Chapter Eighteen
VALENTINO
I know exactly who Dante De Luca is before I look him up.
I know the type. The way he carried himself through that corridor, the ease of a man who has never once in his life entered a room and wondered whether he belonged in it.
The fabricated warmth. The eye contact held a beat too long, not because he’s interested but because he wants you to know that he is the one who decides when to look away.
I pull his file during the afternoon session, while Livia is running the final vehicle drill with Nico buckled into the back seat of one of the lodge’s fleet cars, laughing at something through the window, and I stand at the perimeter of the exercise yard reading about Dante De Luca on my phone.
De Luca Meridian. Forty-two cases across nine jurisdictions. Three separate civil proceedings in the last decade, all settled, none reaching discovery. Two ex-wives, both of whom signed comprehensive NDAs. A daughter from the first marriage.
One daughter.
The file is thorough. My team assembled it in under an hour from the moment I flagged the name.
I read it twice, and then I put my phone away and watch Livia climb out of the car, help Nico down from the back seat, and crouch in the drill yard to wipe something off his cheek while he objects with full force.
She is laughing.
And warmth spreads in my chest when I hear it, then like a blade finding the gap between ribs, is the knowledge that she didn’t look like that in the corridor this morning.
She stood in that room and made herself very still while her father implied that the son she has raised alone for four years, the boy who is currently trying to negotiate his way out of having his face cleaned, is something he could use against her.
The anger I feel about that is not professional.
I stopped pretending it was professional approximately twelve hours ago.
The conversation happens before dinner, in the thirty-minute window when Nico is settled with a staff member and the lodge’s social rooms are too full and too bright for the kind of conversation I need to have.
I find her in the small garden off the east wing, the one with the stone bench and the overgrown lavender that nobody seems to tend. She’s standing with her back to me, arms crossed, looking at nothing in particular.
“I spoke to Aurelius’s legal team,” I say. “De Luca Meridian has a proxy stake in the energy division but no consortium standing that grants access to retreat participants. He wasn’t supposed to be in that room this morning.”
She turns around. “Valentino—”
“Margaret Aurelius has been informed. His access to the shared program spaces is being reviewed.”
Something moves through her expression. Not gratitude. Something more complicated than gratitude, with an edge to it I wasn’t expecting. “You didn’t need to do that.”
“It’s a security matter.”
“It is none of your business.”
“Anything that constitutes a threat within the perimeter of a retreat I am managing is my business. Anything that threatens the integrity of the—”
“It’s not a business matter,” she says, and her voice has gone quiet, which I have learned is when she is most serious. “It’s my father. It’s my problem. I’ve had it my whole life and I am handling it, and you going around me to the Aurelius legal team is not handling, it’s controlling.”
I stop.
The lavender moves faintly in the evening air. Somewhere in the lodge behind us, someone is playing piano, something slow and European.
“He mentioned Nico to try and use him as leverage,” I say.
“Yes.”
“And that’s not something I’m going to stand still for.”
“You don’t get a vote on what happens with Nico.” Her voice stays level, but her eyes don’t. “Nico is not your business, Valentino.”
The words hurt because they're true. Nico isn't my business. The fact that I hate hearing it says more than I'm willing to examine right now. Especially not here, in a garden at dusk, with Livia standing close enough for me to forget every reason I should keep my distance.
I am quiet for a moment.
“Fine,” I say.
“Fine?”
“I understand your position.”
She looks at me with the expression people usually reserve for very fast weather changes. “That’s it?”
“You’ve made your point clearly. I overstepped the professional parameters of the arrangement.” I keep my voice even. It costs more than it should. “It won’t happen again without your approval.”
She stares at me. “You’re agreeing with me.”
“I’m acknowledging a boundary you’ve identified.”
“You’re the most frustrating person I’ve ever—” She stops. Pushes a breath out through her nose. “Thank you. For wanting to. Even if the method was wrong.”
I nod once. We stand in the garden with the lavender and the piano and four years of something neither of us has said yet, and then I say, “The consortium dinner is in forty minutes. Dante De Luca will be in the room.”
“I know.”
“If we go in as we have been doing, he’ll read it the same way he read you this morning. As performance.”
She looks at me carefully. “How do we go in then?”
“I want to go in as what we are supposed to be.” I hold her gaze. “I want to go in as a man who will not let anyone in that room believe, for a single moment, that his fiancée is open to the kind of pressure your father applied today.”
The piano in the lodge changes key. Slower now, more deliberate.
Livia is quiet for a long moment, “And that's to protect me,” she says eventually. “That’s what you’d call it.”
“Yes.”
“That’s exactly what controlling men always call it.”
The words are a test. I can see that she knows I know it, and she says them anyway.
“I am not your father,” I say.
She looks at me for a moment, and something shifts in her expression. Not softness. Honesty, which is harder. “No,” she says. “You are more dangerous. Because part of me wants to trust you.”
I don’t answer that. There is no answer that doesn't put me at a disadvantage.
“I’ll be ready in thirty minutes,” she says, and walks back toward the lodge.
The dinner is forty people in a candlelit room, three courses and two wines and the murmur of people who have money in common and are willing to call that a foundation for conversation. I bring Livia in with my hand at her lower back, and I do not remove it for the first hour.
Dante De Luca is at the far end of the room, seated between two Aurelius board members, and I feel the exact moment he registers our entrance.
I make sure he sees me see him.
During the starter, someone to my left tries to draw Livia into a conversation about the morning’s security drills, and she handles it with the same ease I’ve been watching all week, the quick intelligence and the humor that surfaces exactly where most people would flounder.
I listen without appearing to listen. I refill her water glass when it runs low.
When the conversation turns toward questions about our engagement, the timeline, the wedding, I answer briefly and then shift the topic with a smooth redirection that would take people years to learn, and I watch from the corner of my eye as Livia very carefully does not smile.
After the main course, Dante crosses the room.
He stops to speak to two people on the way, making the approach look accidental, and then he’s at my elbow, his hand extended, and his eyes on Livia in the precise way I intend to make very uncomfortable for him in the next ninety seconds.
“Ferretti,” he says. “I’ve been meaning to introduce myself properly.”
“De Luca.” I shake his hand. Measure the grip. “I know who you are.”
“Good.” He smiles. “Then you know I have some history with your fiancée.”
“I know everything about your history with Livia.” I say it easily, the way I’d discuss a business report I’ve already read and found unimpressive. “Including this morning’s conversation.”
The smile holds. “She mentioned it.”
“She didn’t need to.” I let that settle for a moment.
“I want to be clear with you, Dante. Whatever leverage you believe you’ve identified, whatever pressure points you think are available.
They aren’t. Livia is not alone here. Nico is not a vulnerability.
And you are welcome to continue attending the consortium events you were invited to attend, but the perimeter of her life is no longer one you have access to. ”
Dante looks at me for a long moment. The smile doesn’t move but the warmth drains out of it, leaving just the scaffolding. “You’re very certain about things you’ve known about for a very short time.”
“Certainty is a professional qualification,” I say. “I’m quite good at it.”
He looks at Livia once, a glancing look that contains twenty years of history I wasn’t present for and intend to become an obstacle to, and then he nods, once, and steps away.
Livia doesn’t look at me until he’s gone. Then she turns her head and I can’t read everything in her expression, but I can read enough. Furious, I think. And something else underneath the fury, something she’d rather I hadn’t seen, sadness.
I look away.
In the cottage afterward, Nico is already asleep, the staff member already gone, the nightlight doing its work down the hall. Livia has changed out of the dinner dress into a grey t-shirt and she’s standing in the doorway of the main bedroom when I come in, shoes in hand, jacket over my arm.
We look at each other.
“You shouldn’t have said all of that,” she says. “Not to him.”
“Probably not.”
“He’s going to know it’s not—” She stops. “He’s going to ask questions.”
“Let him.”
She crosses her arms. Still in the doorway. Still close enough that the light from behind her catches the line of her collarbone, the curve of her shoulder. “Why?”
“Because he needs to believe it,” I say. “And so do you, for the next forty-eight hours.”
“That’s not” She exhales. “That’s not what you were doing in there.”
“No,” I agree. “It wasn’t.”
The silence between us has weight to it. I become aware that my hand has risen slightly, moving toward her face the way it did last night in the hallway, and I stop it.
She hasn’t moved. She isn’t flinching away. She’s watching me with those steady dark eyes and her arms still crossed and her mouth set in the expression she uses when she’s decided not to say what she’s actually thinking.
I lower my hand.
I step back.
I say, very quietly, “Goodnight, Livia,” and I walk past her, down the hall, past Nico’s amber-lit door, and out the cottage’s front door, and I sit down on the top step and look at the dark lawn and the lake beyond it, and I stay there.
Because this is what I do. This is where I always end up. Just outside the door.
The question I keep asking myself is whether that’s about discipline, or whether it’s about fear.