Serafina
I've stayed awake through forty-hour shifts, two-car pileups, and a collapsed aorta.
Luca Moretti's mouth is somehow harder to sleep through.
I work.
Not medicine — I don't have any here. But I have a brain and a building full of things someone doesn't want me to notice, and that's close enough.
The brownstone has four floors. Two days in, I know three of them.
I map it the way I map a patient — methodically, without assumptions, starting with what I can observe and building toward what I can't.
Ground floor: kitchen, dining room, a study with a locked door, and a half-bath.
Two cameras visible, one disguised as a smoke detector.
The front door has a keypad and a deadbolt that needs a physical key from the inside.
The back entrance opens to the gated alley — a keypad there too, with a different code.
Second floor: my room, two other closed doors, a full bath, and a linen closet that's actually a linen closet. One camera at the top of the stairwell.
Third floor: I make it up four steps before a guard materializes from nowhere and looks at me.
"Off limits," he says. Not unkindly.
"I was looking for the gym."
"Second floor. End of the hall."
There's no gym on the second floor. We both know this. He doesn't move. Neither do I.
Then I smile pleasantly and go back downstairs.
Three floors accessible. One locked study. Roof unknown. Guard rotation roughly every twenty minutes on the exterior, tighter on the third floor. Someone important is up there — either equipment or Luca himself.
I file it all and move to the kitchen.
The guest Wi-Fi connects instantly.
Too easily.
I pull up a browser and type in an address I use to test network security — a trick my hospital's IT director showed me two years ago after a data breach scare.
The page loads halfway and stops dead. Access denied.
Not a regular firewall error. A custom block, built specifically for someone like me.
I try three other routes. Same wall. Different face, same brick.
That son of a bitch built me a cage with Wi-Fi that doesn't work.
Not just the network. The whole system. Every camera angle. Every guard rotation. Every locked door — deliberate. Considered. The same way the panic button was considered. The same way the clothes in my size were considered.
He mapped me before I got here. Looked at the threat landscape, identified the most likely vulnerability, and found it in me with a burner phone and too much time.
I should be insulted.
I am. A little.
I'm also impressed, and I hate that more than the firewall. Fury I can work with. It's clean, useful, and mine. Whatever is underneath it — the thing with teeth that wakes me up at 3 a.m. — that's the problem.
I'm staring at the third access-denied message when I hear him.
Not footsteps. Luca moves too quietly for that. It's the shift in the air. The way the kitchen suddenly feels smaller, like he's eating the square footage just by existing in it.
"The IT director at Bellevue uses the same test."
I close the laptop. Turn around. "DNS redirect, VPN tunnel, proxy cascade, and a guest network spoof. All of it I learned from a seventeen-year-old patient who hacked his own hospital records to change his diet restrictions."
The room goes quiet.
Then Luca laughs.
Short. Surprised out of him, like he didn't see it coming and couldn't stop it fast enough. Low and genuine and completely unguarded for exactly two seconds before he shuts it down.
He looks almost annoyed at himself for it — like an involuntary reaction he's filing under weakness and burying.
I stare at him.
That sound. That's what Luca Moretti sounds like when he isn't performing.
Something in my stomach turns over and doesn't turn back, and I am in so much trouble it isn't funny.
"None of them worked," he says. Whatever cracked a moment ago seals shut. He's flat again. Back in control.
He moves into my peripheral vision — jacket gone, sleeves rolled to the forearms, looking like he hasn't slept and considers it irrelevant. He stops at the kitchen island. "Stop trying to run."
"Stop trying to own me."
The words land flat and final. For a second, neither of us moves.
Then he rounds the island.
I hold my ground. It costs me — every instinct I have urges me to step back, create distance, put something solid between us — but I've spent my whole life refusing to step back from men who expect it. I'm not starting now. Not with him. Not ever.
He stops close enough that I can smell him. Whiskey and dark amber cologne. That same scent from the doorframe, from the stairwell, from every moment he's stood too close and I've let him.
I'm letting him. Again.
"I'm not trying to own you." His voice drops. Not loud — Luca never gets loud. He gets quieter the more he means it, and right now he's barely above a whisper. "I'm trying to keep you alive."
"By taking everything I have."
"By keeping you here." His eyes track my face, slow and deliberate, like he's reading me and finding what I don't want him to. "There's a difference."
"Is there?" I tip my chin up. "Because from where I'm standing, I can't leave, I can't call anyone, and I can't access the internet. The only difference between this and a cell is the thread count."
A muscle ticks in his jaw. Not anger. More complicated than anger.
"The man who slid that photo under your door last night was on my payroll." Flat. Immediate. "I identified him, removed him, and closed the gap within four hours. That's what this looks like when it works."
"You had a mole."
"A compromised asset. Past tense."
"And the next one? The one after that?" Surgeon's voice. Steady. Measured. "You can't guarantee—"
"No." One step closer. We're close enough now that breathing evenly is a full-time job.
"I can't guarantee anything. That's the job.
But I can guarantee that right now, in this building, you're the safest person in New York City.
" His gaze drops to my mouth. Stays there. "Whether you want to be or not."
My pulse betrays me. One hard kick against my ribs that I feel all the way down.
"Don't."
"Don't what?"
"Look at me like that."
He doesn't look away. "Like what?"
Like you're already planning how to take me apart. Like the only reason you haven't is that you're choosing not to, and that choice is getting harder by the second.
"You know what."
The air between us runs out of room. I watch him decide something — watch it move through his eyes and then go still, like a door locking from the inside.
Then his hand comes up.
Slow. Deliberate. Giving me every opportunity to step back.
I don't step back.
His fingers curl around my jaw — not hard, not rough, just certain — and he tilts my face up and kisses me.
It's not gentle.
It's not supposed to be.
His mouth is demanding from the first second, like he's been holding this back and finally ran out of reasons to keep doing it.
I grab the front of his shirt without deciding to.
He makes a sound against my mouth — low, rough, the kind of sound that short-circuits your entire nervous system — and his other hand finds my waist, pulls me in.
Then I'm pressed against the kitchen island, his hands on me, with absolutely zero interest in stopping.
I bite his lower lip.
He growls.
Actually growls. Like an animal. It should be ridiculous — it should be a thing I hold over him for the foreseeable future — except my entire body lights up like he's flipped a switch and I am not laughing.
I am the opposite of laughing. I am pulling him closer by his collar and making sounds I will spend tomorrow pretending I never made.
His hands move — one sliding into my hair, tilting my head back, the other dropping to my hip and gripping hard enough that I'll feel it tomorrow.
I arch into him because my body stopped asking my brain for permission about three exchanges ago, and he responds immediately, pressing closer and giving me the full, solid heat of him.
"Serafina." My name is in his mouth. Rough and low, against my jaw. Like a prayer he didn't plan to say.
"Don't stop." It comes out before I can stop it. "I mean it in every possible way."
He doesn't stop.
His mouth finds my throat, and I dig my fingers into his shoulders and stop thinking entirely. There's just this — his hands, his weight, the counter edge biting into my back, his breathing ragged against my skin.
I feel wanted in a way I've never allowed myself to need. Not the polite kind. Not the practiced kind. The kind that borders on violent. The kind that takes and takes and doesn't apologize for any of it.
His hand slides under the hem of my shirt. Splays flat against my ribs. Hot skin against hot skin, and I feel it everywhere.
I pull his mouth back to mine.
We stay like that — tangled and breathless, not crossing the line but standing right at the edge of it, neither of us willing to be the one who pulls back first — until a door opens somewhere above us.
Footsteps on the stairs.
We break apart.
Luca steps back. One step. Two. His chest is rising. His hair is wrecked. He looks at me for one unguarded second — want so naked it makes my knees weak — and then it's gone. Shut down. His face goes back to what it always is. Controlled. Unreadable. A wall in a tailored shirt.
He straightens his sleeve.
His goddamn sleeve. After all of that, the first thing Luca Moretti does is straighten his sleeve, and I want to scream at him, and I want to pull him back, and I want to do several things at once that I have no business wanting.
I press my fingers to my lips and say nothing.
If I open my mouth right now, I will say something I cannot take back.
Then the lights go out.
Total blackout — every lamp, every camera indicator, every green pulse on the security panel by the door. Gone. The kitchen drops into absolute darkness.
Luca's hand finds my arm instantly. "Stay here."
Outside, from the front steps — fast footsteps. More than one person.
Moving toward the door.