"You look beautiful," he says.
"Don't."
"A father can't tell his daughter?—"
"Don't." I hold his gaze. "We're past that tonight."
He studies me for a moment. Then the warmth shifts — still present, but something colder moving beneath it, the way a current moves under still water. "You've been gone for days. With a Moretti." His voice stays even. "Do you understand how that looks?"
"I understand exactly how it looks."
"Then come home." Simple. Final. The way he delivers everything that isn't negotiable. "Tonight. Now. The drive, the Moretti boy, all of it — we handle it together, as a family. The way it should have been handled from the beginning."
"You threatened to burn my hospital down."
"I was trying to make you understand the urgency?—"
"You threatened to burn my hospital down." Slower. "The place I built. The patients I treat. People who have nothing to do with any of this." My voice is steady. I'm very proud of my voiceright now. "You picked up the phone and threatened all of that because I wouldn't come home. And you're standing here talking to me about family."
Silence.
My father looks at me with the expression he gets when I've surprised him, which doesn't happen often, and which he doesn't enjoy. Then he exhales once, patient, recalibrating.
"Luca Moretti," he says. The name in his mouth is an accusation. "He's done something to you."
"He's done nothing to me that I didn't choose."
"You don't choose men like him, Serafina. You think you do. You think it's your decision, your desire, your—" a pause, searching "—your hunger for him. But men like Luca Moretti don't give women anything. They take everything and leave you believing it was a gift." His eyes soften the way they used to when I was small. It used to make me feel seen. Now it makes my skin crawl. "He's a disease. Charming and fatal and completely without conscience. I know his kind."
"You are his kind," I say.
The softness disappears.
"He is not the man for you," my father says. Quiet now. Dangerous quiet. "He is using you for the drive, for leverage, for whatever advantage a Moretti can extract from a Virelli this week. The moment you stop being useful?—"
"He protected me." The words come out before I decide to say them. "When your men came to Bellevue, he got me out. When someone installed a camera in the safehouse — his safehouse — he tore his own team apart to find the leak. When you threatenedmy hospital, he had men on the building before he told me, which, yes, we argued about, but the point is he did it." I step forward. "He has kept me alive and informed and treated me like a person, while you have threatened, manipulated, and sent men to grab me off the street. So don't stand here and tell me what kind of man he is."
My father is very still.
"You're defending him," he says. Like he's confirming a terminal diagnosis.
"I'm telling you the truth."
"You're—" He stops. And I watch grief cross his face — not anger, not the cold control, but real grief. The grief of a man watching something slip away that he thought was still his to hold. "Dio mio, Serafina." My god. "You've fallen for him."
I don't answer.
I don't have to.
My silence is its own confession, and we both know it.
Luca doesn't walk in. He arrives like a consequence.
The Calloway distraction bought them thirty seconds — enough time to move me, not enough time to keep me. I see the moment Luca clears the gallery doorway, and his eyes find me, and something in his face goes completely and terrifyingly blank. Not cold. Not controlled. The blankness of a man who has shut off everything that isn't the next ten seconds.
The two soldiers don't even get to reach for their weapons.
The first goes down with a single strike to the throat. Fast, precise, no wasted movement. The second turns, and Luca isalready there — one hand at the collar, elbow to the jaw, quiet and merciless and absolute. Two seconds. Two men on the floor.
