Chapter 17
Seventeen
Ilona
Luca looks how I feel. Wrecked.
The careful grooming is gone. His beard has grown past the meticulous trim he maintains with the same discipline he applies to everything in his life, the dark hair thicker along his jaw and climbing higher on his cheeks, threaded with silver that wasn't visible before.
His hair hangs loose around his face. No leather cord.
No low knot at his nape. Just dark waves falling past his collar in a way that makes him look younger and more exposed than I've ever seen him.
He wears a dark sweater and jeans, no suit, no gold cufflinks, no armor of Italian tailoring designed to project power.
Just fabric and skin and the raw architecture of a man stripped of every costume he's ever used to keep me at a comfortable distance.
His eyes find mine across the room. The gold flecks that usually catch the light when he's scheming or wanting are dim. Banked. Shadows bruise the skin beneath them, and the warm tan I remember has bled out of his face, like even the sun has been avoiding him.
The sunshine smile is gone. The devastating charm that made me weak at the masquerade, that infuriated me in his office, that softened me in our bed, all of it absent. What remains is the man underneath, and for the first time since I met him, I'm not sure if what I see is someone I recognize.
The lamplight from the bedside table casts the room in warm amber.
My reflection ghosts in the window behind me, the October evening darkening beyond the glass, and I stand with my arms wrapped around the belly that has changed the geography of my body in the three weeks since he last saw me.
The curve is unmistakable now beneath the soft wool of my sweater dress. Our daughter, making herself known.
I knew this moment was coming, but all the mental preparation did nothing to warn my heart against the love I feel for him.
I spent hours combing through the USB drive and every secret it contains. I read the files until my eyes burned and my hands shook and the scope of what Luca Valentina built from the shadows became so vast it took my breath away.
Hours of learning who the Red Letter Syndicate truly is, not just the dangerous men who control Chicago's underworld, but the men who read desperate wishes and try to help people.
Hours knowing that the man standing in front of me found my wish. I don’t know for certain if he has it, but I’m about to find out.
I rest my hands on my belly and start with the one thing he never saw coming.
"I know about the wishes."
His brows rise a fraction in understanding.
My voice comes out steady, grounded. I could have started with a million different things to talk about, but finding out he and the brothers are the ones behind the Red Letter wishes caught me off guard. Again.
"I know you and your brothers are the men behind the red envelopes. You found mine didn’t you?" The pause I let settle between us is deliberate, a beat of silence that lets the words land before I deliver the one that will strip him bare. "In all the chaos and emotions, I almost forgot about it."
His lips part around a breath that doesn't quite make it out of his chest.
"Yes."
Luca comes closer until he’s standing right in front of me. I can feel the warmth of his body heat and I want to fall into his arms and forget about everything. Forget the lies, my father, the mistrust.
I raise my chin and latch my gaze to his. "I’m curious. What did you think I meant with my wish?" My fingers press against the curve of my belly, anchoring myself to the one truth in this room that has never been a lie. "By 'make my mistake disappear'?"
I never meant to hurt anyone with my words despite having others hurt me.
He is quiet for a long moment, his hands hanging at his sides, fingers curling and uncurling against the denim of his jeans in a rhythm that matches the pulse I can see jumping at the base of his throat.
His hands slide into his pockets. "I thought you meant the baby at first." His voice is rough and dark. "Or me. Or all of it."
I tilt my head a fraction. "And you stayed anyway."
"I would have stayed if you wished me dead.
" The words carry no drama, no performance that I can find.
I only hear flat certainty. "I would have understood and I would have accepted that you considered this a mistake.
And then I would have spent my entire life figuring out how to show you we were never a mistake. "
The sincerity in his voice scrapes against the rage I've been nursing, the carefully tended fury I've been stoking like a fire I wasn't ready to let die. Because being mad is easier than missing him.
"I meant trusting you." The words climb out of a place I've been guarding so fiercely that releasing them feels like removing stitches from a wound that hasn't fully healed. "I meant letting myself believe it was real. I meant being stupid enough to fall for a man in a mask, of all things."
"You made me believe I was special."
"You made me believe you saw ME, not my father's name, not my value as leverage, not what I could be used for, ME! And the whole time you were cataloguing my bodyguards' schedules and intercepting my medical records like I was a fucking case study. Do you understand the betrayal I feel?"
Despite my control, I feel my voice rising despite trying to contain my anger.
My voice bounces off the walls of Luna's guest room, too loud for this small space, and somewhere down the hallway a door closes softly as someone gives us the privacy to destroy each other.
"I DID see you." He closes the little distance between us, his voice matching mine.
His dark eyes blaze with a heat. "That's why I couldn't go through with it! That's why I gave you a cover name and walked away! Because you were real and I wasn't, and I knew if you ever found out who I really was, you'd look at me exactly the way you're looking at me right now."
He peers down at me with those dark eyes and a chill runs through me.
"And how is that, Luca?" My voice drops to something low and dangerous, trembling with the effort of holding back the tears that are trying to dissolve my fury.
"Like I destroyed the only beautiful thing I've ever been trusted with."
The words hit me in the chest. My eyes sting and my throat closes. I inhale slowly but it doesn’t keep my hands from shaking at my sides.
I narrow my eyes into lethal slits and glare all my hurt and anger at him. "You don't get to say things like that."
My voice fractures on the last word. "You don't get to stand there looking broken and beautiful and say the exact right thing while I'm trying to hate you."
"Then hate me."
A sputter of protest falls from my lips when he picks me up and holds me to him. He takes my mouth in a hard kiss and I feel the very second I lose the battle. What battle? That voice pipes up again, and this time I agree.
The hard planes of his muscles force my body to mold to him.
He breaks the kiss and presses his forehead to mine.
"Hate me for what I planned. Hate me for the file and the lies and every morning I kissed your belly knowing I was keeping secrets that could destroy us.
Hate me for all of it. But don't you dare pretend what we have isn’t real, because I have lied about many things, Ilona, but loving you was never one of them. "
The anger and the want collide so hard I can't breathe. The line between fury and desire dissolves the way it always does with this man. Every damn time.
“Luca, I don,’t—”
“Don't say anything else. Just feel my love for you. Everything else will fall into place.”
His mouth is on mine and my fingers are fisting the front of his sweater and the taste of him crashes through my defenses with the devastating familiarity of coming home to a house you thought had burned to the ground.
The kiss is not gentle. It's a war conducted with teeth and tongues and desperate, clinging hands. He tastes like coffee and regret and the kind of hunger that comes from weeks of starvation.
I devour him with equal ferocity, biting his lower lip hard enough to make him groan, fisting his hair to drag his head back, punishing him with my mouth because the words ran out and the fury needs somewhere to go.
His hands grip my hips and lift me, my legs wrapping around his waist as he carries me the three steps to the bed and lowers me onto sheets that smell like Luna's lavender detergent rather than his sandalwood.
The wrongness of the scent makes me pull him closer, needing his skin against mine, needing to replace this unfamiliar bed with the only familiar thing I have left.
"I'm still angry." My fingers yank his sweater over his head, revealing the panther and the viper and all the dangerous art I've traced with my tongue and my tears. His skin is warm beneath my palms, the muscles rigid with tension, the dark hair on his chest rough against my fingers.
"Be angry." He pulls my sweater dress up and over my head with hands that shake, his breath catching when the full curve of my belly is revealed between us, bare and round and undeniable.
His palm presses flat against the swell, his fingers spreading wide, and the reverence in his touch makes my chest crack open despite the fury still burning in my blood.
"Be furious. I'll take every bit of it."
I drag him down and we collide.
This is not the reverent worship of our reunion after the gala.
This is desperate and raw and combative, two people fighting with their bodies because their words drew blood and the only way to heal is through contact that hurts just enough to feel like honesty.
He pins my wrists above my head and I arch into him, biting his shoulder when he presses his hips against mine.
His groan vibrates against my throat as his mouth finds the pulse point he knows makes me lose my mind, and the scrape of his overgrown beard against my sensitive skin sends sparks cascading down my spine.