3. Nova #2
“Better?” he asks, and there’s no judgment in his voice. No pity. Just a simple question.
“No,” I admit. “But… quieter.”
He nods, like that makes perfect sense. “The doctor came while you were sleeping. Your wrist is fractured, not broken. Your ribs are bruised. You’re malnourished and dehydrated and your body is running on fumes.” A pause. “You’re going to stay here until you heal.”
“I can’t-”
“You can.” His tone leaves no room for argument. “You will.”
“For how long?”
“As long as it takes.”
“And then what?”
He rises, and I watch the way his body unfolds - all coiled grace and controlled power, a predator who has chosen, for the moment, to be gentle.
“Then,” he says, “we discuss what happens to the woman who did this to you.”
He walks to the door, and I should let him go, should accept the rescue and the room and the fractured-not-broken diagnosis and be grateful. But something makes me call out again, something reckless and stupid and desperate.
“She’ll come looking for me.”
He stops with his hand on the doorframe. Turns just enough for me to see his profile - that broken nose, that scarred jaw, those cheekbones sharp enough to cut.
“Let her.”
Two words. Said quietly, calmly, with absolute certainty.
And for the first time in six weeks, maybe the first time in two years, I believe that someone can protect me.
***
Luca
Midnight.
The fire in my study has burned down to embers, and I stand at the window watching the darkness beyond the glass, a phone pressed to my ear.
“Tell me you have something.”
The detective’s voice crackles through the line.
“I have everything, signore. Two years of medical records that don’t match the explanations given.
Staff testimonies I gathered quietly over the last six months, ever since your contact inside the house reached out.
Financial records showing systematic isolation of the wife’s assets.
And now…” A pause. “Now I have photographs of the injuries sustained tonight. Taken by your physician, with the subject’s permission. ”
“She agreed to be photographed?”
“She asked for it. Said she wanted proof this time. Said she wanted someone to believe her.”
I close my eyes. Behind my lids I see her face - not as it was tonight, bruised and hollow and half-dead, but as it was three years ago when my brother first brought her home.
She’d been laughing at something. Her hair loose around her shoulders.
Paint, actual paint, still smudged on her fingers, because Dante had picked her up directly from her studio and she hadn’t had time to wash it off.
She’d looked embarrassed about it, kept trying to hide her hands, and I’d thought-
I’d thought: She doesn’t belong here. She’s too alive. This family will destroy her.
And then I’d watched it happen. From a distance, from the safety of my self-imposed exile, I’d watched my mother’s hands close around something bright and crush it into dust. I’d told myself it wasn’t my problem. I’d told myself walking away was the only option.
I’d told myself a lot of things that let me sleep at night.
“The case needs to be airtight,” I say now. “No loopholes. No technicalities. Nothing that money or influence can dissolve.”
“Signore, with respect - you know as well as I do that money and influence can dissolve almost anything.”
“Not this.” My hand tightens on the phone. “Not her.”
A pause. Then, carefully: “May I ask why this one matters so much?”
I don’t answer. I don’t have an answer - at least, not one I’m willing to say out loud. Not one I’m willing to admit even to myself, in the dark, with the embers dying and a broken woman sleeping in my guest room.
“Just build the case,” I say. “Everything she’s done. Documented, clean, court-proof.”
“And when it’s ready?”
I turn from the window. Look at the flames.
“I don’t want her buried in a hole,” I say quietly. “I want her buried in a courtroom. I want her name in the papers and her face on the news and every person who ever smiled at her across a dinner table to know exactly what she is.”
“That will take time.”
“I have time.”
“And the son? Your brother?”
I think about Dante. Golden, charming, weak Dante, who had a woman like Nova in his hands and couldn’t be bothered to look at her bruises. Who chose comfort over truth, who chose his mother over his wife, who will spend the rest of his life not understanding what he threw away.
“My brother,” I say, “is not my concern.”
I hang up.
The fire crackles. The wind howls. And somewhere in the east wing, Nova sleeps - safe, for the first time in years, behind walls that my mother cannot breach.
She’ll come looking, Nova said.
Let her, I said.
But what I meant was: Let her try. Let her come to my gates with her lawyers and her threats and her society connections. Let her reach for the woman sleeping in my house, the woman she broke, the woman she left bleeding on a street corner like garbage to be collected.
Let her come and find out.
I’m ready. And I’ll make sure this woman in my home will never be hurt by anyone ever again, or I will kill them all.
The file starts here. The case begins here. The war I’ve been avoiding for three years, the war I told myself wasn’t mine to fight, begins here, tonight, with a fractured wrist and a woman who asked to be photographed because she wanted proof this time.
I pour myself a whiskey. I drink it standing at the window, watching the darkness.
And I wait.