Chapter Two
Isabella
We shower in separate rooms because I still want to pretend we have choices.
I put on a dress that wasn’t made for innocence.
Red like the peel of a blood orange. I leave my ring in the room’s safe where it can’t lie to anyone.
When I come down, he’s waiting in linen and shadow.
I join him, and the space between us hums.
Dinner happens to other people. We sit at the edge of the terrace where the glass ends and the air begins.
The sea is ink now, a sheet of black silk cut with moonlight.
The quartet plays something old enough that my grandmother would’ve hummed along and the sommelier pours wine that tastes like summers I barely remember.
Luca’s knee rests against mine beneath the table, unmoving, deliberate.
He doesn’t move it away. I don’t move, either.
His dark eyes track and commit. I concentrate on his mouth that curves like he’s saving the good part for when the room is empty.
His hands are for doing, not for show. His knuckles are nicked, palms sure, and they entrance me more.
I was born to notice every detail. Elsewhere, he carries stillness like a weapon.
Yet he smiles, and it feels like contraband.
If danger had refinement, it would appear as him.
“You’re leaving tomorrow,” he says. It’s not a question.
“I am leaving always,” I say. “Even when I stay.”
He reaches across the table and takes my hand, his thumb circling my pulse with a steadiness that makes my breath hitch. I can’t remember the last time a man touched me without calculation.
I think of my father’s office and the maps with our routes marked in red. I think of the truce, the Commission and the old hate that bears my name. I think of Adrian’s ring and the little bloodless smile he uses when he wants me to obey.
Then I let the sea take it. I think of the cove and the way Luca only wants my yes.
“You do not have to tell me anything,” Luca says quietly. “Not where you live. Not who you belong to. Not why you peek over your shoulder when you think you forgot not to.”
“I don’t belong to anyone,” I say, and I want it to be true.
He lifts our joined hands and kisses the inside of my wrist. The breath leaves me in a soft sound that belongs to the girl in the cove, not to the heir I’m supposed to be.
“Then come upstairs,” he says.
I follow.
His suite opens onto night air and sea, the curtains lifting and falling like a slow breath.
He kisses me just inside the door, his hands warm and certain as they map me, as if learning rather than conquering.
The red dress I chose to feel dangerous becomes a ribbon at my feet, and when he sees there is nothing beneath it, something dark and intent flickers in his eyes.
He turns me toward the balcony doors where the glass throws us back in the dark. In the reflection, he lifts a white curtain sash, shows it to me like a dare.
“My pace,” he says, his voice absolute without being cruel. “One word stops me.”
“A word?” I ask, buying time. “A safe word?”
“A word you’d never use otherwise.”
“Amore,” I whisper as I let the feeling consume me anyway.
Sera’s silly like that.
“Amore?” he repeats. “Let me guess, you don’t do love?”
“I don’t do amore,” I say, raising my chin.
Luca gathers my wrists, wraps the sash twice, snug, then ties off to the door handle so I’m stretched and smiling in the reflection. His hand settles at my throat like a warm collar. Breathing starts out easy, then gets tough. I lean into it.
It should scare me. It does. That’s the point. The danger is orderly because it’s chosen, because he asked for a word and built a door into the threat.
“Look at you,” he says to the glass. “I didn’t think you could be more beautiful. And then you give me your neck.”
My stomach flips at the praise. Not sweet. Not romantic. Like he’s rewarding a private kind of honesty I didn’t mean to show.
He kisses me down my throat, hitting that soft spot near my pulse. The sea lifts the curtain like it wants a better view.
He unzips. My eyes lower on the glass, and my brows lift. A smirk plays on my lips as I observe his more than ample endowment. He can deliver on his swagger. I watch as he takes a long stroke up to the fleshy head that’s beading with anticipation. I feel my own impatience flow down my thigh.
He retrieves a foil packet from his wallet and rolls it on.
His pace commences.
No waiting. No foreplay. Like he’s decided my body is an answer and he’s done pretending he doesn’t know the question.
Spreading me, he grinds my hips to the glass, pushing his cock in inch by inch until my mouth falls open in the reflection. His thumb strokes my lower lip. My bound hands flex and the silk holds.
“Good girl,” he praises, heat in the words as he enters me.
The words should make me snap. I’m not anyone’s good anything.
But my body doesn’t care what my pride thinks it is. My body wants what his voice does to me. My body wants the proof of him there, inside me, the proof that I can want a stranger and still be in control because I can end it with one word.
He sets a rhythm that starts reverent and turns disastrous. The glass fogs where my breath lands. His fingers tighten around my throat, then ease, then tighten again like he’s learning what I’ll take and making it a game we both keep winning.
He slides his free hand down and circles my clit slow, worship that makes my knees want to give. I ask for more and he gives it, driving deeper, steady, hand at my throat easing when I lift my chin.
“Say please,” he murmurs.
“Please,” I say, feeling reckless.
He angles and lets me have it.
The pleasure hits too fast, too sharp, like the sea dragging me under and calling it mercy. I come hard, sound broken. Luca doesn’t slow down just because I break. Luca fucks me through it. He rides it out with me like he owns the storm.
And follows with my name, or rather Sera’s name, his body shaking against mine.
For one breath, it feels like we’re connected.
Then I remember I don’t know him. Not really. Luca is a name a man uses when he wants to be someone else on an island where nobody asks for paperwork. The thought should cool me.
It doesn’t.
Pulling out, he slips off the condom and unties me gently. Turning me, he rubs the faint marks, kisses both wrists.
Not tender the way love is tender.
Precise the way a man is when he knows he left evidence on my skin and he wants me to feel proud of it, not hurt by it.
The result is the same.
I cross my wrists over his shoulders and kiss him back while the sea listens like a priest at confession.
My body knows what it wants before my mind admits it. I want the way he holds my face like it matters what I feel. I want the way his mouth softens and roughens in the right places. I want the way he says Sera like he knows it’s a secret he’ll keep.
He asks for nothing but what I give.
And that’s the part that wrecks me.
Because men like him don’t ask. They take. They decide. They move on.
Luca doesn’t move on. He waits, watching me like I’m the one holding the leash, like the only thing he wants is to see what I’ll do with the power he handed me.
I give him my knees on the bed, and the line of my throat, and the small sounds I never make where anyone can hear as I open my mouth wide and let him have what I’m offering.
Luca gives me his mouth, his tongue, his kiss, on my breasts, below my belly and his pace, slower now. The kind of hunger that is like adoration as he breathes heavily against my clit and makes my knees fall open, makes me climax again like I’m floating in the sea.
We learn each other like a language and don’t speak any other for a very long time.
Later, the wind cools our skin. The sheets tangle around my legs. He lies on his back with his forearm over his eyes, and I trace the pale crescent of his scar with my fingertip. He lowers his arm and looks at me. Those eyes again. Dark as if the world inside him is deeper than the sea.
“You will leave,” he says. “I won’t ask why.”
“I don’t want to,” I say. It slips out before I can stop it. Sera says things like that. Isabella doesn’t. The truth feels reckless and tender in the same breath.
“Then give me this,” he says. “If you go in the morning, answer when I call. Say, yes.”
Men in my world promise things the way they inhale, effortlessly and without cost. I’ve never trusted a promise that came easy. This one doesn’t. It comes from a man who said he didn’t want my name, and he still doesn’t ask for it. He asks for my yes. The word sits on my tongue and lights my mouth.
“Yes,” I say.
He kisses the corner of my mouth like a period at the end of a sentence. We sleep with the balcony doors open, and the sea comes in to blanket us.
I wake before dawn to the sound of a phone in another room. Not my room. Not my phone. His, on a table by the wall. A vibration against wood, short and sharp. He’s already up. He moves like a man who learned long ago how to leave without making noise. But I’m a woman who notices everything.
He dresses in the gray light, pants first, then the open shirt, then the watch that looks like it could buy the island. He catches me awake and comes back to the bed.
“I have to go,” he says, meeting my eyes. “I’m needed. I’m always needed.”
“Work,” I say. I don’t want to ask what kind. I don’t want to know who he is when he’s not Luca. I think of the ring in my safe and the truce in a week and the fact that this island exists because men like my father pay in cash and silence.
“Yes,” he says. “Stay in my bed. I’ll be here one more day.”
He kisses me once, slow and sure, and the day catches on that kiss like lace on a ring. He leaves. The door clicks. The suite hums with the sea and the echo of his steps.
I lie in the warm dent he left and breathe him in.
Salt. Oak. A clean heat runs through me that feels like the first honest thing I’ve felt in a long time.
The sky outside turns from slate to pearl.
Birds begin to argue in the pines. I close my eyes and see his face the way it looked in the water, and in the glass, and over me with his mouth open on my name.
I shower and put the red dress back on because it makes my skin register his touch. I don’t decide anything. I don’t have that luxury. I write a note on hotel stationery that says thank you and nothing else. I leave it on the pillow beside the shape my head made in the night.
Sera would stay.
Isabella packs.
Back in my room, I take the ring from the safe and hold it for a long moment before I slip it back on. It feels heavier than it did yesterday.
The helicopter pad is a circle of sunburned concrete on the roof.
From up here La Sirena is a white crown on a dark head.
The staff carry my bags like I’m a queen and a thief both.
I sense the juxtaposition more than ever as guilt follows me.
The rotors start to turn. The wind lifts my hair and throws it into my face.
I laugh because if I don’t laugh I’ll do something else.
I’ll run back to Luca’s room.
Maybe swim.
The pilot checks my name and I give him Sera.
He accepts it. We lift. The island shrinks, then steadies, then becomes a coin on blue silk.
The mainland grows ahead. My phone finds a signal and fills with messages.
My father. The consigliere. Adrian. I watch their names stack in small blue boxes as the sea slides under us like a road.
My chest is split and bright. My body is sore in all the good places. My mouth tastes like wine and him. I look down at La Sirena until I can’t tell the hotel from the rock it sits on, until the whole place becomes a memory I won’t let anyone take from me.