5. Nova
— ? —
Nova
Week Two
I learn the mansion the way you learn a person - slowly, carefully, one room at a time.
The east wing is mine, apparently. A bedroom, a sitting room, a bathroom with a claw-foot tub big enough to swim in.
The doctor comes every other day to check my wrist, a silver-haired man named Marchetti who speaks in soft Italian and never once asks how I got my injuries.
He knows better. Everyone in this house knows better.
But I don’t stay in my rooms.
I can’t. After two years of being confined to the Castellani estate, of having my movements tracked and my exits monitored and my freedom slowly stripped away, I find that I need to wander.
Need to know the shape of my cage, even if this particular cage is beautiful and gothic and smells like woodsmoke instead of Vivienne’s cloying perfume.
So I explore.
The mansion is a labyrinth. Hallways that twist and turn and double back on themselves, staircases that lead to nowhere, doors that open onto rooms that haven’t been used in decades.
I find a library with floor-to-ceiling windows and books in six languages.
I find a music room with a grand piano so dusty that my fingers leave trails across the keys.
I find a conservatory full of dead plants and living ghosts, the remnants of someone’s abandoned passion.
And I find the chapel.
It’s at the end of a corridor I’ve walked past three times without noticing the door - a heavy oak thing, iron-banded like something out of a medieval fortress. The handle turns easily under my good hand, and I slip inside.
The space is small. Intimate. Stone walls and vaulted ceilings and stained glass windows that turn the afternoon light into something holy.
Wooden pews worn smooth by centuries of worship.
A simple altar at the front, bare except for two unlit candles and a layer of dust thick enough to write your name in.
No one has been in here for a very long time.
I run my fingers along the back of a pew, watching dust motes dance in the colored light, and I think about Luca - about the way the staff flinch when he walks past, the way his face goes blank when anyone mentions family, the way he moves through this beautiful dark house like he’s haunting it instead of living in it.
A man with a private chapel he never enters.
What does that mean?
“It belonged to my grandmother.”
I spin, my heart slamming against my ribs, and find him standing in the doorway. He’s backlit by the corridor, his features obscured, but I’d know the shape of him anywhere by now. The broad shoulders. The way he holds himself, coiled and controlled.
“I’m sorry,” I say automatically. “I didn’t mean to intrude-”
“You’re not intruding.” He steps inside, and the door swings shut behind him. The stained glass throws color across his face - blue and gold and crimson, turning him into something out of a Renaissance painting. “This house is yours while you’re here. Every room. Including this one.”
“Even the ones you don’t use?”
Something flickers across his expression. “Especially those.”
He moves past me, down the center aisle, his footsteps echoing in the silence. I watch him stop in front of the altar, his back to me, his hands hanging loose at his sides.
“She was the only one who ever protected me,” he says quietly. “My grandmother. When I was young. She’d bring me here when things got… bad. Tell me that God sees everything. That He keeps records. That someday, the people who hurt us would have to answer for it.”
I don’t say anything. I barely breathe.
“She died when I was twelve. My mother had her moved to a nursing home, said she was becoming difficult. She lasted three months there before her heart gave out.” A pause. “I haven’t been able to set foot in here since.”
“Why not?”
He turns. The light catches his eyes, and I see something there I haven’t seen before. Something raw. Unguarded.
“Because I stopped believing that God was keeping records. And I started keeping them myself.”
The words hang between us, heavy with meaning I’m not sure I understand. But before I can ask, he’s moving again, walking back toward me, his expression smoothing over into something more familiar.
“Lunch is in twenty minutes,” he says. “The east sitting room. There’s something there I think you’ll want to see.”
He leaves without waiting for a response.
I stay in the chapel for a long time afterward, running my fingers over the dusty pews and thinking about a twelve-year-old boy who lost his only protector.
Thinking about the man he became - dark and dangerous and capable of violence, but also the man who tends wounds with gentle hands and believes women when they tell him about their bruises.
He’s keeping records, I think. He’s been keeping records for years.
And someday, the people who hurt us are going to have to answer for it.
***
The east sitting room is flooded with afternoon light.
It’s smaller than the other formal rooms I’ve found, more intimate, with overstuffed chairs arranged around a fireplace and windows that look out over the garden. The kind of room designed for reading and conversation, for quiet afternoons and comfortable silences.
But that’s not what catches my attention.
What catches my attention is the easel in the corner.
And the paints arranged beside it.
I stop in the doorway, my breath catching in my throat.
They’re good paints - professional quality oils, the expensive kind I used to splurge on back when I could afford to splurge on anything.
A full spectrum of colors. Brushes in every size.
Turpentine. Linseed oil. An actual palette, not the paper plates I’d resorted to using before Dante whisked me away into a life where I had money for anything except the things that mattered.
“You mentioned you used to paint.”
Luca is behind me. I don’t know when he appeared - he moves like smoke, this man, silent and inevitable - but I can feel the heat of him at my back, can smell that familiar sandalwood and darkness.
“I…” My throat is tight. “When did I mention that?”
“You didn’t. But your hands.”
I look down at my hands. My good one, anyway, the other is still splinted and bandaged. I don’t see anything unusual. Just fingers. Skin. The faint ghost of calluses I used to have.
“There are paint stains under your nails. Old ones. The kind that never fully come out, no matter how hard you scrub.” His voice is closer now, low and warm. “You stopped painting when you married my brother. I thought you might want to start again.”
I turn.
He’s right there. Close enough to touch. Close enough that I can see the flecks of gold in his dark eyes, the faint scar at the corner of his mouth, the way his lips are slightly parted like he’s waiting for something.
“How do you know I stopped painting?”
“Because you came to that first dinner with blue and gold under your nails. By the wedding, they were clean. They’ve been clean ever since.”
He noticed. Three years ago, at a dinner I barely remember, he noticed the paint under my nails.
He’s been noticing ever since.
“I can’t,” I whisper. “My wrist-”
“Will heal. But the doctor said movement is good for it - gentle movement, nothing strenuous. Painting might actually help.”
“You asked the doctor if I could paint?”
“I asked the doctor what would help you heal. He said keeping your mind occupied would be useful. This seemed-” He stops. For the first time since I’ve known him, Luca Castellani seems at a loss for words. “This seemed like something you might want.”
I look at the easel. The paints. The brushes arranged with careful precision, clearly by someone who doesn’t know much about art but wanted to get it right anyway.
Two years married, I think, and Dante never once asked about my painting.
He didn’t even notice when I stopped.
“Thank you.” My voice cracks on the words, and I hate it, hate how emotional I am over some tubes of paint and a wooden frame. “I don’t - this is - thank you.”
“Don’t thank me.” His hand comes up, hovers near my shoulder, then drops back to his side like he thought better of touching me. “Just paint.”
He leaves me there with the light and the colors and the sudden, overwhelming urge to create something beautiful.
I don’t paint that day. Or the next. But I sit by the easel sometimes, running my fingers over the brushes, relearning the weight of a palette in my hand. Preparing. Remembering who I used to be before the Castellanis took everything, including my art.
***
Dinner becomes a ritual.
Every evening at seven, I come downstairs to find the small dining room set for two. Candlelight. Wine. Food that appears silently and vanishes the same way, delivered by staff I rarely see and never hear.
And Luca, at the head of the table, watching me.
He always watches me. Not in a predatory way - not the way Vivienne watched, calculating and cold - but with something that feels more like… attention. Like I’m a puzzle he’s trying to solve. Like every word I say and every movement I make is being cataloged and filed away for later reference.
It should unsettle me. It doesn’t.
Tonight, he’s wearing a dark shirt with the sleeves rolled up - always the sleeves rolled up, always those forearms on display like he’s specifically trying to torment me - and he’s talking about the wine.
I’m not listening.
I’m watching his hands.
The way they move when he gestures, graceful and controlled. The way they curl around his wine glass, casual strength on display. The way the candlelight catches the ink on his wrists, illuminating lines and patterns I still haven’t been able to fully decipher.
“-the vineyard is about an hour north of here. We could visit, if you’d like.”
I blink. “What?”
His lips twitch. “You haven’t heard a word I’ve said in the last five minutes, have you?”
Heat floods my cheeks. “I - no. Sorry. I was-”
“Distracted?”
Staring at your hands like a woman possessed. Wondering what they’d feel like on my skin. Imagining-
“Tired,” I lie. “The doctor said that’s normal.”