conversation with your father. To believe if he understands your feelings, if he sees the human side of it, maybe he changes course.”
Luca’s voice sharpens. “That’s not what I said.”
“It’s close enough.” I clutch the blanket tighter around myself. “The point is you still get to imagine being heard. You get to imagine telling your father what you want and having that matter.”
He doesn’t have a response to that, and I laugh once, soft and bitter.
“My father doesn’t care what I want, Luca. He never has.
“He doesn’t care if I’m afraid,” I say, voice dropping. “He doesn’t care if I’m happy. He doesn’t care who I love, or whether I love anyone at all.” My grip tightens on the blanket. “All that matters to him is what he’s decided my life is worth.”
I’ve stopped pacing. Somewhere between one sentence and the next, my feet planted themselves near the kitchen counter and refused to keep moving, like the weight of what I’m saying won’t let me carry it and walk at the same time.
“My point is, even if your father changes his mind, mine won’t.” I say. “He’s still going through with the engagement. He’s still going to marry me off to the Colombian like none of this matters.”
Luca goes dead still, the kind of stillness that feels violent instead of quiet. A muscle jumps in his cheek. His hands curl slowly against his thighs.
“The hell he is.” The words are practically a growl. “I won’t let him.”
I let out a tired laugh. “How?”
When he speaks again, his voice is steadier, but his hands haven’t uncurled.
“You wouldn’t be on your own,” he says, picking up steam. “We have safe houses. And I can put people on you. Keep you covered. Keep anyone from getting near you.”
“For how long?”
He hesitates.
“A week?” I say. “A month? Long enough for my father to get creative?” My grip tightens on the blanket. “You’re talking about guards, Luca. About hiding me. That is not the same thing as me being free.”
“Nat—”
“You can make it harder for him. More dangerous. More expensive. But as long as he’s alive and in power, he doesn’t stop being my father. He doesn’t stop deciding what happens to me.”
Luca goes still at that.
“Nobody can protect me from him.”
He lets out a long breath and hangs his head. “You’re saying he’ll never stop.”
I don’t answer right away. My chin drops, and it feels like all the fight goes out of me at once.
I look up at Luca then, and I can’t tell whether the pressure behind my ribs is grief or fury or some awful combination of both.
“There’s no clean way away from a man like him,” I whisper.
My eyes burn.
Luca stands. I don’t tell him to sit back down.
“For years,” I say, each word dragged up rough, “I have known, somewhere deep down, that as long as Anton Kozlov is alive, he will keep using me. Reaching for me. For my life. My body. My future.” My throat works around the next part. “And there were nights I lay awake and thought…”
I stop.
My whole body goes tight.
Luca takes one step toward me, slow enough that I could pull away if I wanted to.
I don’t. My pulse jumps anyway.
“What did you think?” he asks quietly.
I close my eyes.
Then I open them again and make myself answer.
“I thought the only way any of this ever really ends,” I whisper, “is if he dies.”
Silence follows. Dense and heavy and alive with everything I’ve just made real.
Luca doesn’t flinch.
He doesn’t tell me I shouldn’t say things like that. Doesn’t look at me like I’ve turned into something ugly right in front of him. He just stands there with his eyes on mine, breathing like the air in the room got heavier all at once.
I let out a laugh that sounds nothing like laughter. “Well.”
His brow pulls tight.
“There it is,” I say, wiping at my face with the heel of my hand even though another tear is already slipping free. “The part where you realize I’m just as bad as the people I came from.”
His expression changes instantly. Hardens. “No.”
“No?” My voice cracks. “Luca, I just said I’ve thought about my father dying.”
I pause.
“Not just thought about it.” My laugh scrapes out thin and ugly. “Wanted it. There were nights I wanted the call. Wanted someone to tell me he was dead so I could finally breathe.”
The words hit the room and keep going, like they’ve been waiting years for daylight.
“There were nights I lay there and felt relieved just imagining it,” I say, quieter now, more wrecked. “Relieved. Do you understand how sick that is?”
“You said you’ve spent your whole life under a man who treats you like a thing he owns.” He takes another step, slow enough that I could stop him if I wanted to. “You admit that he was never going to let you go.”
I scoff. “That is a very generous interpretation.”
“It’s the true one.”
I shake my head, but weakly now. I don’t even know what I’m arguing with anymore. Him. Myself. The words still hanging in the air between us.
“You should be disgusted.”
“Why?” His voice drops, rough and fierce. “Because you finally said out loud what kind of man Anton Kozlov is? Because you realized he’s not going to wake up one day with a conscience and let you walk away?”
My throat works, but nothing comes out.
Luca stops in front of me. His hand comes to rest on the edge of the counter beside mine, near enough that I can feel the warmth of his skin without any actual contact. An inch between his fingers and mine. The whole room narrows to that strip of air between us.
“I’ve wanted him dead for years,” he says. “Not because he insulted us. Not because of pride. Because men like him don’t stop until somebody stops them.”
The words hit hard because they line up too neatly with the ones that have been living in my head for years, half-formed and poisonous.
I look down at the blanket crushed in my fists. “I hate that I’ve thought it.”
“I know.”
“I hate that some part of me meant it.”
“Nat,” he says quietly, “wanting the man who’s spent your life terrorizing you to lose his hold over you does not make you him.”
My eyes close for one beat.
Because that is too close to mercy, and I am not built for receiving it right now.
When I look at him again, he’s still there.
“You said it yourself. If he stays where he is,” Luca says, “he forces the marriage. He locks in whatever deal he’s building. Your life will never be your own. And if my family backs off, that just means one threat disappears. Not the real one.”
My pulse kicks harder.
“No,” I whisper.
His thumb brushes once under my eye. “No.”
The touch is so gentle it nearly undoes me. My breath catches, and his gaze drops to my mouth for the smallest fraction of a second before returning to my eyes.
The room feels too small. Too warm. Too full of everything I never wanted to say and cannot unsay now.
“So what does that mean?” I ask, though I think I already know.
Luca’s stare holds mine. “It means this ends one of two ways. With him still owning your life.” His eyes go flat. “Or with us making sure he can’t.”
Fear moves through me first. Cold and immediate.
Right behind it comes something worse.
Relief.
I suck in a breath. “Luca.”
“I know.” He leans in and his forehead almost touches mine, not quite. Close enough that I can feel the heat of him without contact. Close enough that if either of us moved an inch, there would be no space left at all.
“If we do this,” I say slowly, “then I’m choosing it too.”
Luca’s eyes stay on mine. “Yeah.”
My throat tightens. “I don’t know what that makes me.”
“It makes you done waiting for him to decide your life for you.”
“If this happens,” I whisper, “it has to actually end. I cannot survive half measures. I cannot survive just making him angry.”
“It ends,” Luca says. No hesitation. “Or we don’t do it until we know how to make it end.”
That should terrify me more than it does. I know what happens to people who move against my father. I’ve seen the aftermath.
Instead, all I can think is that this is the first conversation about my future I have ever had where I am being treated like I belong in it.
“Okay,” I say.
Luca stills. “Okay?”
“Yes.” My voice shakes, but it holds. “If the only way I ever get free of him is to help put an end to this, then… okay.” My fingers knot tighter in the blanket. “I’m in.”
His breath leaves him in a rush, and for a second neither of us moves. It’s just the two of us, close enough to share breath, the whole impossible weight of what we just agreed to pressing down on us.
I pull back for a moment. “And If we’re doing this, we’re doing it together. No more lies. No more secrets.” I hold his gaze. “I need to hear you say that.”
“No more lies.” His voice is adamant. “No more secrets. You and me.”
He reaches for me slowly, giving me plenty of time to pull away if I want to.
I don’t. When his hand settles against my cheek and his thumb traces the line of my jaw, I lean into the warmth of his palm and close my eyes.
When he kisses me, it’s soft at first. Careful.
Like he’s still half afraid I’ll pull away.
I don’t.
My hands fist in the front of his shirt and I kiss him back, and the sound that leaves him is broken and rough and wrecks something in me all over again.
I’ve missed this. Missed him. There’s no use pretending otherwise now.
Everything isn’t fixed. He still lied to me. My father is still my father. We have just agreed to something that could destroy both of us.
But I don’t feel alone in it anymore.
Terrified, yes.
But for the first time in my life, not alone. And not powerless.