I don't lie. I don't volunteer. I give him the minimum required to seem cooperative and not a single gram more.
Luca inserts himself strategically — offering information that redirects, drawing lines with a word or a look, managing two wars at once without showing the seams. At one point, his hand finds the back of my chair — barely contact, his knuckles grazing my spine — and I feel it everywhere.
A reminder. An anchor.
I'm here.
I keep my face still, my breathing even, and do not think about the fact that his hand is touching my chair.
I think about it constantly.
He's performing perfect loyalty to a man he knows is a traitor. Smiling at the knife. Which is its own kind of lethal. Every time Enzo speaks directly to him, I watch Luca's jaw — the specific stillness of his hands on the table, the controlled absolute nothing of a man holding everything back — and something tightens low in my chest that has no clean name.
Admiration. Want. The specific terror of caring whether someone makes it out of a room intact.
By the time Enzo sits back and folds his hands again, nothing has been conceded on either side.
"You're more like your father than you think."
"And you're exactly like every man who's ever said that to a woman trying to make her own choices." I stand. "I'll take it as a compliment and show myself out."
We'rein the elevator going down when Luca leans close and says, very quietly: "The journalist at the Times."
"What about her?"
"Does she actually owe you a favor?"
"She does." I pause. "Whether the copies exist is a separate question."
A pause. Then, quietly: "You're going to be the death of me."
"You're welcome."
We're backat the brownstone by evening.
The guards rotate. New faces, some I recognize, some I don't. Professional and invisible in the way Luca's people always are — present without intruding, which I've reluctantly decided is a skill.
I'm passing the kitchen when I hear them.
Two men, just around the corner, voices low but not low enough.
"—Virelli princess is something else, though. You see her in there with the old man?"
A quiet laugh. "Didn't flinch. Enzo doesn't get that from anyone."
"Boss isn't going to let her go."
"Would you?"
A pause. The meaningful kind.
I stop walking.
The princess.
I should hate it. It's reductive and presumptuous and everything I've spent since college trying not to be. I am not a princess. I am a board-certified trauma surgeon who has cracked chests, called times of death, and worked through shifts that would break most people. I left the Virelli name behind on purpose. I built something entirely mine.
And yet.
