Chapter 16
Sixteen
Luca
Fuck.
Three weeks, and the mansion has become a museum dedicated to a woman who no longer lives here.
Her jasmine scent faded from the pillows sometime during the second week, leaching out of the cotton thread by thread. I bury my face in the fabric searching for any sign she was once part of my life, but nothing.
The grocery list still sits on the kitchen counter where she left it. I haven't moved it. Moving it would mean accepting something I'm not ready to name, so the paper stays, gathering a fine layer of dust.
I maintain the exterior at Redthorne the way I've maintained every mask I've ever worn.
Suits pressed, hair tied back, coffee in hand by seven every morning.
The routine holds because routine is the scaffolding that keeps me upright when my internal structure has collapsed.
But the precision is slipping in ways I can't hide from men who have spent years learning to read each other's tells.
Meetings I would normally dominate, I let drift.
Intel I would catch first, Drake catches instead, his gray eyes flicking to mine with a concern he's stopped trying to hide.
Decisions that used to take seconds now take minutes while my brothers wait and I stare at documents without processing a single word.
I'm dropping everything, and the men around me are too loyal to say it and too smart not to notice.
Kon shows up at the mansion on a Tuesday evening without calling first. I open the door to find him standing on my doorstep in a black overcoat, his dark hair loose, his breath fogging in the October air.
He doesn't ask to come in. He just shoulders past me and follows the silence to the library where the bourbon I poured an hour ago sits untouched on the side table.
The amber liquid catches firelight from a fire I lit because the cold in this house has nothing to do with temperature.
He settles into the armchair across from mine. The leather creaks beneath his weight. His dark eyes sweep the room once, taking in the novel on the sofa, the cold coffee on the mantle, the empty spaces where Ilona used to be. Whatever conclusions he draws, he keeps to himself.
We sit in silence for forty minutes. The fire pops and settles in the hearth. The old house breathes its creaks and sighs around us, and neither of us needs to fill the quiet with words.
He doesn't ask how I'm doing. Doesn't offer advice or platitudes. He just sits, his breathing slow and steady, his presence the only medicine he knows how to give.
When he leaves, he pauses at the door and rests one heavy hand on my shoulder. The grip tightens once, firm and grounding, the same silent communication we've shared since the early days when words between us were scarce and trust was built in actions rather than speeches.
“Moy brat, I wish you would have listened,” he says quietly, and the weight of those two words settles into a place no other words can reach.
“Me too.”
Drake is less subtle. He corners me in the hallway at Redthorne two days later, his broad frame blocking the path to my office with the deliberate positioning of a man who has decided this conversation is happening whether I want it or not.
"You look like shit, man. So what plan have you come up with to get our girl back? Or are you still wallowing in self-pity like a dumbass?" His gray eyes hold mine with an intensity that reminds me why the Syndicate's enemies learn to fear his attention. "How long are you going to let this go on?"
I don't answer because I don't have one. Every scenario I've run ends the same way: Ilona's face in that hospital bed and the sound of a door closing behind her.
Drake reads my silence the way he reads everything, with a precision that borders on invasive.
"She's not the kind of woman who comes back to a man who waits. She comes back to a man who changes. That’s all the advice I have, brother.
" His jaw tightens and his hand lands on my shoulder heavier than Kon's had.
The gesture carries more frustration and less patience but the same bedrock of brotherhood underneath.
"Figure it out, Luca. Before you lose more than your wife. "
Drake's words follow me home that evening with the pain of a bruise to my ego. I pour a bourbon I won't drink, light a fire that won't warm me and sink into the armchair where I've spent every night since she left staring at the empty sofa across from me.
That's when the wish finally makes sense.
One minute it's Drake's voice in my head and the next the answer is just there, obvious and brutal and waiting for me to stop being too stubborn to see it.
My fingers go still on the arm of the chair. The fire pops once in the silence and the truth I've been circling finally sinks in.
I've been turning it over for weeks, examining every possible angle. Her words burning against my chest from the jacket pocket where I've carried them since the day I found her red letter wish.
I wish someone would make my mistake disappear.
The answer clicks into place with cold clarity, earned by every wrong interpretation that came before.
The mistake wasn't the baby. The baby was never a mistake, not to her, not from the first moment she pressed her palm against her belly and whispered a promise to protect the life growing inside her.
The mistake wasn't me. Not entirely.
The mistake was trusting me. Giving everything she had to a stranger who turned out to be exactly the kind of man she'd spent her life trying to escape. She didn't want me to disappear. She wanted to undo her own judgment for believing I was worth the risk.
The realization reshapes everything with a simplicity that makes me sick. The truth was always there. I just kept looking at it from the angle that protected my ego. It’s what she was telling me in the hospital and I was too blinded by my own embarrassment and shame to hear her words.
I can't undo what I did. The file exists. The words HIGH VALUE as leverage exist in my handwriting. That man is a version of me I want to disown, but pretending he isn't me would be one more lie. And I'm done lying.
But I can give her the one thing I've never given anyone in my entire life.
Total vulnerability.
The meeting happens the next morning in Rafael's office rather than mine.
What I'm about to ask affects every man in this brotherhood, and it deserves neutral ground.
Drake leans near the window with his arms crossed.
Kon occupies the leather sofa, still as stone.
Massimo sits in the chair nearest the door, one ankle crossed over the opposite knee, his whiskey-colored eyes already calculating.
Rowan stands against the far wall, his ice-blue gaze sharp beneath the dirty blond hair that never quite behaves.
Rafael sits behind his desk, fingers steepled beneath his chin, waiting.
"I need to tell you what I'm planning." I stand rather than sit because sitting feels too comfortable for what I'm about to propose. "And you're not going to like it."
I lay it out the way I'd deliver an intelligence briefing.
Flat. Clinical. Facts without emotion. The USB drive.
Every file I've ever compiled. Every password, every access code, every piece of leverage I've gathered over years of operating as the Syndicate's intelligence officer.
The Marchetti dossier. The Syndicate's internal operations.
The networks spanning Chicago, New York, and New Orleans.
Everything I am and everything I've built, compressed onto a device the size of my thumb and handed to a woman who has every reason to use it as a weapon against us.
Drake's reaction is immediate and exactly what I expected.
"You're insane." He pushes off the window and crosses his arms tighter, the muscles in his forearms bunching beneath his rolled sleeves.
"That drive contains enough to dismantle everything we've built.
Every operation. Every asset. Every brother's name and face.
You're handing a loaded weapon to a woman who might hate you enough to pull the trigger. "
"She won't." The words come out with a certainty I feel in my marrow even though I can't prove it with evidence, which is ironic for a man who has built his life on the doctrine that evidence is the only truth worth trusting.
Kon says nothing. Just holds my gaze long enough for Drake to shift impatiently and Rafael's fingers to tap once against the desk. Then he nods. One nod.
Massimo uncrosses his legs and leans forward, his fingers steepled the way they do when he's drafting worst-case scenarios in his head. "You realize if that drive ends up in the wrong hands, every NDA and contract I've ever drafted becomes toilet paper."
"It won't," I repeat. “That is how much I trust her. She doesn’t trust me, but I put all my faith in her.”
He studies me for a beat, then straightens his cuffs and settles back. "Your funeral. But I want it on record that I objected."
Rowan hasn't moved from the wall. His ice-blue eyes track the conversation the way they track everything, missing nothing, revealing less. When the room goes quiet he finally speaks, his voice low and unhurried.
"She's had three weeks with nothing but time and a reason to hate us. If she was going to burn us, she'd have done it already." He lifts one shoulder. "I'm in."
Rafael is the one who surprises us all. He leans back in his chair and considers me for a long beat while the morning light from the window behind him throws his shadow long across the carpet. His signet ring catches the light as his fingers unlace and resettle beneath his chin.