Chapter Nineteen
LIVIA
He’s still on the steps twenty minutes later.
I know because I can’t sleep because some restless, traitorous part of me keeps drifting to the window to check. The third time I do it, I see him exactly where I left him, elbows on his knees, head bowed slightly, the porch light throwing a long shadow down the steps and into the dark grass.
I should not care that he’s still out there.
I tell myself that, lying in the dark of the bedroom with Nico’s monitor humming faintly on the nightstand, the small green light blinking its assurance that my son is asleep down the hall and the world, for the moment, has not ended.
I have spent four years building a life that doesn’t depend on whether a man comes inside out of the cold.
I am good at that life. I am proud of that life.
And yet I keep getting up to check the window.
The dinner replays behind my eyes every time I close them: his hand at my back, steady and certain, the way he said my father’s name like a fact rather than a threat, the way the whole room shifted around the two of us like we were something solid instead of something invented for an audience.
I think about the doorway after, his hand rising toward my face and stopping, the careful retreat down the hall, the front door closing behind him with a deliberateness that felt less like discipline and more like a man fleeing something he didn’t have a name for.
I stand at the window with my arms wrapped around myself for a long moment, watching a man who organizes evacuation routes for a living refuse to come in out of the cold, and I think, not for the first time this week, that I am tired. Not of him. Of the distance.
Then I open the door.
He doesn’t turn around right away. “Go to sleep, Livia.”
“That’s not really your call to make.” I step out onto the porch.
The night air is sharp enough to wake me up fully, cold against my bare arms, and I wrap them tighter around myself.
“You can sit out here all night pretending this is about discipline. Or you can come inside like a normal, emotionally damaged man and talk to me.”
That gets him. The corner of his mouth moves, not quite a smile, but close enough that I count it as a small victory.
“Emotionally damaged,” he repeats.
“I’ve read your file, Valentino. Metaphorically. I don’t need a dossier to know a man who builds exit routes into every room he stands in has some history he’s not telling anyone.”
He’s quiet for a moment, looking out at the dark lawn instead of at me. “You’re not wrong.”
“I rarely am.”
That, finally, gets the smile all the way out, brief and unguarded, gone again almost before I register it. He stands, slowly, like something in him has decided, and follows me back inside.
The cottage is warm and dim, lit only by the lamp in the corner and the faint glow leaking from beneath Nico’s door down the hall. I sit on the end of the sofa, legs tucked under me, and after a moment he sits too, an arm’s length away, like he’s negotiating the distance with himself in real time.
I’ve been waiting for this conversation since the night I first saw the ink on his forearm and felt something in my chest catch on it like fabric on a nail. “Tell me about the tattoo.”
He looks down at his own arm, like he’s forgotten it’s there, like it’s become so much a part of him he stopped registering it as something separate that could be asked about.
“It’s supposed to represent where I was born,” he says. “A small town, inland from the coast. My grandmother kept goats. My father worked on a farm that wasn’t ours, that we worked anyway, because the man who owned it never came to claim it and somebody had to feed the animals.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“I know.” He turns his arm slightly, and the lamp catches the ink — a small, weathered farmhouse, simple lines, half-swallowed by hills.
“My mother died when I was nine. My father two years after that. By eleven I was raising myself in a house that wasn’t legally mine, on land that wasn’t legally anyone’s, until an uncle in Milan decided I was either an asset or a liability and chose to make me the first.”
“Valentino—”
“I got this,” he says, touching the tattoo with two fingers, “the year I left. Not to remember the farm. To remember that I survived it. That whatever I built after, however far from that hillside it took me, some part of it was mine before anyone else decided what I was for.”
I think of all the versions of him I’ve assembled over the past two days: the man who recalculates exit routes before he’s finished his coffee, the man who briefed an entire security detail without raising his voice once, the man who sat on the edge of a four-year-old’s bed and spoke to him in a language Nico doesn’t understand a word of, simply because it was the language that lived closest to his own grief.
None of them quite match the boy on that hillside, feeding goats that weren’t his on land that wasn’t his, deciding alone at eleven that survival was something you built rather than something given to you.
“You built all of this,” I say quietly, gesturing at nothing in particular, at the cottage and the retreat and the company and the careful architecture of a life that looks, from any reasonable distance, like complete control, “out of a boy who had none of it.”
“I built all of this,” he agrees, “because I decided very early that I would never again be a person, things simply happened to.”
“And now?”
He looks at me for a long moment, and something in his face shifts, some old vigilance loosening just slightly. “Now I’m sitting in a cottage with a woman who makes that plan look considerably less appealing than it used to.”
I reach over, slowly, and rest my fingers against the ink. He goes very still.
“Home,” I say quietly. “And loss. And making it out anyway.”
“Yes.”
He’s looking at me like he’s trying to place something, trying to chase down a memory that keeps sliding out of reach the harder he reaches for it.
“You’re looking at me strangely,” I say.
“You remind me of someone.”
My pulse stutters. “Who?”
“I don’t know yet.” His voice has gone low, rough at the edges.
I should change the subject. I should stand up, say goodnight, retreat to the bedroom and put a door between us before whatever this is finishes building toward whatever it’s been building toward since the hallway last night.
I know exactly what I’m risking by staying here, my fingers still resting against his arm, his eyes still searching my face like an answer is written somewhere on it.
I think of Venice, of a mask and a balcony and a man whose voice I have never once managed to fully forget, no matter how many years I spent trying.
I think of how easily the two versions of him could collapse into one if I just said the words sitting heavy on my tongue right now.
I don’t move. I don’t say them.
“Livia.” My name, in his mouth, sounds like a decision being made.
“I know,” I say.
“This is—”
“A terrible idea. I know that too.”
He laughs, low and surprised, like the sound escaped before he could stop it. “I was going to say inevitable.”
“That’s worse.”
“Probably.”
And then there’s no more space between us and his hand comes up to my jaw the way it did last night, except this time there’s no nightmare down the hall to interrupt it, no audience, no exit route either of us is looking for.
I close the distance myself, because waiting for him to do it feels like a cowardice, I’m no longer willing to indulge.
The kiss is slower than the hallway. Deliberate, almost reverent, like he’s decided that if this is going to happen, he’s not going to let urgency rob him of any of it.
His hand slides from my jaw into my hair, and mine finds the front of his shirt, the same place it found last night, except this time neither of us stops.
He says my name again, against my mouth, and I feel it more than hear it.
His fingers slide to my thighs slowly moving up upwards, pressing between my curves until they find the wetness that is dripping from my folds and making a mess of my panties. His rumbling chuckle feels like a warm, summer breeze, suffusing me in a heat that burns from the inside out.
My thighs fall open of their own accord, giving him unfettered access to the place that aches for his touch, even as a protesting whine works its way up my throat.
“Not here” I pant, it takes all my strength to pull away from his touch.
I let a teasing smile appear on my face as I pull off my shirt leaving me in just my simple black panties then turn around to walk towards the bedroom.
I take a total of three steps before I'm lifted up in Valentino's strong arms and carry the rest of the way to the bedroom.
He lays me on the bed gently, his mouth finding mine once more as he caresses every inch of me, he can touch, eventually he pulls away for oxygen, panting as he kisses his way down my body.
"I want to taste you. Is that alright?" he asks as he smiles at me.
I nod. "Of course it is."
"Lean back just a bit," he says to me, prompting me to lift my hips. I do as he wordlessly asks and he removes my panties.
"These are so pretty," he tells me, pocketing them as he leans down. Spreading my legs with his hands, he leans down so he can inhale my scent.
"You smell so fucking good," he tells me.
I feel the blush that covers my cheeks, but don't say anything.
"Don't hold your noises from me, you got that?" he asks sternly as he rubs his thumb over my clit.
I nod shyly.
Holding my thighs apart, he leans down to lick me. He starts at my clit, giving it kitten licks, before he leans in and starts dipping his tongue into me. He moans as his tongue covers every inch of my pussy.
I keep my promise and let the sounds fall from my lips. Reaching down, I grab at his dark hair and start grinding my pussy onto his mouth.
"It feels so good," I moan out. "Your tongue is fucking magical."
He chuckles against my skin.