Chapter Twenty-Eight
VALENTINO
I carry Nico back to his bed and stay a moment longer than necessary, watching his breathing settle into the slow, even rhythm of real sleep before I let myself leave the doorway.
There’s a small nightlight plugged into the wall socket near his dresser, shaped like a moon, throwing soft light across a room scattered with toy cars and a single, well-loved stuffed dinosaur missing one button eye.
I notice these details the way I notice everything, cataloguing them without meaning to, except tonight it isn’t tactical.
It’s something closer to hunger, the hunger of a man trying to memorize four years he can never get back through the small, accumulated evidence of a life he’s only just been allowed to enter.
When I return to the living room, Livia is sitting exactly where I left her, knees pulled up, arms wrapped around them, watching me with a raw expression, she looks like someone that’s been stripped of their usual careful armor.
“He went down easily,” I say, settling back onto the sofa, leaving more space between us than I want to.
“He always does, after he’s checked that everyone’s okay.” She says it quietly, almost to herself. “He’s been doing that since he was two. Some kind of internal radar for whether the adults in the room are actually fine or just pretending.”
“He didn’t get that from me.”
“No,” she agrees, and something almost like a smile moves across her face, brief and exhausted. “That one’s mine.”
We sit in the lamp-lit quiet for a moment, the apartment settling around us, Piper’s steady breathing audible faintly from the den.
I am aware of how close Livia is. Close enough that I could reach her in a single motion.
Far enough that the distance still feels like a choice either of us could close or maintain.
“Tell me about Venice,” I say. “What do you remember? I want to know if it’s the same thing I’ve been carrying for five years.”
She’s quiet for a long moment, looking at her hands.
“I remember the mask first,” she says finally.
“Ivory and gold, with this absurd, beautiful detail along the edges, like something out of a painting. I remember thinking the entire night felt like stepping into someone else’s life, someone braver than I usually let myself be.
And then I remember you. Tall, before I even saw your face properly.
The way you didn’t introduce yourself, didn’t ask my name right away, just looked at me like I was the only interesting thing in a room full of extremely wealthy, extremely boring people. ”
“You were.”
“I didn’t know that yet. I just knew I didn’t want the night to end.
” She looks up at me. “I remember the library. The way moonlight came through those enormous windows, and how quiet it got once we were away from the music, like the whole world had narrowed down to just that room. I remember thinking I had never told a stranger so much true information about myself in one night, and I remember not caring, because some part of me understood it would never be relevant past midnight. Whoever you were beneath that mask, you weren’t going to follow me into Monday morning. ”
“I wanted to.”
I watch her expression closely, registering the slight shock on her face
“I looked for you,” I continue, before I lose the nerve.
“After. I had people I trust discreetly inquire about the masquerade’s attendee list, which the Society guards more carefully than most governments guard state secrets.
I got nothing. A description that matched a hundred women in that room.
I told myself, eventually, that you’d chosen to disappear, and that chasing a woman who chose anonymity was its own kind of disrespect.
I stopped looking because I convinced myself stopping was the respectful thing to do. ”
“I thought the same thing about you,” she says, and her voice catches slightly.
“I told myself you’d simply gone back to whatever life you actually lived, the one with a name and a schedule and people who expected things from you, and that the night had been exactly as temporary as we both agreed it would be.
I didn’t let myself grieve it properly, because grieving something you chose felt indulgent.
And then I found out I was pregnant, and grief stopped being optional. ”
We assumed the worst for five years, both of us, independently, neither of us aware the other was doing the exact same thing.
“I never forgot you,” I say. “I want you to know that clearly, regardless of everything else. I have had five years of relationships that ended quickly, for reasons I told myself were practical, and the truth underneath all of it is that none of them were you. I didn’t know your name.
I knew the exact sound of your laugh, the way you tilted your head when you were considering whether to trust me with the truth.
I built an entire private museum in my mind out of one night, and I never once told anyone, because saying it out loud made it sound like the kind of obsession a rational man doesn’t admit to. ”
I think of the women I dated in the years since Venice—brief, controlled arrangements that never asked more of me than I was willing to give.
Each one ended the exact same way. It was always polite and predictable, done the moment I sensed they wanted something I wasn’t capable of offering.
I never once told any of them why. I barely admitted it to myself, the irrational loyalty I’d developed toward a stranger I’d spent a single night with, a woman whose actual name I didn’t learn until four years and one accidental coffee spill later.
Even saying it out loud now, in this small lamp-lit room, feels insane.
“I remembered your tattoo,” she says, quiet, almost like a confession.
“Every time Nico did something that reminded me of a man I couldn’t name.
The exact way he tilts his head when he’s deciding whether to trust something.
The way he goes still right before he says the truth, the same stillness I remembered from a library in Venice.
I used to trace the shape of your tattoo from memory, late at night, when I missed you.
I told myself I was being foolish. I did it anyway. ”
The space between us has closed without either of us realizing, and I’m not certain who moves first, only that her hand finds mine, and mine finds her jaw.
“I know you now,” I say, against her mouth, and I mean it more than she'll ever know. “Not the mask. Not the mystery. You. All four years of three a.m. feedings and grocery store tears and songs sung in the same order every night. I know you, Livia.”
“Valentino—”
“I’m not going anywhere,” I say, before she can finish whatever uncertain thing she was about to say. “Not tonight. Not after tonight.”
The kiss that follows is slower than the hallway, slower than the cottage, deliberate in a way that has nothing left to prove.
There’s no urgency to outrun, no nightmare down a hall to interrupt us, no fear of a Calabrian boy’s careful structure cracking under the weight of wanting something too much.
I have already cracked. I cracked the moment I held our son in my arms an hour ago and finally understood what all of it had been for.
My lips trail down the side of her neck, while I slide my hands slowly under her shirt breaking contact briefly to pull it over her head.
Her mewl of happiness only eggs my on further and soon I have carefully taken both shirt and short off her and she responded in kind, her own hands relieving me of my own shirt.
My teeth grazes Livia's neck as I kiss my way down her body to stop and give subtle kisses at the top of her panties waistband.
Gently, I press my hand to the wet spot on her underwear, enjoying the sharp hiss of breath that escapes Livia's mouth. She moves against my hand, eager for more friction.
Please," she whimpers, her hands guiding mine to pull her panties down her thighs. "Please."
I can't say no.
With Livia's panties on the living room floor, I focus my attention back on the growing wetness between her thighs. With a tender finger, I gently press against the spot. Livia letting out a gasp of pleasure.
Smiling, I gently rub the spot, my eyes watching Livia's face for reactions. When her eyes begin to flutter shut and her breath came out in little gasps I decide to go a step further.
I slide my index finger inside her slowly. I can feel her body tense at my entry and then the muscles around her relax as I pushed in further. Inside her, she grips my finger tightly and I groaned aloud at the thought of what she'd feel like around my cock.
With tentative movements I pull my finger in and out of her, watching her face again to see her pleasure. When Livia smiles up at me, I feel my cock twitch, already hard and needy, against her.
Sensing my own need Livia fumbles with the button my jeans, giggling slightly when I have to help her undo them. Through the fabric of my boxers she grasps my cock and my head falls against her shoulder with a growl.
Livia gives his dick a few more experimental jerks and I move against her hand, already feeling ready to burst.
"Livia, you're-you're going to have to stop...that," I say dangerously.
Her mouth pops open in a little 'o' and she quickly removes her hand.
I kiss her again deeply and then remove my boxers with haste and settle myself between her legs. Livia brings her arms up around his neck and she leans up to kiss him before whispering in his ear.
"Go ahead. Ruin me like you did in Venice"
I press my now throbbing cock against her entrance and she guides me in, freezing as her body adjusts to the feel of my intrusion. I growl low again as I feel her muscles grip my cock hard. I move slowly, giving her time to breathe.
Eventually she wraps her arms around my pressing me down and deeper into herself.
I had spots cross my vision as I enter her completely. She feels so good, so incredibly good wrapped around me. My lips smash against hers as I begin to move, my hips pulling back completely before plunging into her again.
“Oh god, oh god, Vale- Val I'm going to-” she doesn't finish the sentence before she clenches around me bliss clear on her face.
It isn't long before the spots in my vision turn to fireworks and I stop breathing for a second, my cock twitching inside Livia and spilling my cum.
I collapse on top of her, riding the high back down to earth while she runs her fingers through my hair and hums softly against my skin.
"I love you," I say softly, rolling off Livia and pulling her into his arms. "I love you so much and that was...incredible."
Livia cups my face and gives me a chaste kiss. "I love you too. Now let's clean up and get to the room before Piper wakes up, unless you want to leave?” she asked the question casually but there seems to be an underlying vulnerability and her tone.
I don’t leave.
I lie in the dark with her head against my chest, her breathing slowing gradually into sleep, and I think about all the rooms I left instead of staying, every relationship I ended before it could end me first, every exit route I have ever mapped out of instinct rather than necessity.
I don’t move toward the door tonight. There is no door I want more than this room.
Sometime before dawn, I wake to small, deliberate footsteps in the hallway, and a moment later the mattress dips under additional weight, a small, warm body wedging itself determinedly between us with the complete confidence of a child who has never once doubted he belongs exactly where he’s chosen to be.
I freeze, uncertain of the protocol for this particular situation, uncertain whether four-year-olds object to being held by fathers they’ve known officially for less than a day.
I have spent fifteen years preparing for crises of every imaginable scale — armed confrontations, hostile negotiations, situations where a single wrong decision could cost someone their life.
None of that preparation tells me what to do with a small, warm weight pressing trustingly against my side at five in the morning, a weight that has decided, apparently without any internal debate at all, that this bed is simply where he belongs now.
Nico doesn’t object. He simply burrows closer, one small hand finding the front of my shirt the way it did the first night I sat with him through a nightmare, before either of us knew what we actually were to each other.
Slowly, carefully, I rest my hand against his small back.
He goes still under my palm, settling, trusting, asleep again within minutes.
I lie there in the grey, early light, listening to two different rhythms of breathing on either side of me, one fast and light and entirely unguarded, the other slow and even and gradually deepening back toward sleep.
I think about the word Beckett used on the dock two nights ago — sharper, not weaker.
I understand it fully now, in a way I couldn’t from the outside of it.
Every threat circling beyond the walls of this apartment — Dante, the company, the filing sitting unread on Livia’s laptop somewhere in the next room — feels somehow both larger and more manageable at once, larger because I finally understand exactly what I stand to lose, more manageable because I am no longer facing any of it alone.
I lie there in the grey, early light, my son breathing steady beside me and the woman I have loved without a name for five years asleep on my other side, and I understand, with a clarity that has nothing to do with strategy or calculation, that whatever comes next — Dante, the company, every battle still circling outside this small, quiet room — I am, for the first time in my adult life, exactly where I am supposed to be.
Home begins here. Not in Calabria. Not in any building I’ve ever constructed. Here, in this bed, with this woman’s breathing slow against my shoulder and this boy’s hand fisted in my shirt like he intends never to let go.
I don’t move. I don’t want to disturb a single second of it.