6. Nova #4
It feels like home.
***
The nights blur together.
Three nights. Four. Five. I stop going to my own room entirely. What’s the point, when I always end up in his? We don’t discuss it. Don’t negotiate the terms. It just… happens. Every evening after dinner, I climb the stairs to his room. Every morning, I wake in his arms.
We don’t do anything more than sleep.
But “sleeping” has become something complicated. Something that involves tangled limbs and whispered conversations and the slow, torturous mapping of boundaries.
His hands in my hair.
My head on his chest.
His thigh between my legs when we shift in the night.
My fingers tracing the tattoos on his arms when I think he’s asleep.
(He’s never asleep. I realize this on the fourth night, when I’m tracing the lines of ink across his forearm and I feel him shiver. He’s been awake the whole time, letting me touch him, holding himself still while I explore.)
“You can ask,” he says into the darkness.
“Ask what?”
“About the tattoos. I know you’re curious.”
I trace a line from his wrist to his elbow. “What is this one?”
“A reminder.”
“Of what?”
He’s quiet for a moment. Then: “Of who I’m not going to become.”
I don’t ask anything else that night.
But the next night, I trace a different line. And the night after that, a different one still. And slowly, piece by piece, I learn the map of him - the stories written in ink on his skin, the scars that tell their own tales, the landscape of a man who has survived things he doesn’t talk about.
It’s the most intimate thing I’ve ever done.
More intimate than sex, somehow. More revealing. Every night, I learn something new about him - a scar he got in a fight when he was nineteen, a tattoo he got to commemorate a friend who died, a patch of unmarked skin that he’s saving for something he won’t tell me about.
And every night, he learns something new about me.
Not through touch - he keeps his hands carefully above the neck, stroking my hair, my back, never venturing anywhere that might be considered dangerous. But through words. Through the quiet conversations we have in the dark, when it’s easier to be honest.
I tell him about the first time Vivienne hurt me. About the Christmas Eve slap. About the night I showed Dante my bruises and he told me I was sensitive.
He listens to all of it. Never interrupts. Never offers platitudes or advice. Just… listens. And when I’m done, he holds me tighter and says, “I believe you.”
Every time. The same two words.
I believe you.
It undoes me every time.
***
Luca
She’s going to be the death of me.
I’ve known it since the first night she climbed into my bed - hell, I’ve known it since the first moment I saw her, three years ago, laughing at my brother’s mediocre joke with paint on her fingers and joy in her eyes. But knowing it intellectually is different from living it.
Living it is torture.
Every night, she comes to me. Every night, she presses her body against mine and falls asleep with her head on my chest. And every night, I lie there in the dark with my hands in her hair and my cock aching and my self-control fraying one thread at a time.
I want her.
I want her so badly it’s like a sickness, a fever that won’t break.
I want to roll her beneath me and swallow her gasps with my mouth.
I want to trace every curve with my tongue, learn every sound she makes, bury myself inside her and never come out.
I want to mark her - with my teeth, my hands, my body - so that everyone who sees her knows she belongs to me.
But I don’t do any of that.
Because she’s not ready. Because she’s still healing. Because taking what I want, what we both want, before she’s strong enough to truly choose it would make me exactly the kind of man I’ve spent my life trying not to be.
So I hold her. Night after night, I hold her. I stroke her hair and listen to her breathe and I don’t sleep, because sleeping would mean letting my guard down, and letting my guard down would mean my body doing something my mind knows it shouldn’t.
(That’s a lie. I do sleep. Better than I have in years, actually.
But I always wake before she does, always slip out of bed before she can feel how much I want her.
I’m a coward that way. A coward who can face down armed men without flinching but can’t handle the thought of her knowing exactly how desperate I am.)
The fifth night, she traces a line of ink across my ribs.
“What’s this one?” she asks.
“A name.”
“Whose name?”
I hesitate. This is one I don’t talk about, one of the marks on my skin that hurts too much to explain.
“My grandmother’s,” I say finally. “The one who used to take me to the chapel.”
Her finger stills on my skin. “The one who died when you were twelve?”
“Yes.”
She doesn’t say anything. Just traces the letters, slow and careful, like she’s committing them to memory.
“I got it on her birthday the year after she died,” I continue. “I was thirteen. Too young for tattoos, but I knew someone who would do it anyway. My mother found out and beat me so badly I couldn’t go to school for a week.”
Her hand flattens against my ribs - not tracing anymore, just touching. Holding.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers.
“Don’t be. It was worth it.” I cover her hand with mine. “She’s always with me now. No one can take that away.”
Nova is quiet for a long moment. Then: “I want something like that.”
“A tattoo?”
“Something she can’t take. Something that’s mine, no matter what.”
I think about the paints I bought her. The easel in the sitting room. The way she’s been spending hours every day just looking at them, not yet ready to use them.
“You’ll find it,” I say. “When you’re ready.”
She presses her lips to my chest - not a kiss, exactly, just a touch. A point of contact that burns through me like a brand.
“Thank you,” she murmurs against my skin.
“For what?”
“For waiting.”
For waiting.
She knows. She knows exactly what this is costing me, exactly how much I want her, exactly how hard I’m holding myself back. She knows, and she’s thanking me for it.
I don’t deserve you, I think. I’ve never deserved you.
But I’m going to spend the rest of my life trying to.
***
The call comes on the sixth morning.
I’m in my study, pretending to work, actually thinking about the way Nova’s hair looked spread across my pillow when she woke up this morning.
The sun had caught it just right, turning it to gold, and I’d had to physically remove myself from the room before I did something stupid like kiss her awake.
“Signore.” Marco’s voice is tight. “We have a problem.”
I sit up straighter. “What kind of problem?”
“The investigator. The one Vivienne hired.”
“What about him?”
“He’s found the mansion.”
My blood goes cold.
“Explain.”
“He hasn’t breached the perimeter, not yet. But he’s been watching the gates. Taking photographs. And this morning-” Marco pauses. “This morning, he made a phone call to Vivienne.”
“What did he say?”
“He said he’s found where your brother’s wife is hiding. He said he needs more time to confirm, but he’s almost certain. He said-” Another pause. “He said he’ll have proof within the week.”
The phone creaks in my grip. I force myself to relax, to think, to plan.
“Redirect him.”
“Signore?”
“I don’t care how. Give him a false lead. Pay him off. Have someone break into his hotel room and steal his files. I don’t care what it takes, just buy me more time.”
“How much time?”
I think about the case being built. The evidence being gathered. The trap that’s almost ready to spring.
“Two weeks,” I say. “Give me two weeks, and this will all be over.”
“And if I can’t buy you two weeks?”
I look out the window. The morning sun is bright on the grounds, making everything look peaceful and beautiful and safe.
“Then we accelerate the timeline,” I say quietly. “And my mother finds out what happens when she threatens what’s mine.”
***
Marta calls me that night, her voice barely above a whisper. My mother has found us.
She was summoned to the study. “I want to know everything about my son’s household,” my mother told her. “His staff. His schedule. His gates.”
Then, Marta says, my mother smiled - that soft, silk-over-steel smile I learned to flinch from before I could walk.
“You worked under his grandmother in that house for years, didn’t you?” she said. “Then you’ll remember the way in.”