Both of them — cupping my jaw, tilting my head, running a fast clinical check of my eyes and my throat, and the bruising at my wrists that he catalogs and stores away like evidence he intends to present to someone, later, in a room with no witnesses.
"Where are you hurt?” he says.
"I'm fine." My hands close around his wrists. His pulse hammers under my fingers — hard, fast, not fully controlled. "You're not. Luca, the bandage?—"
"Where are you hurt?”
"I'm fine." I hold his eyes. "Are you?"
One second.
His forehead drops to mine. His hands tighten on my face. His breath comes out rough and uneven — the sound of a man who has been holding everything together through sheer force of will, briefly, privately, allowing himself to feel what almost happened tonight.
I let him have it.
Then the three words arrive, and they arrive without warning, and they land with the specific, catastrophic weight of something I cannot take back.
The man I love.
Oh, no.
Oh, absolutely the fuck not.
My stomach drops clean out of my body. My hands start shaking. Not from the drug or the adrenaline or the aftermath of a concrete room and zip ties and my father's grief.
From this.
From three words in my own head that I have apparently been building toward for weeks without my own knowledge or consent. And they're true. And I know they're true.
And the worst part is this.
I don't want to take them back.
He pulls back. Stands. Puts his body between me and the room.
"We need to move."
"Yeah." My voice comes out almost normal. "Yeah, okay."
We don't makeit ten steps.
They come from the side corridor — six men, Moretti soldiers, already positioned, already armed. The setup of people who were in place long before we arrived. And behind them, moving through the doorway with the unhurried ease of a man who has been three steps ahead of everyone in this building all night —
Enzo Moretti.
He looks the way he always looks. Composed. Paternal. Wearing his warmth like armor. His eyes move over the scene: Luca's blood-soaked shirt, my ruined gown, the men on the floor. His expression doesn't change.
It never does. That's the thing about Enzo — the performance is so complete you keep looking for the seam, and there isn't one.
"Nipote." Warm as a blade between the ribs. Nephew. "You've made quite a mess."
Six guns come up.
All of them aimed at Luca.
He goes still beside me. Not the frightened kind. The predator kind — the kind that precedes something irreversible.
"The gala. The recording. The federal channel." Enzo tilts his head. "I've been three steps ahead since the brownstone. You've always known I would be." His gaze moves to me — not with hatred, not with warmth. The flat assessment of a man looking at a problem he's already solved. "You chose her." Back to Luca. "Now choose who dies."
