Chapter 11
Eleven
Ilona
Luca Valentina talks in his sleep.
He doesn't speak in full sentences. He doesn't murmur confessions or spill secrets into the darkness like I half expect from a man who trades in other people's sins for a living.
It's just fragments and names I don't recognize.
Numbers that sound like coordinates or account balances.
Once, three nights ago, he whispered "jungle flower" against my hair and pulled me tighter against his chest, his arm a steel band around my waist, his heartbeat thudding slow and steady against my spine.
I pretended to be asleep and pressed my smile into the pillow where he couldn't see it just in case he was awake.
This morning, the October light filters through the bedroom windows in pale gold while he sprawls across three-quarters of the bed like he's claiming territory even in unconsciousness.
His long dark hair fans across the pillow, and one arm stretches across the space where my body was minutes ago.
The sheets pool low on his hips, revealing the panther that prowls across his ribs and the viper coiling up his right arm, scars mapping stories between the ink that I'm only beginning to learn.
Two weeks of marriage. Two weeks of sleeping in this man's arms, breathing him in until his scent is more familiar than my own. Learning the rhythms of a life I never chose but am beginning to want. That last thought terrifies me more than my father ever could.
I slip out of bed and pad barefoot toward the bathroom, the hardwood floors cool beneath my feet. The contrast to the rolling nausea is welcome. I pause just outside the bathroom and inhale slowly, letting the air out to the count of five.
Ugh. I hope this stage passes quickly.
I step over the third board from the bedroom door out of habit, the one that screams like a wounded animal if you so much as breathe on it, and make it to the bathroom without waking Luca.
After brushing my teeth, I splash water on my face, patting my skin dry with a towel that smells like sandalwood because everything in this house smells like him now, and catch my reflection in the mirror.
Tired eyes. Blue-tipped hair tangled from sleep and from his hands.
I look like a woman who is softer than she did two weeks ago, and that observation unsettles me more than I want to admit.
The kitchen is my next stop, and I navigate the creaking floors like a woman who's memorized the minefield. The spot outside the library groans like an old man getting out of a chair, but I sidestep it with practiced ease.
Coffee. Then I can do all the things. I’ve been learning the ropes as Luca’s personal assistant and it’s been great. But demanding. I’ll need to shift to decaffeinated coffee, come to think of it. It will be better for the baby. I make a note on the list we have on the kitchen counter.
The machine Luca bought after I complained about his espresso being strong enough to strip paint gurgles to life, filling the kitchen with the rich aroma of medium roast and hazelnut creamer.
Steam curls from my mug as I wrap both hands around the ceramic and lean against the counter, letting the warmth seep into my fingers.
"You're up early."
His voice reaches me before his footsteps do, low and roughened by sleep.
He rounds the corner in black sweatpants and nothing else, his hair still loose, his eyes soft in a way they never are when other people can see.
The morning light catches the gold flecks in his irises as his gaze finds me and holds.
I flick my eyes to the clock on the stove.
Oh. I didn’t realize. "Morning sickness decided five-thirty was a great time to remind me it exists.
" I press a hand against my stomach, still barely showing and take a careful sip of coffee.
"At least the nausea passed before I had to sacrifice your bathroom rug. "
His lips twitch. He crosses the kitchen and slides his hands over my hips, lowering himself until his mouth hovers near my navel. "Morning, little one." His breath is warm through the cotton of my sleep shirt. "Go easy on your mother. She's grumpy enough without your help."
"I heard that."
"You were meant to." He presses a kiss to my belly, then rises to his full height and steals a sip from my mug.
The easy intimacy of the gesture catches me off guard, the way he drinks from my cup without asking, the way his free hand rests on the small of my back like it lives there, like we've been doing this for years instead of weeks.
"Tell me about your mother."
The question falls out of me before I can examine whether I actually want the answer.
We've been dancing around the personal details of our lives before meeting for two weeks. We’ve traded surface details like poker chips while both of us hoard the cards that matter.
His favorite color is black, which surprises no one.
He reads voraciously and prefers historical fiction over thrillers.
He takes his coffee with one sugar, no cream, and considers anyone who drinks decaf a war criminal.
Which reminds me…
I move the grocery list to the side so as not to start a war this early. But the real things, the things that made him, those he keeps locked in a vault I haven't found the key to.
His hand stills on my back. The kitchen holds its breath.
"Rosa." The name leaves his mouth like a prayer he hasn't spoken in years.
He leans against the counter beside me, his shoulder warm against mine.
"She cleaned houses for wealthy families on the North Shore.
Three jobs, seven days a week. Her hands were always raw and cracked from chemicals, but she'd still sit with me every night and make me tell her everything I'd noticed that day. "
My brows pinch together. "Noticed?" I ask over the rim of my coffee mug.
"People's tells. She taught me to read them.
" A faint smile curves his lips, tinged with a sadness that makes my chest ache.
"The woman who hid wine bottles behind the cleaning supplies.
The husband whose cologne changed on Tuesdays and Thursdays when he visited someone who wasn't his wife.
She said information was more valuable than gold.
She never used what she learned against anyone because she was too kind for that, but she wanted me to understand that everyone carries secrets, and secrets are power. "
My throat tightens. I can see her in my mind, a woman with work-worn hands and her son's dark eyes, teaching him the skills that would eventually build an empire from shadows.
"She died when I was twenty-two." His voice doesn't break, but it flattens, the emotion compressed into something small and dense and heavy. "Worn down by work and worry. I'd just started making real money, enough to take care of her. I was three weeks too late."
The silence that follows fills with the coffee maker's quiet hiss and the distant tick of the grandfather clock in the hallway. I set my mug on the counter and turn to face him, pressing my palm against his chest, right over the panther's snarling jaw.
"She would have been proud of you."
"She would have smacked me upside the head for half the things I've done." His laugh is rough, caught between humor and grief. "But yeah. I think she'd like the parts that matter."
His hand covers mine, pressing it harder against his skin. Beneath my fingers, his heart beats strong and steady, and I feel the precise moment he decides to trust me with more.
"My father left before I could remember his face.
" The words come out stripped bare, no charm, no deflection.
"I tracked him down when I was seventeen.
Found him in Florida with a new wife and two kids who had no idea I existed.
Watched him for three days and gathered enough information to destroy his entire life. " He pauses. "Then I walked away."
"Why?"
"Because I didn't need a father. I needed to know I was better than mine."
The admission hits me somewhere deep and undefended. My own father, who kept me like a pet in a gilded cage. His father, who simply vanished. Two different kinds of abandonment that left the same wound.
"I've never told anyone that story," he adds quietly.
My eyes sting. I rise on my toes and press my lips to the corner of his mouth, a kiss that says I hear you and thank you and I understand all at once. When I pull back, the gold in his eyes burns brighter.
"Your turn," he murmurs.
So I tell him. Not the headlines he already knows, but the texture of it.
The sound of my mother's voice growing quieter year by year.
The way Abel's body looked flying over the balcony railing because three guards were given orders that my virginity belonged to my father's bottom line.
How the sound of his head cracking against the edge of the neighbor's pool still wakes me up some nights.
Two years of therapy. Two years of flinching every time someone stood behind me.
The way Gino straightened his jacket afterward like he'd just taken out the trash and told me my maidenhead belonged to the family's wealth.
Luca listens without interrupting, his thumb tracing circles on the back of my hand. When I finish, his jaw is tight and his eyes have gone cold in a way that reminds me who he is and what he does to people who hurt the ones he cares about.
"Your father will answer for all of it." Not a threat. A promise. As certain as gravity.
"Not today," I tell him. "Today we have other things to deal with."
He lifts an eyebrow.
"The ultrasound is at eleven. Don't tell me you forgot. I did put it on your calendar back at the office."
The shift in his expression is instantaneous. The cold calculation vanishes, replaced by something raw and unguarded. Nerves. Luca Valentina, the man who stares down crime lords without blinking, looks genuinely nervous about a doctor's appointment.