4. Nova
— ? —
Nova
The First Week
I wake to sunlight.
It takes me a moment to understand why that’s strange, and then I remember. The shelters. The doorways. The alley where I learned to sleep with one eye open, where any light meant danger, meant exposure, meant someone had found me.
But this isn’t an alley. This is a four-poster bed draped in velvet, a fire crackling low in the hearth, morning sun streaming through windows that look out over a garden I don’t recognize.
The mansion. Luca. The Rolls-Royce in the dark.
It comes back in pieces, disjointed fragments that don’t quite fit together. The heat of his hands. The steadiness of his voice. The way he looked at my bruises like he was memorizing them, filing them away for later use.
What happens to the woman who did this to you.
I sit up slowly, cataloging my injuries.
The wrist is splinted now - I don’t remember that happening, must have slept through it - wrapped in clean white bandages that smell like antiseptic and money.
My ribs ache when I breathe too deeply. My face feels wrong, swollen and tender in places I can’t see.
But I’m alive. I’m warm. And for the first time in six weeks, I’m not hungry.
There’s a tray on the bedside table. Espresso in a tiny porcelain cup, still steaming. A croissant, flaky and golden. Fresh fruit arranged on a plate like a still life.
Who brought this? When did they-
I reach for the espresso with my good hand, and the first sip makes me want to cry.
It’s perfect - strong and dark and exactly right, the way good espresso should be and never was in the Castellani household, where Vivienne insisted on some pale, overpriced blend that tasted like hot water with pretensions.
I’m halfway through the croissant when the door opens.
Luca.
He’s different in the daylight. Still devastatingly handsome - God, even more so, with the morning light catching the angles of his face, illuminating the gold flecks I hadn’t noticed in his dark eyes - but softer somehow.
More human. He’s not wearing a suit today; just dark trousers and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, exposing forearms corded with muscle and traced with ink.
Don’t look at his forearms. Don’t look at his forearms. Don’t-
I look at his forearms.
The tattoos are beautiful. Dark lines that wrap around his wrists and disappear beneath the folded fabric, intricate patterns I can’t quite make out from here.
I find myself wanting to push those sleeves higher, to trace the ink with my fingertips, to map every line and curve until I’ve memorized them all.
Stop it. What is wrong with you?
“How are you feeling?”
His voice snaps me back to reality. I realize I’ve been staring - at his arms, at his hands, at the way the white fabric stretches across his shoulders - and heat floods my cheeks.
“Better,” I manage. “The espresso helps.”
“Good.” He crosses to the fireplace, adds another log, adjusts something I can’t see.
The movement pulls his shirt tight across his back, and I catch a glimpse of more ink disappearing beneath his collar.
“The doctor wants to check your wrist again this afternoon. I told him you’d be awake by then. ”
“How did you know?”
He glances back at me, one eyebrow raised. “Know what?”
“When I’d wake up. How I take my espresso. That I’d-” I stop, suddenly aware of how strange this is. How intimate. A man I’ve never met, anticipating my needs like he’s been studying me for years.
Something flickers across his face, there and gone too fast to name.
“Lucky guess,” he says. And turns back to the fire.
I don’t believe him. Not for a second. But I’m too tired and too grateful and too distracted by the way the firelight plays across his profile to push.
“I should look at your wrist.”
“The doctor already-”
“The doctor set it and bandaged it. He didn’t check it this morning.” He straightens, turns to face me fully. “I did.”
“You… what?”
“While you were sleeping. I needed to make sure the swelling was going down.” He says it like it’s nothing. Like checking on an unconscious woman’s injuries while she sleeps is a perfectly normal thing for a stranger to do. “It is. But I want to see it again now that you’re awake.”
I should protest. Should feel violated, maybe, or at least uncomfortable. A man I barely know has been watching me sleep, touching me while I was unconscious, making decisions about my body without my input.
But the man who watched me sleep is the same man who pulled me off a street corner and carried me up a staircase and told me I never had to apologize for surviving.
The same man whose hands held me like I was precious, whose voice cut through my nightmares, whose presence in the dark felt like safety instead of threat.
“Okay,” I hear myself say.
He crosses to the bed in three long strides, and suddenly he’s right there, close enough that I can smell him - that same sandalwood and smoke from last night, warm and dark and dangerously appealing.
He sits on the edge of the mattress, the dip of his weight shifting me slightly toward him, and holds out his hand.
“May I?”
I extend my bandaged wrist.
His fingers close around my forearm - gentle, so gentle, barely any pressure at all - and he begins to unwrap the bandage.
I watch his hands work, those scarred knuckles and elegant fingers, the silver ring glinting in the morning light.
He’s focused entirely on the task, his dark eyes tracking every loop of fabric as it falls away, and I’m focused entirely on trying not to combust.
He’s touching me like I’m made of glass.
My skin is burning everywhere his fingers land.
He’s my ex-husband’s brother.
He’s dangerous.
I should not be wondering what those hands would feel like without the bandage between them.
The last of the wrapping comes away, and I look down at my wrist. It’s ugly. Purple and swollen, the imprint of Vivienne’s fingers still visible beneath the discoloration. The fracture is somewhere in there, invisible, making itself known only through the deep ache that pulses with every heartbeat.
Luca goes very still.
I watch his jaw tighten. Watch his eyes trace the pattern of the bruising: four fingers, one thumb, the exact shape of a woman’s grip. Watch something cold and lethal move behind his expression like a shark beneath still water.
“She grabbed you here,” he says quietly. “Twisted.”
It’s not a question.
“Yes.”
“How many times? Before this?”
I think about lying. Think about deflecting, minimizing, doing all the things I learned to do when Dante asked about the bruises. It’s nothing. I’m clumsy. She didn’t mean it.
But Luca isn’t Dante. Luca is looking at me like my answer matters. Like my truth is something worth having.
“I lost count after the first year.”
His hand tightens fractionally on my arm - not painful, just present, a grounding point of contact - and then relaxes.
“Tell me.”
“Why?”
“Because someone should know.” His eyes meet mine, dark and steady. “Because I want to believe you.”
I want to believe you.
Not I believe you. Not the automatic reassurance, the meaningless platitude. Something more deliberate than that. An invitation.
And somehow, that distinction cracks something open inside me.
“The first time was a week after the wedding.”
The words come slowly at first, rusty with disuse.
I haven’t told anyone this story - not all of it, not from the beginning.
Dante didn’t want to hear it. The few friends I tried to confide in looked at me like I was crazy, like surely I must be exaggerating, like Vivienne Castellani was too refined, too elegant, too beloved to do the things I was describing.
But Luca just listens.
I tell him about the pinches at dinner parties.
The slaps in empty hallways. The way Vivienne would grip my arm hard enough to bruise while smiling at her guests, her nails breaking skin beneath the tablecloth.
I tell him about the riding crop she kept behind the coats in the hall closet, and the night she used it - the marks across my shoulder blade that healed wrong and never faded.
I tell him about the Christmas Eve in the pantry, “Silent Night” playing in the next room while she hit me for using the wrong serving spoon.
I tell him about the night I finally showed Dante - about the way he looked at his whiskey instead of my wrist, about the words that still echo in my head every time I close my eyes.
You’ve always been sensitive.
She probably doesn’t realize.
Go to bed, Nova. We can talk about this tomorrow.
Through all of it, Luca doesn’t interrupt. Doesn’t gasp or exclaim or make sympathetic noises. He just sits there, holding my wrist like it’s something sacred, his eyes never leaving my face.
And when I finally run out of words, when the whole ugly story is lying between us like a body on a table, he says:
“I believe you.”
Three words. Simple. Quiet.
No are you sure?
No maybe you misunderstood.
No she probably didn’t mean it that way.
Just: I believe you.
And that - more than the rescue, more than the mansion, more than the gentle hands and the perfect espresso and the four-poster bed - undoes me completely.
I cry.
Not the wracking sobs of last night, the nightmare-induced hysteria. This is something quieter, something deeper. Tears sliding down my cheeks in silence while something in my chest finally, finally unknots.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I don’t know why I’m-”
“Don’t.” His free hand comes up - slowly, giving me time to pull away - and his thumb brushes across my cheekbone, catching a tear. “Don’t apologize. Not to me. Not for this.”
His skin is warm against mine. His eyes are soft in a way I wouldn’t have thought possible, looking at that hard face. He’s close enough that I can see the individual lashes framing those dark eyes, can count the tiny scars scattered across his cheekbones, can-
Can feel my heart pounding so hard he must be able to hear it.
I pull back.