2. Nova #2
I try to stand, but my legs won’t cooperate. Six weeks of malnutrition and exhaustion have stolen something from me, some fundamental ability to fight back, to run, to do anything but watch as Vivienne Castellani steps into the dim light of the alley.
She’s wearing a black coat. Elegant. Understated. A coat that costs more than everything I’ve lost.
She looks down at me like she’s examining something unpleasant on the bottom of her shoe.
“There you are.” Her voice is calm. Almost pleasant. “I had to see it myself.”
“You’ve won.” The words come out rough, scraped raw by cold and hunger. “What more do you want?”
“Won?” She laughs, a delicate sound that doesn’t match the cruelty in her eyes. “My dear girl. This isn’t about winning.”
She crouches down, and I flinch - I can’t help it, the reflex is too ingrained - and something like satisfaction flickers across her face.
“This is about understanding,” she says. “I need you to understand that what’s happening to you isn’t temporary. It isn’t a setback. It’s permanent.”
“Why?” I hate that I’m asking. I hate that I still don’t understand, after everything, what I did to deserve this. “I left. I’m gone. Why can’t you just-”
“Because you thought you could leave.” Her voice goes sharp. “You thought you could walk out of my house, abandon my son, and face no consequences. You thought you were someone who mattered.”
She crouches lower, and her voice goes almost gentle.
“Understand me. This was never about whether I liked you. You were a thing I owned, a thing I was still using. I don’t break what’s mine because I hate it.
I break it so it remembers whose it is.” Her eyes are flat as winter.
“You forgot. You walked out my door as though you belonged to yourself. No one who belongs to me gets to decide that.”
She reaches out, and her fingers close around my wrist - the same wrist, the same grip, the same place where her nails always find purchase. I try to pull away, but I’m too weak, too slow, too broken.
“You’re nothing, Nova. You were always nothing. A stray my son dragged home because he thought you were pretty. And strays who forget their place-”
She squeezes. I feel something give. The pain is white-hot, blinding, a scream trapped in my throat because I won’t give her the satisfaction-
“-get put down.”
She releases me, and I crumple against the wall, cradling my wrist, unable to breathe through the pain.
Then her other hand cracks across my face - once, twice - her rings cutting skin, and when I slide sideways down the wall her fingers find my throat and hold. Not squeezing. Just resting there. Just long enough to show me she can. Just long enough for the edges of the world to go gray.
She lets go. Rises. Smooths her coat like she’s finished an unpleasant errand.
“If you come near my son again,” she says, “I’ll bury you. And no one will look for you. No one will miss you. No one will even remember you existed.”
She turns and walks away, her heels clicking against the pavement, her perfume lingering in the air like poison.
I don’t cry. I don’t scream. I don’t do anything except lie there on the cold pavement with my broken wrist and my broken life and the certain knowledge that she’s right.
No one is coming for me.
No one is going to save me.
I close my eyes and wait for the darkness to take me.
***
I don’t know how long I drift. Minutes or hours or some space in between where time stops mattering. The cold has seeped so deep into my bones that I’ve stopped shivering, which I remember from somewhere means something bad, means my body is giving up on fighting, means-
An engine.
The sound cuts through the fog, too close, too loud. Headlights wash over me, turning the backs of my eyelids red.
A car door opens.
Footsteps. Not heels this time, something heavier. Deliberate. The sound of someone who knows exactly where they’re going.
She sent someone to finish it, I think dimly. She actually sent someone to-
“Signora.”
A man’s voice. Deep. Low. Unfamiliar.
I force my eyes open.
The first thing I see is the car. A Rolls-Royce, black as midnight, idling at the mouth of the alley like something out of a fever dream. The second thing I see is the man crouching in front of me.
And I forget, for a moment, that I’m dying.
He’s the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen - and I hate myself for noticing, hate that my half-frozen brain has the audacity to register attraction when I’m bleeding on a pavement - but God, I can’t help it. Can’t help the way my breath catches even though breathing hurts.
Tall. So tall that even crouching he seems to take up the entire alley, to block out the dim streetlight and the cold wind and everything else that exists beyond the space he occupies.
His shoulders are broad beneath a charcoal suit that fits him like it was sewn directly onto his body - and it probably was, I think deliriously, because men who drive Rolls-Royces don’t buy off the rack.
The suit jacket is unbuttoned, revealing a black shirt underneath, no tie, the collar open just enough to show the hollow of his throat and a hint of something dark beneath - ink, my artist’s eye supplies, a tattoo trailing up from his chest - and I shouldn’t be cataloging these details, I shouldn’t be noticing-
But I notice.
I notice the way his dark hair falls across his forehead, almost black in the dim light, thick and slightly disheveled like he’s been running his hands through it.
It’s longer on top, shorter at the sides, a cut that looks effortless but probably costs more than my monthly rent used to.
I notice the sharp cut of his jaw, shadowed with stubble that’s closer to a three-day beard than a five o’clock shadow, dark against olive skin that speaks of Mediterranean sun and ancient bloodlines.
I notice his cheekbones - God, those cheekbones - high and sculpted, bone structure that makes artists weep and photographers fall to their knees in gratitude.
They cast shadows beneath the dim streetlight, hollowing out his face in a way that should make him look gaunt but instead makes him look like something carved from marble by a master sculptor.
Like Michelangelo himself reached down from heaven and said this one, this one I’ll make perfect.
His nose has been broken at least once. Maybe twice.
There’s a slight irregularity to the bridge that should make him less handsome but somehow does the opposite, adding something rough and real and dangerous to features that might otherwise be too perfect.
A thin scar cuts through his left eyebrow, silver-white against his olive skin, and another traces along his jaw, disappearing into the stubble like a secret.
His lips are full, almost soft-looking, a strange contrast to the harsh angles of the rest of his face.
The bottom lip is slightly fuller than the top, and there’s a tiny scar at the corner of his mouth - another fight, another story I’ll never know.
Right now those lips are pressed into a thin line, not quite frowning but nowhere near smiling, and I find myself wondering what his smile looks like. If he ever smiles at all.
But it’s his eyes that undo me.
Dark. So dark they’re almost black in the dim light, the color of espresso, of midnight, of every shadow I’ve ever been afraid of.
They’re framed by lashes that are wasted on a man - thick and dark and long enough to cast shadows on those impossible cheekbones.
They’re the kind of eyes that see everything, miss nothing, strip you bare without ever changing expression.
Right now they’re moving over me - over the bruises blooming on my face, the way I’m cradling my wrist against my chest, the fingermarks on my throat that I forgot were visible - and something happens in those dark depths.
Something cold. Something lethal.
The temperature in the alley seems to drop ten degrees, and it has nothing to do with the November wind.
He knows whose hands made these marks.
I can see it in the way his jaw tightens, the muscle ticking beneath that scarred cheekbone. In the way his shoulders go rigid beneath the expensive wool of his suit. In the way his hands - God, his hands - curl into fists at his sides before he deliberately, visibly, forces them to relax.
His hands. I shouldn’t be looking at his hands.
But I am, because I’m apparently incapable of not cataloging every detail of this man like he’s a painting I need to memorize before it’s taken away.
They’re large, broad-palmed, with long fingers that look like they’d span an octave on a piano with ease.
His knuckles are scarred - old wounds, white against olive skin, the kind of scars you get from hitting things.
Or people. A heavy silver ring on his right hand catches the headlights, some kind of signet, old and worn smooth by generations of wear.
There’s ink on his hands too, I realize. Black lines that disappear beneath his cuffs, hinting at more beneath. Tattoos that trail up his forearms, hidden by the expensive fabric, and I find myself wanting to push back his sleeves and trace every line with my fingertips.
Stop it, I tell myself savagely. Stop it, you’re dying, this is not the time-
He looks like something carved from Roman marble and brought to life by a god with a cruel sense of humor - a fallen angel rendered in oils, all sharp edges and shadowed beauty and the promise of violence barely leashed.
Like danger wearing a bespoke suit, like sin made flesh, like the answer to prayers I never knew I was making.
He looks like a Castellani.
Luca.