Stolen By The Devil's Brother

CHAPTER FIVE

The Night Everything Started

Dante left on a Saturday morning.

He told me Friday evening casually, between emails that he had business in Chicago. Two days, possibly three. Associates from another family, something that required his presence. He kissed my cheek on his way out of the bedroom and said he'd have food sent from my favorite restaurant on Sunday if he was still away.

I didn't ask him not to go.

I thought about the fact that I didn't ask, after he was gone. I stood by the window and turned that over in my mind, eight months with this man, and when he told me he was leaving for days, my first feeling was not longing. It was something closer to the release of a breath I'd been holding.

That told me something.

I didn't want to look at it too directly, so I didn't.

What I didn't expect was for Luca to still be there.

He appeared in the kitchen Saturday afternoon in gray sweatpants and a worn-out t-shirt, looking completely unbothered, making the kind of coffee that required four steps and two different appliances, and I stood in the doorway feeling oddly ambushed by his casualness.

"I thought you'd be gone," I said.

He looked up. "Dante didn't tell you I was staying a few days?"

"He mentioned associates in Chicago. He didn't mention you specifically."

Luca's expression did something complicated, a kind of fond, tired resignation that told me this wasn't new information about his brother. "That sounds right," he said.

I stayed in my room most of the afternoon. I told myself it was sensible. That proximity to Luca, who was too observant and too warm and entirely too good at making me feel like a person rather than an accessory, was not a comfortable situation.

But the apartment was large and also, somehow, very small.

By evening, we were watching a movie in the main living room not deliberately, but the way things happen when two people exist in the same space and neither of them wants to acknowledge they're actively avoiding each other. He chose something with subtitles that I wouldn't have picked and turned out to be extraordinary. I pulled a blanket over my legs. He sat on the other end of the sectional with a glass of something dark and said nothing for ninety minutes.

When it ended, neither of us moved to leave.

"Can I ask you something?" I said.

"You'll ask anyway."

"Why did you leave? Dante's family all of this. You clearly had a place in it and you walked away." I paused. "Or were pushed."

He was quiet for a moment. The city glowed orange through the tall windows, and in that light he looked softer and more tired than he had during the day. "Both," he said finally. "In the way those two things sometimes end up being the same."

"He doesn't talk about you."

"I know."

"Does it hurt?"

He turned his head to look at me, and the look on his face was one I recognized because I had worn it myself too many times to count, the look of someone who has decided that hurting is something you do privately, where no one can see. "Yeah," he said. Just that. No performance around it.

Something inside me shifted.

I shouldn't have said the next thing. I knew it even as I said it, the same way you know a door is going to swing wide before you touch the handle.

"I feel invisible sometimes," I heard myself say. "In this life. In this apartment." I pulled the blanket tighter. "He doesn't see me. Not really. I don't know if he ever did."

Luca didn't rush to respond. He didn't offer a platitude or a deflection. He just looked at me with those dark, steady eyes and let what I'd said exist in the air between us without trying to fix it or minimize it.

"I see you," he said quietly.

Three words. Unremarkable on their own. Devastating at that moment.

The thing that happened next was not dramatic, not cinematic, not the way it would be written in a story that wanted to excuse itself. It was just two people on a couch at eleven o'clock at night, sitting too close, in a silence that had changed temperature.

He reached over and brushed a piece of hair from my face, the smallest gesture, and his fingers barely grazed my cheek, and that was all it took. That was the thing. That tiny, careful moment of being seen and touched like I was something worth being careful with.

I didn't stop it.

Neither did he.

And somewhere in the hours that followed, in the warmth and the honesty and the terrifying realness of every moment, I understood that I had spent eight months starving without knowing it, and one evening with Luca Moretti had shown me exactly how hungry I was.

By the time Sunday came, nothing was simple anymore.

And nothing, not Dante, not the penthouse, not the careful life I had built out of someone else's design would ever look the same again.