The Billionaire’s Hidden Flame

Chapter4

Elena Rossi

The sky over SoHo had darkened by the time Elena pushed open the creaky glass door to her studio. The familiar chime above the frame gave its usual half-hearted jingle, a sound she’d once found comforting. Today, it felt like a taunt.

She locked the door behind her and leaned against it for a moment, eyes closed. The rain had stopped, but its chill clung to her clothes, to her skin. Or maybe it was the cold steel of Luca’s words that lingered.

It’s not personal, Ms. Rossi. It’s business.

Elena let out a breath and peeled off her blazer, tossing it over the back of her worn leather chair. The studio looked exactly the same as when she’d left it a few hours earlier—sunlight filtering through dusty skylights, the faint scent of aged linseed oil, a disorganized sea of canvases and brushes and carefully documented fragments of history.

And yet, everything felt different.

She crossed the room and lit the vintage floor lamp by the workbench, casting a soft amber glow over the unfinished restoration of a seventeenth-century Venetian portrait. The young nobleman’s eyes stared back at her through centuries of grime and cracked pigment, solemn and knowing.

“You’d understand, wouldn’t you?” she murmured to the canvas. “Power, duty, control. All the things men like him hide behind.”

She dropped onto her stool and rubbed her temples.

She’d expected resistance, of course. Billionaires didn’t become billionaires by bending to emotional appeals. But she hadn’t expected him—Luca, unchanged in posture and confidence, yet entirely unrecognizable in every way that had once mattered.

And worse—he didn’t even remember her.

Or maybe he did. That flicker in his eyes when she challenged him... it hadn’t been nothing.

But even if some part of him remembered, he hadn’t connected the dots. Not to Tuscany. Not to her.

Not to the summer that changed everything.

“Elena?” a small voice called from the hallway.

She turned, startled, as a little girl padded into the room in striped pajamas, her curls wild and sleep-tousled. A sketchbook was tucked under one arm. One of her socks was missing.

Elena's heart squeezed.

“Sweetheart,” she said softly. “What are you doing up? I thought Nonna tucked you in an hour ago.”

“She did, but I heard the door.” The little girl rubbed her eyes. “And I wanted to finish this.”

She walked over and handed Elena the sketchbook. Inside, a crayon drawing showed three stick figures: a woman with curly hair, a little girl with a bow, and a tall man in a suit. Above them, the word FAMILY was written in large, wobbly letters.

Elena swallowed hard.

“You gave him a tie,” she said, forcing a smile.

“Because you said he works in an office. Important people wear ties, right?”

“Yes, they do.”

The little girl leaned her head on Elena’s arm. “Is he ever gonna come visit us?”

Elena hesitated. Not because she didn’t have the answer. But because Sofia—nine years old, brilliant, perceptive, and compassionate—deserved more than a lie. And yet, the truth had teeth. It wasn’t safe. Not yet.

“Maybe one day,” Elena said gently. “But not right now. He doesn’t know we’re here.”

Sofia looked up at her with serious eyes. “You could just tell him.”

Elena smiled faintly, brushing a curl from her daughter’s cheek. “Some things aren’t that simple, my love.”

Silence settled between them. Sofia’s drawings scattered across the desk like pieces of a story waiting to be told.

“He looks kinda like the guy on TV,” Sofia said, flipping back to a page she’d drawn weeks ago. “Remember? The one in the magazine? With the big buildings?”

Elena’s breath caught.

Sofia was referring to a business magazine Elena had tossed aside at the grocery store checkout, the one with Luca’s face on the cover—Empire Builder: Luca DeLuca and the Future of New York. She hadn’t realized her daughter had even noticed.

“Yes,” she said softly. “He does look like that.”

Sofia yawned. “Will he like me?”

Elena wrapped her arms around her. “He would love you.”

It wasn’t a lie. She didn’t think Luca could meet Sofia and not love her. She had his stormy eyes and his stubborn chin, and an uncanny ability to challenge everything Elena said with polite rebellion.

But what would he do when he learned the truth?

Would he see betrayal, or would he see a decade of sacrifice? Would he understand, or would he demand?

Elena had spent years building a life carefully out of reach, out of memory, out of danger. And now, just one meeting—one name on a letterhead—had cracked open everything she’d buried.

“I think you should sleep now,” Elena said softly, lifting Sofia into her arms. She was light but tall now—growing too fast.

Sofia wrapped her arms around Elena’s neck. “Can I stay here while you work?”

“Just for a little while.”

Elena carried her to the corner sofa and tucked her in beneath a quilt, the same one her grandmother had sewn when Elena was a baby in Florence. Sofia curled up with her sketchbook like a cat returning to a favorite spot.

Elena returned to the workbench, but she didn’t pick up a brush.

She stared at the nobleman’s half-restored face, but all she could see was Luca.

Not the man she’d met today—the CEO with unreadable eyes and a voice smooth as silk—but the boy she’d kissed beneath the cypress trees, who had whispered promises in Italian and drawn constellations on her back with his fingertips.

She still remembered how he’d smelled then. Like rain and rosemary.

Back then, he wasn’t DeLuca Holdings. He was just Luca—a visiting architecture student, the son of a powerful Florentine developer who’d resented every minute of his father’s empire. He’d said he wanted to build beauty, not power.

But somewhere along the way, the boy had vanished.

And the man who stood before her today? He could evict without blinking.

Still… he’d looked at her twice. Once with indifference. And once with something like memory.

She didn’t know what scared her more: that he might never remember her at all… or that he might remember everything.

Elena rubbed her arms. The studio had gone quiet again, except for the sound of Sofia’s soft

breathing.

She had to protect that sound. That life. That light.

No matter what Luca DeLuca remembered.