I find Livia near the edge of the terrace, Nico already asleep against her shoulder, exhaustion and confusion both written plainly across her face, and the question arrives before I can stop it, ugly and immediate, surfacing from some old, wounded place I am not proud of.
“Did your father know because of you?”
The words leave my mouth before I’ve finished deciding whether I believe them, and I watch her process the wordsrage and hurt visible on her face, for a second, I hate myself for choosing to say them anyway, in this moment, in front of our sleeping son,
She looks at me like I’ve struck her.
And for a single, suspended second, neither of us says anything at all.
Chapter Twenty-Five
LIVIA
The question feels like a small, precise wound that hurts worse than anything Dante said to me all week.
“What?”
“Did your father know because you told him?” Valentino says it again, quieter this time, but no less devastating for the lower volume. His eyes are distant and methodical, like he’s already half-decided the answer and is only waiting for me to confirm it. “He knew enough to leak it to the entire consortium tonight. He knew enough to structure a hostile acquisition weeks in advance. That requires more than guesswork, Livia.”
For a moment I can’t speak at all. I stand there on the terrace with Nico’s weight warm and trusting against my shoulder, the music from the closing reception still drifting faintly through the open doors behind us, and I feel something inside my chest go very quiet, like my body is deciding whether to fight or simply stop functioning altogether. I have absorbed worse accusations than this one over the years. My father has called me unstable, unreliable, ungrateful, a dozen variations on the theme that I am fundamentally not to be trusted with my own life. I have built calluses against all of it. I did not expect to need them tonight, standing across from the one person I had finally, foolishly, let all the way past my defenses.
Nico stirs against my shoulder, murmurs something unintelligible, and settles again, his small weight a sudden, unbearable reminder of everything currently at stake in this conversation.
“You think I told him.” My voice comes out flatter than I expect, stripped of the hurt I actually feel. “After everything I told you four mornings ago. After everything it cost me to say any of it out loud. You think I picked up a phone and handed my father the one thing I have spent four years protecting from him.”
I shift Nico slightly, settling him more securely against me, and I notice my hands are shaking, a fine, persistent tremor I can’t make stop. “Do you have any idea what that man would do with this information if I’d actually given it to him? Do you understand what ’helping’ Dante De Luca has cost every single person who’s ever tried it?”
Valentino doesn’t answer immediately, and the silence stretches long enough that I understand, with a cold, sinking clarity, that he genuinely doesn’t know. That somewhere in the last hour, standing in a study with my father and then standing in front of Margaret Aurelius and watching his company come apart in real time, his mind reached for the easiest available betrayal, and I was standing right there, convenient and already guilty of one secret, easy to make guilty of a second.
“I didn’t help him,” I say. “I have never once, in thirty years, given that man a single advantage over me that I could avoid giving him. He found out the way he finds out everything: by watching, by waiting, by being patient enough to notice the things people think they’re hiding well enough. He’s spent his entire life reading people for weakness, and apparently, I am not as good at hiding things from him as I thought I was.”
“Livia—”
“No.” The word comes out sharper than I intend, sharp enough that Nico shifts again, and I lower my voice without losing any of its edge. “You don’t get to ask me that questionand then immediately try to soften it once you see my reaction. You asked it because some part of you believes it’s possible Valentino. That’s not a small thing to have asked the mother of your child.”
He’s quiet. I watch regret move across his face, the look of a man absorbing a mistake he can’t take back, and for a moment I almost feel sorry for him, almost reach for the part of myself that wants to forgive quickly, smooth things over, make the night easier for both of us.
I don’t reach for it.
“This is exactly what I was afraid of,” I say, and my voice finally cracks, the careful composure I’ve been holding since this morning splintering all at once. “Not just that you’d take him. Not exactly. I was afraid of being doubted the second things got hard, of having every hard thing I’ve survived used as evidence against me instead of context for me. I told you everything and the first time something goes wrong, you looked at me and saw a woman who would endanger her son to what? Destroy you? I don’t even have any reason to do that.”
“I made a mistake.”
“You did.” I look at him for a long moment, Nico’s weight warm and steady against my chest, the only solid thing in a night that has otherwise come completely apart. “And I understand why. I do. Your company is collapsing in front of you, your trust in me is already fractured, and I was standing right there. I understand the math of it. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t it hasn't cost you something."
“What has it cost me?”
“It costs me staying.” The words tumble out of my mouth before I’ve fully decided, but once they’re out, I know they’retrue, know it with a certainty I’ve known very few things in my life. “If I stay here, where the first instinct is suspicion instead of trust, that is not a life I’m willing to build for Nico. He doesn’t have to grow up watching his mother prove her innocence on a loop every time something goes wrong that isn’t her fault. If I stay where I am not trusted, Dante wins anyway.”
I’m already moving before I finish the sentence, walking past Valentino toward the cottage, Nico still asleep against my shoulder, my mind already cataloguing what needs to be packed and how quickly I can manage it without waking him fully.
The cottage feels different now than it did this morning, different than it did even two hours ago at dinner, when Nico announced to a table of strangers that Valentino built the best racetracks and something in me had let itself believe, just for a moment, that this could actually work. Every object I pass on my way to the bedroom seems to belong to a version of us that no longer exists: the rug where the racetrack still sits half-assembled, the kitchen counter where four nights ago a kiss undid four years of careful distance, the hallway wall I leaned against while a man, I’m now packing a suitcase to leave told me to tell him to stop and I never did.
Valentino doesn’t follow immediately, and when he does, he doesn’t try to stop me. He doesn’t grab my arm, doesn’t block the door, doesn’t do any of the things a man like my father would do in this exact moment. He simply stands in the doorway of the bedroom while I move through it, pulling clothes from drawers, folding them with hands that won’t quite stop shaking, every motion mechanical and efficient because if I slow down even slightly, I am going to fall apart completely.
“Livia.”
“Don’t.” I don’t look up from the suitcase. “Please don’t try to talk me out of this right now. I don’t have anything left tonight to argue with.”
