Then I open the door.
He doesn’t turn around right away. “Go to sleep, Livia.”
“That’s not really your call to make.” I step out onto the porch. The night air is sharp enough to wake me up fully, cold against my bare arms, and I wrap them tighter around myself. “You can sit out here all night pretending this is about discipline. Or you can come inside like a normal, emotionally damaged man and talk to me.”
That gets him. The corner of his mouth moves, not quite a smile, but close enough that I count it as a small victory.
“Emotionally damaged,” he repeats.
“I’ve read your file, Valentino. Metaphorically. I don’t need a dossier to know a man who builds exit routes into every room he stands in has some history he’s not telling anyone.”
He’s quiet for a moment, looking out at the dark lawn instead of at me. “You’re not wrong.”
“I rarely am.”
That, finally, gets the smile all the way out, brief and unguarded, gone again almost before I register it. He stands, slowly, like something in him has decided, and follows me back inside.
The cottage is warm and dim, lit only by the lamp in the corner and the faint glow leaking from beneath Nico’s door down the hall. I sit on the end of the sofa, legs tucked under me, and after a moment he sits too, an arm’s length away, like he’s negotiating the distance with himself in real time.
I’ve been waiting for this conversation since the night I first saw the ink on his forearm and felt something in my chest catch on it like fabric on a nail. “Tell me about the tattoo.”
He looks down at his own arm, like he’s forgotten it’s there, like it’s become so much a part of him he stopped registering it as something separate that could be asked about.
“It’s supposed to represent where I was born,” he says. “A small town, inland from the coast. My grandmother kept goats. My father worked on a farm that wasn’t ours, that we worked anyway, because the man who owned it never came to claim it and somebody had to feed the animals.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“I know.” He turns his arm slightly, and the lamp catches the ink — a small, weathered farmhouse, simple lines, half-swallowed by hills. “My mother died when I was nine. My father two years after that. By eleven I was raising myself in a house that wasn’t legally mine, on land that wasn’t legally anyone’s, until an uncle in Milan decided I was either an asset or a liability and chose to make me the first.”
“Valentino—”
“I got this,” he says, touching the tattoo with two fingers, “the year I left. Not to remember the farm. To remember that I survived it. That whatever I built after, however far from that hillside it took me, some part of it was mine before anyone else decided what I was for.”
I think of all the versions of him I’ve assembled over the past two days: the man who recalculates exit routes before he’s finished his coffee, the man who briefed an entire security detail without raising his voice once, the man who sat on the edge of a four-year-old’s bed and spoke to him in a language Nico doesn’tunderstand a word of, simply because it was the language that lived closest to his own grief. None of them quite match the boy on that hillside, feeding goats that weren’t his on land that wasn’t his, deciding alone at eleven that survival was something you built rather than something given to you.
“You built all of this,” I say quietly, gesturing at nothing in particular, at the cottage and the retreat and the company and the careful architecture of a life that looks, from any reasonable distance, like complete control, “out of a boy who had none of it.”
“I built all of this,” he agrees, “because I decided very early that I would never again be a person, things simply happened to.”
“And now?”
He looks at me for a long moment, and something in his face shifts, some old vigilance loosening just slightly. “Now I’m sitting in a cottage with a woman who makes that plan look considerably less appealing than it used to.”
I reach over, slowly, and rest my fingers against the ink. He goes very still.
“Home,” I say quietly. “And loss. And making it out anyway.”
“Yes.”
He’s looking at me like he’s trying to place something, trying to chase down a memory that keeps sliding out of reach the harder he reaches for it.
“You’re looking at me strangely,” I say.
“You remind me of someone.”
My pulse stutters. “Who?”
“I don’t know yet.” His voice has gone low, rough at the edges.
