For a heartbeat, he doesn’t move. His eyes hold mine, and in them I see everything—relief, hunger, something dangerously close to vulnerability.
Then he kisses me. It's not careful, nor restrained, but with the weight of a man who has been waiting for this and will never let it go. His hands cradle my face as though the words have changed the shape of the world, and maybe they have.
The kiss is deep, claiming, the kind that leaves no space for air or doubt. My fingers curl into his shirt, pulling him closer, and I feel the steady beat of his heart against mine.
It matches the twin rhythms still echoing in my mind from the monitor, two tiny lives tethering us to something bigger than either of us alone.
We stay like that for a long time, the room fading away, the fever, the fear, all of it drowned in the heat of him.
When we finally part, his forehead rests against mine, his breath warm on my lips. For the first time since the sickness began, I feel warm for reasons that have nothing to do with fever. It is the kind of warmth that sinks deep and stays, no matter what storms might come.
27
GIOVANNI
Every lead I have chased on Vittorio Greco in the last two weeks has turned to smoke in my hands. The man moves like water through cracks, never where I expect him to be. Every time I think I’ve cut off his escape, he surfaces somewhere else, untouched, wearing that slick, knowing smirk that tells me he still thinks he is untouchable.
I have been living on little sleep. I cannot afford the luxury of rest, not now. Not when Liliana is carrying my children. My heirs. I have doubled security, stationed men at every gate, every hall, every blind corner of the estate. Tomasso has run background checks so deep that no one enters this house—not the maids, not the delivery boys, not the men who unload bread from the trucks—without me knowing exactly where they have been for the last ten years.
Greco will not get close to her. Not while I breathe.
She told me she loved me. Sat in front of me, her voice rough with fever, and gave me words I had not been waiting for but wanted all the same. She has given herself to me fully, completely, in ways she does not even realize. And I have let that mean something. I have let it anchor me, even in the middle of this war.
This morning, Tomasso walks into my office without a word and sets a folder in front of me. His expression is unreadable.
“What is it?”
“Something you need to see,” he says, dropping the folder. He leaves quietly.
I flip the folder open. At first, it is numbers. Bank statements. Transfer records. Half a million euros, funneled through shell accounts over the course of weeks, ending in an offshore fund tied to the money my father lost in Palermo. Money I traced to Renato Marchelli when I first took this chair.
But this time, there is another name on the paper. Liliana’s.
It is there in black and white. Accounts she had access to. Transactions tied to her signature. The dates overlap with when the funds vanished, the funds Renato embezzled from my father’s Palermo operation, half a million euros siphoned through an account she allegedly controlled.
I turn the page.
A photograph stares back at me. It is grainy, time-stamped nearly a year ago. A bar in Naples. Vittorio Greco sits at a corner table, his posture relaxed, his smile sharp.
Across from him is Liliana. She's seated beside Vittorio, her face pale but composed, her hands folded tightly in her lap. The timestamp is months before our marriage, when her father, Renato, was still my father's enforcer.
She looks younger in the image. Her hair falls loose over her shoulders, and there is a softness in her face I do not see now. She is looking at him, not with fear, but something quieter. Curiosity, maybe.
My jaw tightens. I know that place. One of Greco’s bars.
Another photo. A wider shot. Renato is there too, leaning back in his chair, talking while Greco’s eyes stay fixed on her.
I set the pictures down, my hand flat on the desk.
I have been breaking my back to hunt this man, to keep him away from her, to cut off every avenue he could use to get close. And here she is in a photograph, sitting at his table. Money missing from my father’s accounts, her name attached to the trail.
I do not care if the meeting was before our marriage. I do not care if she thinks it means nothing now. She did not tell me. Not about the meeting. Not about the money.
She told me once she knew him only as her father’s friend. That was all. She stood in front of me and said there was no association worth speaking of, that she had nothing to give me that could help take him down. She had that stillness about her, that careful way of measuring what she allowed me to see.
The room tilts as rage and heartbreak collides, a storm tearing through me. This can’t be true, but the evidence is merciless, a noose tightening around my heart. My hands shake as I clutch the photo, her face blurring through my anger, each detail a wound to my jagged heart.
Without thinking, I’m on my feet, the folder in my grip, my boots pounding the marble as I head for the bedroom.
