My pulse hammers in my throat.
I have watched him do this before. I have watched him take apart rooms full of danger without raising his voice, and every time my body has the same catastrophic reaction it's having right now — something low and electric and entirely involuntary that I will be embarrassed about later and cannot stop in the moment.
He doesn't look down at the men on the floor.
He crosses to my side. Puts himself between my father and me in one shift of his body. Still doesn't touch me — but I feel the fury radiating off him like a furnace. Feel the restraint it takes to hold that much rage still.
"Virelli," he says. Very quiet.
That's how I know he's furious.
"Moretti." My father's voice has gone to ice. "You have something that belongs to me."
"Serafina belongs to herself." Luca's voice doesn't change. "You know that. You've always known that. You just don't like it."
"She is my daughter."
"She is a trauma surgeon who has saved hundreds of lives. This is her life. You have no part in it." Luca tilts his head. Fractionally. The way he does when he's made a decision. "And she's made her choice about where she stands. If you have a problem with that choice, you can take it up with me."
The air in the gallery goes thin.
My father looks at Luca the way he looked at him across the gala floor — flat, cold recognition. The assessment of a threat that needs to be removed. Then he looks at me.
"Come home," he says. One last time. Soft. Almost a plea.
I step forward.
I stand between them — not behind Luca, not behind my father, but between them, equidistant, my own person in my own space — and I look at Giovanni Virelli and feel a door close inside me. Final. Irreversible.
"No," I say. "Not tonight. Not like this. Not until you can talk to me like I'm a person and not an asset you misplaced."
My father stares at me.
For a long moment, nobody moves.
Then the shot rings out.
It happens fast.
A crack from the doorway — close, deafening in the small gallery — and I watch Luca's body jerk with the impact. Watch him stagger. Watch his hand go to his side, and the dark bloom spreading through the white of his shirt, and his eyes finding mine across the room.
Not pain.
Fury. Pure, absolute, murderous fury — at himself, at the room, at the fact that he is bleeding and I am still three feet away and someone is already moving behind me.
"Luca—"
The forearm catches me across the chest.
The cloth hits my face — chemical, sweet, sickeningly fast — and I fight it, I fight it with everything I have, clawing at the arm, driving my elbow back, buying seconds I don't have. My knees are already going. The room is already tilting.
The last thing I see before the black curtain closes is Luca on one knee.
Still reaching for me. One hand pressed to his side and the other stretched across the floor toward where I'm falling, fingers spread open, as if he can just get close enough?—
He doesn't stop reaching.
The word surfaces somewhere beneath the chemical dark, shapeless but certain.
