Stolen By The Devil's Brother

CHAPTER FOUR

The Wrong Brother

He came back on a Friday.

I was actually in the kitchen, making pasta from scratch the way my grandmother taught me, because Dante was out and the kitchen was the one room in this apartment where I still felt like myself. Flour on the counter, music playing from my phone, the satisfying tension of dough under my palms. The simplest kind of joy. The kind that doesn't need to be witnessed.

I didn't hear the elevator open. I didn't hear the front door.

I just heard a voice say, behind me: "Nobody told me Dante hired a chef."

I spun around so fast I knocked the flour container sideways, and a cloud of white dust exploded across the counter and partially across my shirt, and I stood there covered in flour staring at a man I had never met who was leaning in the kitchen doorway like he'd been there for years.

He was tall, not quite Dante's height, but close. Where Dante was sharp and architectural, this man was something rougher. Dark curly hair, longer than Dante's. A leather jacket worn soft from actual use, not for appearance. A bruise along his jaw that was maybe four days old. And eyes, dark, warm, slightly amused that looked familiar in a way I couldn't immediately place.

Then I remembered the photograph.

"You must be Luca," I said.

"And you must be the famous Elena." He smiled, and it was nothing like Dante's smile. Dante's smile was a controlled, beautiful expression deployed at strategic moments. This one just... happened. Like he couldn't help it. Like something had genuinely struck him as good. "Dante talked about you."

"He didn't talk about you."

The smile shifted not hurt, but something quieter. Knowing. "No," he said simply. "He wouldn't."

He crossed to the refrigerator like he owned the place, which technically, in some way, maybe he did. He pulled out a bottle of water, cracked it open, and watched me with frank curiosity. Not the assessing gaze men sometimes leveled at me in Dante's world, the one that calculated my value. This was different. Warmer. Like he was actually curious about what I was going to say next.

"How long are you staying?" I asked, turning back to the counter and trying to salvage the pasta situation.

"Don't know yet." He came to stand beside me, looking down at the mess of flour and dough with what appeared to be genuine interest. "You actually know how to do that?"

"My grandmother taught me."

"Dante eats things like this?"

"Dante eats what his chef prepares. I made this for myself."

A pause. "That's a little sad."

I looked up at him sideways. "Most people would say it's romantic. Cooking for the person you love."

"Is that what you're doing?" He tilted his head, completely unguarded. "Cooking for someone who's not here?"

I didn't answer that.

He leaned against the counter and watched me work without filling the silence with noise, which was unexpectedly comfortable. With Dante, silence always meant distance, displeasure, processing. With Luca, after about three minutes, silence just felt like breathing.

"How long have you been with him?" he asked eventually.

"Eight months."

"Happy?"

The word hit different the second time someone asked me in a week. I kept my eyes on the dough. "I live in a penthouse."

"That's not what I asked."

I looked up then, and he was watching me with those warm, too-honest eyes, and something in my chest did something it hadn't done in months. Some small, embarrassing thing that I immediately tried to smother.

"You shouldn't ask questions like that," I said quietly.

"Probably not." He didn't look sorry. "But I asked anyway."

He stayed in the kitchen while I finished the pasta. He didn't try to talk more than was natural. He made me laugh twice, once about something stupid involving the water bottle and once about a story from wherever he'd been that he told in fragments, like he wasn't sure how much to give. He ate a bowl of pasta without being asked and told me it was the best thing he'd had in months and seemed to mean it completely.

By the time I went to bed that night, I already knew something was wrong.

Not wrong like bad.

Wrong like dangerous.