Page 11 of The Hidden Heir

A whole one this time. His hand doesn't move. His eyes don't either.

"Again."

We stand like that, his hand at my neck, my heartbeat slamming against his palm, until the white recedes from the windows and the room reassembles itself around the fact of him.

"He was there," I whisper.

"He was close," Luca says. "He is no longer close to anything. Every man on this property would take a bullet before one reaches you or Michael. That is not a promise. It's a payroll."

A laugh cracks out of me, wet and unhinged. His mouth tugs. Almost a smile, gone instantly, like it surprised him too.

And then I notice the rest of it. How enormous he is this close. The heat coming off him, cedar and smoke and clean cotton. His other hand has settled at my waist, steadying me, fingers spread over the fullness of me. And he doesn't skim past it the way men sometimes do, apologetic, in a hurry to get somewhere narrower. He holds on. Like the softness is the point.

His gaze drops to my mouth.

One second. Two. Long enough that I stop breathing again, and this time it has nothing to do with panic. Long enough that he knows I noticed, and I know he knows.

Then his hands leave me, neck and waist both at once, deliberate as a man setting down a loaded gun, and he steps back, and the morning air rushes in cold where he was.

"Eat something," he says, unreadable again, the closed door where a man should be.

"The wedding will be soon," he adds at the doorway, voice level like nothing happened, because to him maybe nothing did. "Small. You'll want for nothing."

Except a life that's mine.

He leaves. Through the window, out on the terrace, Mikey is shrieking at the fountain fish, and Marta is laughing, and the guard passes on his eleven-minute loop, and Lake Michigan glitters like it has no idea.

I wrap both hands around the cold coffee and make myself a promise instead of a vow. The vow, I've already given him. I built a life out of nothing once. Every shift, every deadbolt, every dollar. I can do it again if I have to. But first I'm going to learn this beautiful cage the way I learned my old neighborhood: every door, every camera, every eleven-minute loop. Until the day the walls need me to know them.

And in the meantime, I'll survive the more dangerous thing, which was never the man with the gun.

It's the man who ordered me to breathe. And the way my body obeyed him.

Marta comes back in with Mikey syrup-sticky on her hip and a cordless phone in her other hand, and her face is doing something uncertain that I already don't like.

"Signora. It's for you."

Nobody knows I'm here. The thought arrives first, cold and complete. Nobody on this earth knows I'm here except the men on Luca Petrucci's payroll. My stomach drops second.

I take the phone, because not knowing is worse.

"Hello?"

A woman's voice. Warm, smooth, polished. A voice I haven't heard in almost three years and would know in a hundred.

"Hello, Tina," Caroline says. "I hear my sister has come home."

4

VALENTINA

Ifeel isolated.

Even though I'm allowed to go outside, I can't leave the property. Susie comes in to take care of Michael if I need some time to myself, and she seems kind and sweet enough. Eddie is good to me, too. Hell, everybody working for the Petrucci family has been nothing but good to me.

I haven't seen Luca since yesterday morning, though.

I heard him come in late last night. I noticed his shadow passing by my closed door. Just a hint cutting through the blade of light from the hallway.