Epilogue
THE PENTHOUSE WAS NOTHING like the one in Los Angeles.
Julian’s LA apartment was forty-three floors of glass and concrete and silence, a monument to a man who’d built an empire on top of a wound.
Luciano’s penthouse was on the Upper West Side, twelve floors up, and it smelled like coffee and fresh bread and the particular warmth of a home where someone had been cooking all morning and had left the windows cracked to let in the September air.
Katy stood in the doorway and tried not to grip Julian’s hand hard enough to break his fingers.
“Hi.” Elsa appeared from the kitchen, and the first thing Katy noticed was that her hands were dusted with flour and she was wiping them on the front of a cotton dress that already had a sauce stain on the hem.
No shoes. Brown hair pulled back with a clip that was losing its hold.
She was small, younger than Katy had expected, and she was smiling, but her other hand was at her side, her index finger tracing a small circle against her thigh, and Katy recognized the gesture because she had her own version of it.
The hair tuck, the downward glance, the body doing something small and repetitive because the brain was running too fast. “Come in. I made — there’s a lot of food. I might have overdone it.”
She had overdone it. The dining table was set for four with mismatched plates and cloth napkins that didn’t match either, and there were three different serving dishes on the counter and a pot still simmering on the stove and a vase of sunflowers in the center of the table that had been arranged with more love than skill, the stems uneven, one head drooping slightly left.
At Haven, Katy had served hundreds of meals to couples who spent more on a single bottle of wine than Amy made in a week.
She knew what wealth performed like. She knew the particular attention to surface.
The right watch, the right water, the right amount of boredom to signal that none of it impressed you because you’d always had it.
Everything curated. Everything conscious.
This apartment had none of that. The bookshelves were overstuffed and disorganized.
A pair of men’s shoes sat by the door, not hidden in a closet.
The kitchen counter had a flour handprint on it.
It was the home of two people who were living in it, not presenting it, and something in Katy’s chest unclenched.
“Elsa grew those,” Julian said behind her, nodding at the sunflowers. “She ships them from Nebraska.”
“He flies them,” Elsa corrected, and the circle on her thigh stopped. “He has a cargo company do it. He thinks I don’t know.”
“She found out in the first week,” said a voice from the hallway.
Luciano Salvatore came through the kitchen doorway carrying a bread basket, and Katy’s lungs forgot how to work.
He was taller than Julian. Not by much, an inch, maybe two, but his bearing made the difference feel larger.
Dark hair. Dark suit. Dark eyes, not Julian’s blue, but the same depth behind them, the same gravity, as if both brothers had been forged in the same fire and the heat had left the same mark regardless of the color it burned.
The resemblance was not in the features.
It was in the men themselves: the carriage, the jawline, the way they both held stillness like a weapon and tenderness like a secret.
She was standing in a room with two men who had been born into darkness and had clawed their way out separately, and the women who loved them had found them on the other side.
“Katy.” He said her name simply, without ornament, as though the name itself was enough. He set down the bread basket and extended his hand. “It’s good to meet you.”
His handshake was firm and brief and nothing like Julian’s touch, which was all heat and current and barely-contained want. Luciano’s handshake was a door being opened. Welcome. Enter. You’re safe here.
“Thank you,” she said, and meant it for more than the handshake, and he knew, because his eyes moved to Julian and something passed between the brothers, not a glance, not a nod, just a current, and Katy understood that the full weight of what Luciano had done, the phone call and the search and the address in Rhode Island, was present in the room and would never be spoken of in front of her, because the Salvatore brothers conducted their love in silence and always had.
Lunch was pasta. Elsa had made enough for eight, and apologized for this, and then apologized for the bread, which she said was overbaked, which it wasn’t.
She served with the earnest, slightly flustered energy of a woman who wanted desperately for this to go well and was managing her nerves by keeping her hands busy.
Katy recognized that too. She’d spent a year managing her own nerves behind a serving tray.
Halfway through the meal, Elsa asked about the flower farm, and Katy told her about the dahlias, how they grew from tubers that resembled dead things, and Elsa leaned forward with her elbows on the table and her chin in her flour-dusted hand, and her eyes lit with the specific recognition of a woman who’d grown things from nothing and understood the metaphor without needing it explained.
“I killed three rosebushes the first year,” Elsa admitted. “Luciano replaced them without telling me. I think he thought I wouldn’t notice.”
“You cried,” Luciano said.
“I did not cry.”
“You cried into your coffee.”
The look Elsa gave him was equal parts exasperation and adoration, and Katy caught the corner of Luciano’s mouth move, not a smile, not quite, but a shift in the granite that suggested the man underneath it was capable of warmth that would embarrass him if anyone pointed it out.
Julian was different here. Katy observed it from across the table: his shoulders had dropped two inches since they’d walked in, his voice lost its edge when he spoke to Luciano, and he ate Elsa’s pasta with the unselfconscious focus of a man who’d been hungry for a long time and had just remembered that food could taste like being cared for.
At Haven, Katy had served men who ate without tasting.
Men who ordered the prix fixe because it was the most expensive option and left half of it on the plate because finishing was gauche.
Julian cleared his plate. Luciano cleared his plate.
Elsa beamed and gave them both seconds without asking, the same instinct Katy’s mother had, because in certain kitchens the food was the love and the love was the point and the plates were just how it traveled.
After lunch, Julian drove her to Marydale.
THE CAMPUS WAS OLD stone and green lawns and pathways lined with oak trees whose leaves were just beginning to turn.
September. The air smelled like cut grass and the faint mineral tang of old buildings and the possibility of becoming someone new, and Katy stood on the main quad with her hands in her jacket pockets and her chin tipped up and her heart so full she was afraid to breathe in case something spilled.
The admissions rep was waiting at the main building.
A young woman in a blazer who was visibly nervous and kept addressing Julian as Mr. Ventura and offering him water and pamphlets he didn’t take.
Julian ignored her with the distracted patience of a man who’d been treated this way his entire adult life and had stopped noticing.
“This is Katy’s visit,” he told the rep. “She’s the one you should be impressing.”
The tour took forty minutes. Lecture halls and libraries and the student center with its coffee shop and its notice board covered in flyers for clubs Katy would never have the courage to join and might join anyway, because she’d learned in a flower farm that courage wasn’t the absence of fear but the willingness to show up alone and put your shoulders back and survive.
The rep pointed out the botany program. Katy’s fingers tightened in her pockets.
They crossed the north end of campus, past the sports facilities and a row of Victorian houses that had been converted into department offices, and turned onto a street that was quieter. Residential. Trees. A wrought-iron gate standing open, and behind it, a stone house.
Not large. Not a mansion. A former fraternity house, the rep explained, recently renovated by a private donor. Two stories. Blue shutters. A porch with a swing, and a garden, small, neglected, promising, that wrapped around the side and caught the afternoon light.
Katy stopped walking.
“This is the private residence option for affiliated students,” the rep said, consulting her clipboard. “Fully furnished. Kitchen, two bedrooms, private entrance. The donor requested that it be offered to—”
“Thank you,” Julian said. “We’ll take it from here.”
The rep left. Katy stood on the brick pathway and took in the house with the blue shutters and the porch swing and the garden that was going to grow zinnias and sweet peas and dahlias next spring, she could already see it, could already feel the dirt under her fingernails and the morning light on her face, and her eyes were burning.
“This is too much,” she said.
“Not at all.” Julian was behind her, his voice silk and warmth and the particular tone he used when he was about to be ruinous and knew it. “I need a place to stay when I visit you.”
“You can visit me in the dorm.”
His mouth was at her ear. “Not when I want to do this.”
His hand found hers. He pulled her through the gate and up the porch steps and through the front door of a stone house with blue shutters in New York that he’d bought for her, and the door closed behind them and he turned her against it.
His mouth on hers. Not gentle. Not tentative.
A kiss that said I flew three thousand miles and bought a house and sat across from my brother for the first time in my life, and all of it, every piece of it, was to get to this door with you behind it.
His hands slid into her hair and cradled her skull and he kissed her with a thoroughness that left no room for thought, and she kissed him back, and her hands found his chest and the buttons of his shirt and the warm skin underneath, and he made a sound against her mouth, low, from somewhere deep, and the sound went through her like a current.
He lifted her. Her legs went around his waist and her back was against the door and his mouth was on her throat, the spot he’d discovered in a garden in Los Angeles a lifetime ago, and her fingers were in his hair and she was saying his name, not thinking about it, just saying it, Julian, Julian, and each time she said it his grip tightened and his mouth moved lower.
He carried her. Through the house she hadn’t seen, past rooms she’d explore tomorrow, to a bedroom where the late afternoon light came through the windows in gold bars and the bed was made with white sheets that someone had chosen for this exact moment, and he set her down on the edge and knelt.
Knelt. At the foot of the bed. His hands on her knees, his face tipped up toward her, and his expression, the openness, the hunger, the devotion, was so raw that she touched his face, her palm against his cheek, and he turned into her hand and closed his eyes and stayed there, breathing, his lips against her palm.
“Let me,” he said against her skin. “Please.”
She nodded. Couldn’t speak. Her heart was in her throat and her blood was singing and his hands were sliding up her thighs, gentle, careful, pausing at the hem of her dress, his thumbs tracing circles on her skin that sent heat spiraling through her center.
He took his time. He pushed her dress up over her hips with a reverence that made her eyes sting, and the way he was touching her, kissing her, had Katy gripping the sheets, her breath coming in short, sharp pulls.
With every second that passed, he was learning what she wanted, what drove her crazy, and she could only say his name one more time—Julian—before pleasure broke over her like a door flung open onto a room she hadn’t known existed.
She came down slowly, and she ran her fingers through his hair, knowing what it had cost him to give that to her without taking anything for himself.
He lifted his head. His eyes were dark and bright and his mouth was wet and he was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen in her life.
“Come here,” she whispered.
He rose. Climbed onto the bed beside her and gathered her into his arms and she buried her face in his chest and listened to his heartbeat, fast and strong and hers.
Katy closed her eyes as Julian’s arms tightened around her.
I love you.
She didn’t say the words out loud, but it was as if he had heard her, with his lips touching her forehead.
I love you.
~ The End ~