Chapter 15
Fifteen
Luca
The hospital smells like antiseptic and false promises, the sharp chemical sting of industrial cleaner burning the inside of my nostrils with every breath while fluorescent lights hum overhead in a frequency designed to keep patients awake and visitors on edge.
The second the nurses finish stitching me and cleaning my shoulder, I find Ilona.
I step into the examination room where they have her waiting to be checked over. Rafael got us to the hospital in record time. But it didn't take long for the adrenaline to wear off Ilona and the reality of this whole situation to harden a wall around her.
By the time we hit the emergency room and all the medical staff swarmed around us, Ilona had closed herself off. I was taken one way, while she was taken another.
I close the door behind me. It is small, painted in that shade of institutional beige that exists nowhere in nature. Equipment crowds every surface, whining with the low electronic hum of machines that reduce life to numbers and blinking green lights.
Ilona sits on the examination table in a hospital gown that swallows her frame, the paper crinkling beneath her every time she shifts position.
Her hair falls loose around her face, uncombed and tangled from the hours since the estate. The dark strands catch the harsh overhead light and throw shadows across cheekbones that look sharper than they did this morning.
A bruise blooms across her left forearm where one of Enzo's guards gripped her, the purple already deepening against her beautiful skin, and every time my gaze catches on that mark, the rage I swallowed at the estate crawls back up my throat with teeth.
She angles away from me and that's when I see the bruise blooming across her cheekbone, deeper and darker than the one on her arm. The mark of a fist where his guard attacked her. If I had her father in front of me, I wouldn’t let anyone stop me from putting a bullet in him.
In fact, when I leave here, I’m going to take exceptional pleasure in torturing the fuck out of him at Club Genesis.
I mentally set my darker thoughts aside.
I cross the room and wrap my hand around hers where it rests on the starched sheet. She lets me hold it, but her fingers lie limp against my palm, offering nothing back.
No squeeze. No warmth. No reflexive curl of her fingers against mine the way they've done every night for the past three weeks when I reach for her in the dark. Her hand is a dead weight in my grip, the physical equivalent of a door closed quietly and deliberately in my face.
Her eyes stay fixed on the far wall where a faded poster illustrates the stages of fetal development in cheerful primary colors, as if growing a human being can be contained in a laminated chart.
She stares through it rather than at it, focused on a distance I can't cross because the bridge between us burned hours ago and I'm the one who lit the match.
“Sorry for the wait. It must be a full moon with how crazy busy we are tonight.” The technician enters with a warm smile and a tube of gel.
We go through the same routine we shared two weeks ago when checking for a heartbeat.
The gel is cold against Ilona's belly, the same involuntary gasp escaping her lips.
I watch the screen fill with gray and white static that shifts and swirls like storm clouds searching for shape.
The heartbeat fills the room first. Fast and fierce and completely indifferent to the wreckage her parents have made of everything outside these walls.
The relief hits me like a blow to the sternum, buckling something I've been holding rigid since Luna's phone call sent me racing across the city with murder on my mind and terror clawing at the walls of my chest. The baby is fine and continuing to grow despite everything her parents have put her through in the last twelve hours.
Fuck, my chest hurts. I rub at the pain.
"Your baby has a strong heartbeat," the technician confirms. "There are no signs of distress and your baby is growing right on schedule."
Ilona nods once, thanks her with a voice so controlled it sounds automated, and returns her gaze to the wall.
She doesn't cry with relief the way she did at the first ultrasound, when tears streamed down both our faces and she pressed my hand against her belly.
That day the world narrowed to three heartbeats in a room that smelled like possibility.
That woman felt like a lifetime ago. The woman on this examination table has locked every emotion behind a wall so thick I can hear my own words echoing back at me from its surface, hollow and insufficient.
The silence between us is worse than anything she could say. This is a woman deciding whether any of the pieces are worth salvaging.
The technician excuses herself. The door clicks shut behind her, and the sound leaves us alone with the electronic beep of the fetal monitor and the irritating fluorescents buzzing overhead. The antiseptic air stings my eyes or maybe that's something else entirely.
I don’t know. I’m more focused on my wife.
Ilona sits upright in the bed, her hands folding over her belly in a protective gesture that has become as natural as breathing over these past weeks.
Her hair falls around her face like a curtain she's using to hide behind, and the determination in the set of her jaw tells me she's been building toward this moment since the car ride from the estate.
"Tell me everything." Her voice cuts through the sterile air with a precision that reminds me she learned to read deception from a master. She was raised in a world of calculated men and taught to recognize deception by living inside it. "From the beginning. I need to hear you say it."
I pull a chair closer, the metal legs scraping against the linoleum. The plastic seat is cold even through my trousers, unyielding in the way hospital furniture always is.
My hand settles on my knee, palm down, fingers spread against the fabric of trousers still smudged with dust and dried blood from the estate. My other arm is in a sling and screams with pain. But I lean into it and use the fire tearing through me to help keep me focused.
I don't reach for her hand this time. The comfort of touching her while I dismantle every lie I've built between us belongs to a man who earned it, and that man is not me.
"I was surveilling your father for months." The words come out with the flat cadence of an after-action report, stripped of charm, stripped of warmth, delivered with the clinical precision that built my career and destroyed my marriage.
"His operations, his connections, his vulnerabilities.
The Syndicate had been building a case against Enzo Marchetti for a few months now, and I was the intelligence officer responsible for assembling the dossier.
The files covered his entire operation, his lieutenants, his financial networks, his trafficking routes.
" I pause, and the pause costs me more than any of the words that came before it. "And his family. Including you."
The monitor beeps. Our baby’s heartbeat fills the space between my sentences, a steady rhythm that sounds like counting, like a clock measuring the remaining seconds of a life I built on sand.
"I had everything. Your schedule, your routines, your bodyguards' rotations, your coffee order.
Every detail of your life documented and filed.
At that time you were a point of intelligence.
" My fingers tighten against my knee, the fabric bunching beneath my grip.
"I had your medical records. I knew things about your body and your history that no stranger should know, and I catalogued all of it with the detachment of a man who convinced himself that information was neutral.
That knowing someone's secrets didn't make you responsible for how you used them. "
Her breathing changes, a slight hitch that tells me she's listening even though her eyes haven't moved from the wall. The bruise on her cheek darkens under the harsh lighting, purple bleeding into blue, and I force myself to look at it because looking away would be another kind of cowardice.
"When I saw you at the masquerade, I recognized you instantly from the surveillance photos.
The body paint, the blue tips in your hair, the way you moved through the crowd like a woman who had just discovered what freedom tasted like and was terrified she'd have to give it back.
" My voice roughens against the edges of a memory I've been carrying like a wound.
"I approached you deliberately. I seduced you with the intent of using the relationship as leverage against your father.
Or as a way into his inner circle. Whatever was needed to stop him. "
The fetal monitor marks time with our baby’s heartbeat, steady and completely unaware that her father is confessing sins that might erase him from her life before she's born.
"But something happened that I didn't plan for.
You weren't what I expected. You were real and fierce and you looked at me like I was worth trusting.
Somewhere between the first kiss and dawn, the operation stopped mattering.
" I swallow against the thickness building in my throat, the taste of antiseptic and regret coating my tongue.
"I gave you a cover name because the operation required it.
I let you leave because pursuing you further would have compromised the mission. Those were the reasons I told myself."
The pause stretches between us, taut as a wire bearing too much weight.
Seeing her torment from my actions kills me.
“Ilona.”
“Don’t Ilona me, Luca.”
My arms ache to hold her, but there’s more to say and I’ll never get it out if I touch her. "The truth is simpler. I couldn't face being the man who used you after what you gave me that night. I didn’t deserve you."
“And yet you blackmailed me when I showed up needing your help.”