Luca
"Move."
I grab her wrist, and she yanks back like I've burned her.
"Don't touch—"
"Move or get carried." I'm already pulling her down the stairs. "Three seconds. Pick."
She moves.
Smart woman.
The service tunnel runs beneath the hospital's east wing. Concrete. Fluorescent lights. Smells like industrial cleaner and bad decisions. My men swept it twenty minutes ago.
Serafina keeps pace without being told, gym bag against her chest, running like someone who's spent years being ready to run.
Above us, somewhere inside the hospital, gunfire cracks.
She doesn't stop. Doesn't flinch. Doesn't make a sound.
I notice. I shouldn't, but I do.
"Left." I put my hand on her lower back to steer her at the junction. Barely contact. Just direction.
Her whole body goes rigid.
Every muscle. All at once. Like I've pressed a live wire to her spine.
Mine does the same thing.
I drop my hand. "Left leads out. Right leads into your father's men."
She goes left without a word.
I follow her and tell myself I'm not watching the way she moves.
I'm watching the way she moves.
The armored car is waiting at the tunnel exit. I get her in through the rear door and climb in behind her, and we're moving before she's fully upright.
She rounds on me immediately. Eyes blazing. Cheeks flushed. Furious and breathing hard with her chin up like she's already deciding how to win this.
I'm in trouble.
"Where are you taking me?"
"Somewhere safe."
"That's not—"
"It's what you're getting." I hold her gaze. "Sit down."
"You don't get to tell me to—"
The car takes a hard left. She pitches sideways, and I catch her — both hands on her arms, her body suddenly against mine.
For one suspended second, we're close enough to feel the warmth radiating off her skin, to smell her beneath the antiseptic and the adrenaline.
Something clean and precise, like soap. Something beneath it that's just her.
Her hands land flat on my chest.
She realizes it at the same second I do.
She shoves back like contact with me is a burn. Puts herself against the opposite door. Stares at me like I arranged the swerve on purpose just to get my hands on her.
I'd consider it.
"Don't." Her voice has dropped an octave. Throatier than before.
That's what gets me. The throat. The way her voice changes when she's fighting something she doesn't want to feel.
"You were falling."
"I was fine."
"You were falling." I lean back against my seat, give her the space, and watch her try to reconstruct her composure. She's good at it. The flush creeping up her throat is the only tell. "I caught you. That's all that happened."
"Nothing happened."
"Agreed."
She narrows her eyes like she doesn't believe me.
Smart. She shouldn't.
Because what happened was her body against mine for three seconds, my hands on her arms, and the way she smelled.
I'm still cataloging all three in vivid, inconvenient detail.
Where her palms pressed flat. How they'd feel lower.
How she'd look if she stopped fighting and let herself want what her body was already asking for.
Fuck.
She crosses her arms. Looks out the window. The city slides past at 1:30 a.m., indifferent and bright, and I watch her jaw work while she processes and calculates and refuses to look at me.
Good. I need her not to look at me right now.
"Ground rules," she says finally.
"You're not negotiating ground rules."
She reaches into her gym bag and holds it up slightly. The drive. "I'll throw it out the window."
She might do it.
The corner of my mouth moves. "You'd destroy your only leverage."
"Maybe leverage isn't worth dying for."
"Then we agree." I hold her gaze. "Which is why you're coming with me."
She stares at me for a long moment. Her eyes shift. Not softening. Not backing down.
Recalibrating.
She's deciding what she can work with. What she can use.
It's the most interesting thing I've seen in years, and that is a catastrophic problem.
"Fine." She drops the bag back to her lap. "But when we get wherever we're going, I want answers."
"Some."
"Actual answers."
"Some actual answers." I watch her mouth press into a flat line. "That's the best offer you're getting."
She looks away again. Profile sharp, chin up, throat exposed above the neckline of her scrubs. There's still a smear of dried blood on her forearm that she hasn't noticed — or has noticed and decided doesn't matter.
Both options are equally likely.
I think about what those hands would feel like wrapped around me. Gripping my shoulders. Pulling me closer while I pin her down and find out how loud she gets when she isn't in control.
I look out the window.
She's Virelli. She's the asset.
Get it the fuck together.
The rest of the drive happens in silence.
Fifteen blocks. Maybe twenty. I stop counting because counting is what I do when I need my brain somewhere that isn't her, and my brain is not cooperating.
She's against the opposite door. As far from me as physics will allow in a vehicle this size. Arms still crossed. Jaw still set. Looking out the window like the skyline personally offended her.
She doesn't look at me once.
I keep my eyes forward. Or try to. It lasts about six seconds at a stretch before something pulls my gaze back — the line of her throat above the scrub collar, the blood smear on her forearm she still hasn't wiped off, the way her thumb keeps moving against the strap of her gym bag like she's counting breaths.
I know what counting breaths looks like. I've done it in every bad room I've ever been in.
She's doing it across from me right now.
She's scared.
She's not going to let me see it.
Something moves in my chest that I don't have a name for and don't want one. It's adjacent to the thing that wanted to put that third intruder through a wall three hours from now, except he doesn't exist yet and she hasn't been touched and nothing has happened.
I am reacting to a woman counting her own breaths in the back of my car like she already belongs to me.
I shouldn't.
I am.
I think about what it would take to make her stop counting.
Not sex — not yet, not right now, not when she's still cataloging exits and has blood on her sleeve.
Just a hand over hers. The smallest contact.
Enough to tell her she can stop running the math on her own survival because I'm running it for her now.
I don't move.
If I move, she'll flinch. And I will feel that flinch for the rest of the night.
So I sit with my hands where they are and my eyes out the window and I count with her, silently, across three feet of leather upholstery and a Virelli-Moretti war neither of us started.
She never knows I did it.
That might be the problem.
1:50 a.m.
I hand her off to Kosta at the door and watch her walk inside without looking back — head up, spine straight, like she's checking into a hotel of her own choosing instead of a Moretti safehouse under armed guard.
The door closes.
I stand there longer than I need to.
The brownstone is locked down. Kosta has the interior. Three of my men on the perimeter. Two more on the block. She's as safe as anyone can be in a city that suddenly has a line of people willing to pay for her.
And I still don't want to leave.
That's the problem. Not that leaving is hard. That not leaving is starting to feel like the actual option.
I make myself walk to the car.
There's a meeting I can't move. Enzo wants a face-to-face before dawn, which in Enzo-language means come explain why you didn't do what I told you to do — and the longer I wait, the worse the conversation gets.
If I don't show up, he sends men. If he sends men, they come here.
And if they come here, every careful thing I've built in the last two hours — her inside that door, my people on this block, Giovanni shut out — collapses.
So I go. Because protecting her means sitting across from a seventy-eight-year-old man who would happily trade her for a favor, and smiling through it.
I get back in the car.
"Long route," I tell Ren.
He pulls out without a word. I close the partition and sit in the dark.
She keeps surfacing.
Every version of her from the last two hours on repeat. Calm in the trauma bay. Furious in the stairwell. Flushed and breathing hard in the back of this car with her hands on my chest.
The way she said don't like it was a full sentence. Like she meant the opposite and hated herself for it.
Her hands. Christ. Covered in blood and moving with that certainty. That focus.
The partition is closed. Ren can't see me. The windows are blacked out and the city outside is muffled. I am alone in the dark with her voice in my head saying don't touch me in that wrecked, throaty tone that meant the exact opposite.
I handle it.
Fast and rough, hand braced against the door, jaw locked, her face behind my eyes whether I want it there or not.
The sound she made when she shoved away from me — that sharp little exhale, half fury, half want she wouldn't admit to with a gun to her head.
What she'd sound like underneath me. Whether she'd fight it, give in, or both.
Both is what I want.
Both is what would wreck me.
It takes less time than it should.
It helps less than I needed.
I fix my jacket. Breathe. Shove her back into the locked part of my head.
Once. That's all that was.
It doesn't happen again.
My phone buzzes.
Niko.
Hit squad identified. Not Virelli. Not Moretti. Outside professionals, clean, no family ties. Someone else sent them.
I read it twice.
Then I sit in the dark and think about Serafina sleeping — or not sleeping — in my safehouse with a dead man's drive and enemies she doesn't know she has yet.
Someone else.
Shit.
I knock twice on the partition.
Ren's eyes find mine in the rearview.
"Turn around. Get me back to the house. Now."
He doesn't ask why. He never does. The car swings hard and accelerates, and I sit back and stare at the ceiling and think about a woman who walked into that brownstone without looking back, like she had everything under control.
She doesn't know the list just got longer.
She doesn't know who's on it.