2. Nova #3
The name surfaces through the fog in my brain, dragging recognition with it.
The brother no one mentions at dinner parties.
The name Vivienne spits like a curse whenever someone is foolish enough to bring him up.
I found a photograph once, buried in the back of Dante’s desk drawer - a family portrait from before I existed, before the word estranged became the only way anyone referred to the eldest son.
In that photo, he’d been younger. Softer. Something almost gentle in his eyes, standing slightly apart from his mother and brother like he already knew he didn’t belong with them.
There’s nothing gentle in his eyes now.
Now they’re cataloging my injuries with clinical precision, and I watch something build behind them, something cold and patient and absolutely terrifying.
Not directed at me. Directed at whoever did this.
Directed at the woman who walked away fifteen minutes ago with my blood still drying on her manicured nails.
He looks at me like he’s calculating exactly how many ways he could destroy the person who did this.
The number he’s arriving at is all of them.
“Can you stand?”
His voice matches the rest of him - deep and low and dark, with a rasp to it that suggests whiskey and cigarettes and secrets told at midnight.
It rolls over me like velvet, like smoke, like the first warm day after a brutal winter.
There’s an accent there, subtle but present, the vowels softened by Italian in a way that Dante’s never were.
I shiver, and it has nothing to do with the cold.
Stop noticing. Stop wanting. You’re half-dead in an alley and he’s your ex-husband’s brother and this is not the time to develop an inappropriate attraction to-
I try to stand. My legs buckle.
He moves faster than a man his size should be able to move. One moment he’s crouching in front of me; the next his arms are around me - one behind my back, one beneath my knees - and he’s lifting me like I weigh nothing at all.
He’s warm.
That’s what I think, pressed against his chest. He’s warm, and he smells like sandalwood and something darker, something smoky and rich that I can’t identify, and I can feel the steady beat of his heart through the expensive fabric of his suit.
Can feel the strength in the arms holding me, the restrained power in the body carrying me toward the car, the coiled tension of a man who is holding himself very carefully in check.
His chest is solid against my cheek. I can feel the muscle beneath his shirt, the heat of him seeping through the fabric into my frozen skin. Can feel the way his arms tighten around me - not hard, not painful, just… secure. Like he’s afraid I’ll disappear if he doesn’t hold on.
Dante never carried me anywhere.
Dante never held me like I was something precious, something worth protecting, something that mattered.
“Get in,” Luca says, and his voice is a command and a promise and something else I can’t identify. “You never have to see them again.”
“How-” My voice is a rasp, barely audible. “How did you find me?”
He carries me toward the car, and his answer is quiet enough that I almost miss it.
“Someone in that house still has a conscience.”
He doesn’t explain further. He doesn’t need to.
The car door opens. Warmth rushes out like a physical thing, and I realize I’ve been so cold for so long that I’d forgotten what warmth felt like.
The interior is cream leather and dark wood, obscene luxury that used to make me uncomfortable before I married into a family that considered it standard.
“Why?” I manage, as he settles me into the leather seat with a gentleness that makes something crack in my chest. “Why do you care what happens to me?”
Luca Castellani looks down at me with those midnight eyes, and for a moment I think he’s not going to answer.
The streetlight catches his face, illuminating the sharp planes of his cheekbones, the scar through his eyebrow, the stubble darkening his jaw.
He looks like a statue. He looks like a storm.
He looks like the most lethal thing I’ve ever seen, and somehow also the safest.
Then: “Because no one helped me when I needed it.”
He closes the door. Walks around to the driver’s side. Gets in.
The Rolls-Royce pulls away from the alley, and I watch the street disappear through the tinted window - the doorway where I almost died, the alley where Vivienne left me broken - and I think:
Someone sent him.
This wasn’t chance.
This was planned.
The heat is seeping back into my bones, thawing something that’s been frozen for six weeks. Longer. Maybe since the first time Vivienne’s nails broke my skin and I told myself it was an accident.
I should be afraid. I should be asking questions - where he’s taking me, what he wants, what kind of debt I’m accruing by accepting help from a man the Castellanis have disowned. I should be remembering that the last time I trusted someone with that surname, they chose their mother over me.
But my body has finally found warmth. Finally found safety. And all those questions fade into the blackness as exhaustion drags me under, as consciousness slips away like water through my fingers.
The last thing I feel before the darkness takes me is a hand adjusting the coat draped over my shoulders.
Gentle.
Careful.
Like I’m something worth protecting.