Serafina
Iwake up in Luca's bed, and my first coherent thought is that I'm in serious trouble.
Not the gun-and-fixer kind. The other kind.
The kind where your body has spent eight hours wrapped in someone else's sheets and has quietly, catastrophically, decided it prefers it here.
His scent is everywhere — whiskey and dark amber cologne — and my nervous system has apparently cataloged it and filed it under home, which is a betrayal I'll be dealing with for the foreseeable future.
Luca appears in the frame with two cups of coffee, still in yesterday's shirt, sleeves rolled up, looking like a man who didn’t sleep and considers it a minor administrative detail.
His eyes find me in his bed and go very still.
I pull the sheet up slightly. Which is ridiculous. He's seen everything.
"You said seven."
"It's seven." He crosses the room. Sets a cup on the nightstand. Never looks away. "How'd you sleep?"
"In your sheets. Smelling like you." I reach for the coffee. "Horribly."
"Horribly."
"Don't repeat it back at me like that."
"Like what?"
"Like you're pleased about it."
"I'm not pleased about anything." He sits on the edge of the bed. The mattress dips and he's close — not touching, that deliberate not-touching that feels louder than contact — and his eyes move over me once, slow and thorough, deciding something. "You smell like me."
"Your sheets started it."
"My sheets." The corner of his mouth twitches. "Dangerous objects."
"Apparently."
He reaches out. Two fingers. He tucks a strand of hair back from my face with a slowness that has no right to exist in a man who snaps arms for a living. His hand curves around the back of my neck, warm and certain, his thumb tracing the line of my jaw.
"We have thirty minutes." Low.
"Before Bruni."
"Before Bruni."
I look at his mouth. Look away. Look back.
"This keeps being a terrible idea."
"I know." He leans in. His mouth brushes the corner of mine — barely, just a suggestion — and I feel it in my spine. "Tell me to stop."
I don't tell him to stop.
We do not, strictly speaking, have time.
What we have is his weight pressing me into his mattress, his mouth on my throat, and his hands moving over me like he has a map and intends to ruin every inch of it. He gets my shirt off in one motion and looks at me like he's deciding where to start, and the answer is everywhere.
His mouth finds my breast — hot and deliberate, tongue circling my nipple until I arch into him with a sound I didn't plan to make. His hand slides between my thighs.
"Vai piano — go slow," he murmurs against my skin when I try to rush him.
I don't go slow. He makes me anyway — two fingers pressing inside me with maddening patience while his thumb works slow circles that have my hips lifting off the mattress.
He watches my face while he does it. That's the part I can't handle — the watching, the completely focused attention, like I'm the only thing in the world worth looking at, and he intends to catalog every single response.
"Luca—"
"I've got you." He doesn't speed up. "Vai piano."
He takes his time, working me open — first his fingers, then his mouth.
He moves down my body with ruthless intention, deliberate and slow, until his tongue finds me and stays there.
His timing is obscene — pulling back when I get close, starting again, until I'm fisting the sheets with both hands and choking out words in broken sentences I will refuse to remember later.
When I finally come apart, it's loud and graceless, and I don't care. My whole body is shaking, his name in my throat, his hand flat against my lower back, holding me together as I fall to pieces.
"Brava," he breathes against my inner thigh. Barely a sound. Like a secret.
He kisses his way back up my body — unhurried, possessive, stopping at my hip, my ribs, the scar below my collarbone that he traces with his mouth like he's memorizing it — and by the time he settles between my thighs I'm already reaching for him, already desperate in a way that has nothing to do with pride.
He pushes inside me slowly.
Like he has all the time in the world. As the Bruni debriefs, the Enzo deadline, my father’s deadline, the entire collapsing architecture of two crime families simply does not exist.
He watches my face the whole time — dark eyes tracking every flicker, the moment my mouth falls open when he seats himself fully and stays there, not moving until I make a sound that is frankly humiliating and entirely involuntary.
His control breaks then. Just once — a sharp exhale against my throat, his forehead dropping to mine, his hands gripping me like I'm the only solid thing left.
"Dio mio — my God," he grunts. Low. Wrecked. Like he didn't mean to say it. Like he forgot, for one unguarded second, that he doesn't let people see him like this.
I file it away like something I intend to keep.
"Sei bellissima — you are so beautiful." Rough. Unplanned. Like the words came out before he could stop them.
Then he moves.
I stop thinking entirely — his hips finding a rhythm that is exactly, precisely, infuriatingly what I need.
One hand gripping my hip hard enough to bruise.
The other braced beside my head. His mouth on my jaw, my throat, my mouth.
I wrap my legs around him, pull him deeper, and feel him groan against my skin — low and helpless, the sound of a man who has lost the same battle I have.
I come for the second time with his name on my lips and my nails on his shoulders.
Then he pulls back and flips me without warning. I gasp into the pillow as his hands grip my hips and drag me back into him.
"Ancora — again," he says against my spine.
He pushes inside me from behind — deeper, a different angle that pulls a sound out of me I didn't know I was capable of — his hand sliding around to the front while he moves, his mouth at the back of my neck, pressing words into my skin in Italian I'm too far gone to translate.
I come apart a third time with my face in his pillow and his body covering mine completely, like he's trying to eliminate every inch of space between us.
He follows moments later — my name rough and reverent, his forehead dropping to my spine, his hands flattening against my hips like he's holding on to something he refuses to let go.
We stay tangled together.
Neither of us speaks.
His heartbeat slows against my palm.
Outside, New York City does what New York City does — indifferent, relentless, alive.
In here, for exactly this moment, nothing exists but this.
Here's what I know about Luca Moretti in the early morning.
He is not in a hurry.
He knocked twice on the bathroom door when I had five minutes left.
"Bruni in five," he said, through the wood. Voice perfectly even. Like nothing happened.
Infuriating. Deeply, deeply attractive. Both.
Bruni delivers everything.
Six weeks of surveillance logs. Three burner numbers. A dead drop in a Midtown parking garage. A fixer whose name Niko is already running through seventeen databases.
I sit in the study and take it all in — my surgeon's face neutral, processing, filing. I don't let any of the cold fury show until I'm alone in the hallway afterward.
Six weeks.
They've been watching me for six weeks — before the drive, before Tessaro died on my table, before any of this started.
Someone looked at Serafina Virelli and decided she was a variable worth monitoring.
She went to work every day, unaware. Stood in her apartment, worked at her hospital, lived her life — while someone watched every minute of it.
I think about that.
I do the math.
By the time Luca comes to find me, I've already reached a conclusion, and that conclusion has a plan attached to it. The plan is either brilliant or insane, and at this point, I'm not entirely sure there's a difference.
"Enzo wants you at midnight,” Luca announces from the doorway, watching me carefully.
"I know. I'm not going."
To his credit, Luca doesn't waste time arguing the obvious.
He goes straight to no — quiet, final, the voice he uses when he's already decided and expects the room to agree — and I let him finish.
Then I lay out my counter-plan with the same precision I use when I tell a resident their diagnosis is wrong.
The Fixer wants leverage. After six weeks of surveillance, he still hasn't moved directly, which means he needs me functional, compliant, or compromised — not dead.
That's an opening. Wire me up, put me where he'd expect me, give him the chance to make contact.
When he does, we get his voice on record, hand it to the federal channel with Niko's payment chain, and the whole thing detonates publicly in a way even Enzo can't manage.
Luca listens.
His expression does not change once.
"No."
"It's the cleanest—"
"No."
"If you'd just—"
"Serafina." Warning. "No."
I look at him. He looks at me. The air between us has that charge it gets — two people, each completely certain they're right and with no intention of yielding.
"Then I'll do it without you."
A muscle ticks in his jaw. "You will not—"
"East wing breaker cuts the card reader at the service exit." Calm. "I've had three days to map the building. I can be outside in four minutes flat, and I'll be halfway to Bellevue before your team resets." I hold his gaze. "I'm not bluffing. I've run the scenario. It works."
Dangerous silence.
"You'd actually walk out?"
"I would walk out because the alternative is to sit here while your uncle and my father negotiate my future over scotch.
I will burn this city down before I let that happen.
" I step toward him. "You want control? Fine.
Give me a wire. Give me guards I can't see, exit routes mapped to the inch, fifteen-minute check-ins.
Give me the infrastructure. But give it to me as a partner, Luca — not as a prisoner with better security protocols. "
His jaw is tight enough to cut glass.
He turns away. Walks to the window. Stands there with his hands in his pockets.
I watch his shoulders and think of the boy who grew up with brothers and a rotating nanny and no mother, who learned that control was the only thing that kept the world from taking everything — and I viscerally understand the cost to him of what he does next.
He turns around.
"Wire. Two men inside, three outside. Exit routes mapped before you move.
Fifteen-minute check-ins, no exceptions.
You make contact, you get audio, you walk — you don't push for more, you don't improvise, you don't go off-script for any reason.
" He crosses back to me. Stops close. "And if I give you this and something goes wrong—" His voice drops below language.
"I'll kill every last one of them and I won't lose a minute of sleep over it.
There will be nothing left of the people responsible. You understand me? Nothing."
My pulse is doing things it has no business doing.
"That's surprisingly reasonable."
"Don't."
"I'm just saying—"
"Serafina." His hand comes up. Knuckles brush my jaw — barely touching, the ghost of contact.
"This isn't me giving you permission. This is me accepting that you'll go regardless, and choosing to make sure you come back.
" His eyes find mine and hold. Dark and certain, and beneath it all, fear.
Real fear. The kind he'll never name. "Come back. "
Not a command.
A plea dressed up as one.
What moves through me has no safe name.
I give it to him anyway.
"Working on it."
His hand drops.
He steps back.
The wall goes up — smooth, practiced, and now completely unconvincing, now that I know what lives behind it.
"Niko." He doesn't look away from me.
Niko materializes in the doorway like he's been waiting for his cue — which he absolutely has, the little eavesdropping genius — and after one look at the two of us, becomes very interested in his laptop.
"Wire," Luca says. "Best one we have."
"Already pulled it."
Two hours later, I'm memorizing exit routes when Luca appears at the kitchen counter beside me.
He doesn't say anything for a long moment. He just stands there, close enough that I can feel his heat, staring at the map like it's offended him personally.
"If this goes wrong." His voice is very quiet. Absolute. The voice he uses when he means it down to the bone. "I'll start a war you can't imagine."
I look at him.
At the hard jaw, the ruthless mouth, the eyes that have been tracking my every move all morning like I'm the only thing in the room worth watching.
"Then let's make sure it doesn't."
He holds my gaze for one long moment.
Nods once.
Goes back to his coffee.
But his shoulder stays pressed against mine for the rest of the morning, and neither of us moves away.