Romano's Obsession

Chapter three: Defiance

LUCIA

I wake up angry.

Not the manageable kind that dissolves after coffee. The deep bone settled kind that has been building since the moment those men put me in that car and drove me away from my life without asking my name first.

I am done being quiet about it.

I wash my face, pull on yesterday's clothes still mine, still wrinkled, still the only thing in this house that belongs to me and go looking for him.

I find him in the main corridor.

Walking toward the study, phone in hand, two men flanking him at respectful distance. He moves the way he does everything like the world is expected to rearrange itself around him and has never once failed to do so.

He sees me and stops.

"I need to talk to you," I say.

He says something low to his men in Italian. They disappear. He gestures toward the study and walks in without waiting to see if I follow.

I follow.

He closes the door.

"My landlord will report me missing," I begin, turning to face him. "My professor has emailed twice. My café shift started three hours ago and my manager—"

"It has been handled," he says.

I stop. "What do you mean handled?"

"Your landlord has been paid three months ahead. Your professor received an email explaining a family emergency. Your manager was informed you resigned."

The silence that follows is extremely loud.

"You went into my life," I say slowly. "Without telling me. Without asking me."

"Yes."

"You had absolutely no right—"

"I had every reason."

"That is not the same thing!" My voice climbs and I don't pull it back. "You don't get to reach into everything I have built and rearrange it because it suits you. I worked for every single thing I have. Every shift, every euro, every lecture I earned it completely alone and you had no right—"

"Lucia."

"Don't say my name like—"

"Choose your next word carefully," he says quietly.

I chose it anyway.

"Bastardo."

The word lands between us like a lit match.

Something moves in his jaw. His eyes drop to mine and then he crosses the space between us in two strides and his hand comes up and wraps carefully, deliberately around the front of my throat.

Not tight. Not painful.

But absolute.

I stop breathing entirely.

His face is inches from mine. Close enough that I can see the precise darkness of his eyes not black but the deepest possible brown, like mahogany in low firelight and the controlled set of his jaw and the faint movement at his temple.

"You are in my house," he says. Very quietly. "You are alive because I chose it. You will not curse at me."

I should be terrified.

I am terrified.

But underneath the terror, something else is happening that I have absolutely no framework for something warm and electric that starts where his hand meets my throat and moves outward until I feel it in my fingertips.

I hold his gaze.

"Let go of me," I whisper.

He doesn't.

His eyes move over my face with slow deliberate attention from my eyes to my mouth and back again and I watch something shift in them. Something he is working very hard to keep buried. Every part of him is controlled and still.

Except his eyes.

His eyes are saying something completely different.

I think he knows I can see it.

We are close enough that I can feel the warmth radiating off him, can smell something dark and expensive that has been haunting the edges of my consciousness since that first night. My heart is hammering and I desperately hope he cannot feel it against his palm.

His thumb moves.

The smallest possible shift against the side of my neck one fraction of movement and every coherent thought I have dissolves completely.

His eyes drop to my mouth.

"Matteo."

Luca's voice from the doorway.

We separate instantly. Matteo steps back, his expression sealing shut so rapidly it is almost mechanical walls going up smooth and immediate. He turns to Luca without looking at me again.

"What?" Perfectly even.

Luca's eyes move between us once. His face gives nothing away except for the briefest lift of one brow before it settles back to neutral.

"Marco is on the line," he says. "Fabrizio."

Something cold and final moves across Matteo's face at that name. He straightens, picks up his phone from the desk.

"Get out," he says.

I get out.

I walk down the corridor on legs that are not entirely steady, close my bedroom door behind me and press my back against it.

I put my hand to my own throat where his was.

My pulse is still hammering.

"Stop it," I tell myself firmly.

It takes considerably longer than it should.

---

MATTEO

She called me a bastardo.

To my face. Without flinching.

I am standing outside on the rear terrace at midnight with a glass I am not drinking and the particular irritation of a man whose composure has been disturbed in a way he cannot immediately account for.

Nobody speaks to me that way.

The last person who looked me dead in the eye and said exactly what they meant regardless of consequence was my mother. Standing in my father's study with her chin up and her voice completely steady delivering a truth he didn't want to hear.

I push that thought away immediately.

Luca appears beside me. I don't look at him.

"Don't," I say.

"I merely came for air."

"You came to say something irritating."

He is quiet for four seconds. "She didn't break," he says. "Even with your hand at her throat. She didn't break."

I say nothing.

"Wednesday," I say finally. "Palermo. I want it done."

"Already arranged."

I nod and go inside.

I do not stop outside her door.

I keep walking.

I almost convince myself it costs me nothing.

---