Chapter 4
1489 Words
Aria POV
I don’t sleep.
Not really.
I drift, and in that drift the dark comes back. The club, loud music, someone’s hand over my mouth, the taste of something bitter on my tongue. I’m trying to scream but no sound comes out, and then there are hands, too many hands, and—
I wake up gasping.
My shirt is soaked with sweat, and my heart is hammering so hard I can feel it in my teeth. The room is black except for the thin line of light under the door, and for a second I don’t know where I am.
Right. Luca’s house. Luca’s room. Luca’s couch.
My hands fly to my stomach before my brain catches up. The twins. They’re okay. They’re safe.
A knock, soft, at the door.
“Aria?”
It’s Nico.
I should say no, I should say go away, but my voice comes out small and broken instead. “Come in.”
The door opens and he’s there in gray sweats and a Moretti security t-shirt, his hair messy like he was sleeping too. He looks young like this, 22 and scared and trying so hard not to show it.
“Bad dream?” he asks.
I nod, because if I talk I’m going to cry.
He doesn’t ask permission. He just crosses the room and sits on the floor next to the couch, close enough that our knees almost touch.
“You want water?”
“I want to go home,” I whisper, and immediately regret it.
Nico’s face falls. “I know.”
“You don’t.”
“I do,” he says quietly. “We didn’t ask for this either. Any of it.”
We sit in silence for a while. The house is quiet except for the hum of the fridge downstairs and the distant sound of a guard walking past in the hall.
“You’re shaking,” Nico says after a minute.
“Am I?”
“Yeah.” He reaches out, hesitates, then pulls the blanket up higher around my shoulders. His fingers brush my collarbone and I flinch, but he doesn’t pull back. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to scare you.”
“You didn’t.”
It’s a lie, but it’s a kind one.
Nico smiles a little at that, sad and soft. “Can I... can I stay? Just until you fall asleep? I’ll stay on the floor. I won’t touch you, I promise.”
I should say no. Luca’s rules, the brothers, the whole mess. But I’m so tired and so alone and he looks like he needs this as much as I do.
“Okay,” I say.
He settles on the rug, leaning back against the couch so I can feel the warmth of him through the fabric. It’s stupid, but it helps. The shaking slows.
“Do you paint?” I ask, because I saw the art room earlier.
“Yeah,” he says, surprised. “How’d you—”
“I saw your room. The canvases.”
“I paint when I’m anxious,” he admits. “Or when I can’t sleep.”
“Are you anxious now?”
“Terrified,” he says honestly. “Of them hurting you. Of me saying the wrong thing.”
I turn my head to look at him. “You’re not saying the wrong thing.”
His eyes are blue in the dark, and for a second we just look at each other. It’s not romantic. It’s not even safe. It’s just two scared people in a room that doesn’t belong to either of us.
“Can I hold your hand?” he asks, so quietly I almost miss it.
My throat is tight. “Okay.”
His hand is warm and calloused, but gentle. He doesn’t lace our fingers, just rests his over mine, like he’s afraid I’ll bolt. I don’t.
“This is against, like, seventeen house rules,” he says, and I hear the smile in his voice.
“Then it’s a good thing Luca isn’t here.”
The words are barely out when the door opens.
Luca.
He’s in black pants and no shirt, and the hallway light cuts across his chest and the tattoos I didn’t see before. He stops when he sees us, his eyes going from me on the couch to Nico on the floor to our hands.
The air in the room goes cold.
“What the hell is this,” Luca says, and it’s not a question.
Nico jerks his hand back like he’s been burned. “She had a nightmare. I was just—”
“Get out.”
“Luca, she’s—”
“I said get out, Nico.”
Nico looks at me, apologetic and guilty, then scrambles to his feet. “I’m sorry,” he murmurs to me before he goes, and then the door shuts behind him.
Now it’s just me and Luca.
He doesn’t come closer. He leans against the doorframe, arms crossed, and I can see the vein in his jaw ticking.
“Did he hurt you?”
“No.”
“Did he touch you?”
“He held my hand,” I say, and I’m not sure why I’m not lying. “Because I asked him to.”
Luca’s eyes flash. “You don’t get to do that, Aria.”
“Do what? Be comforted? Be human?”
“Be touched by one of us without all of us knowing about it.”
The possessiveness in his voice makes my stomach twist.
“So what, I need a permission slip to hold someone’s hand?”
“You need to understand something,” he says, pushing off the doorframe and coming into the room. He stops at the foot of the couch, too close and not close enough. “You’re ours. All of ours. That means no secrets. No favorites. Not yet.”
“Not yet?” I repeat.
“Until we know,” he says, and his voice drops. “Until we know who the father is.”
The word father hits me like a slap.
I sit up, the blanket falling to my waist. “And what if I don’t want to wait? What if I want to choose?”
Luca’s expression shutters. “You don’t get to choose. Not with this. Not with them.”
“Them,” I echo. “You keep saying that like they’re already Morettis.”
“They are,” he says simply. “By blood.”
I want to throw something. I want to scream. Instead I wrap my arms around myself.
“Go to bed, Luca.”
“I’m not leaving you alone.”
“I don’t want you here.”
“Tough.”
He walks around the couch and sits in the armchair across from me, close enough to see me, far enough to not touch.
“You’re not sleeping,” he says.
“Neither are you.”
“Someone has to watch.”
We stare at each other.
“You’re an asshole,” I say finally.
“I know.”
“And you’re scared.”
His jaw ticks again. “Of course I am.”
For the first time, he looks tired. Really tired. The cold CEO mask is gone and it’s just a man who’s in over his head.
“Who did you think it was?” I ask.
“What?”
“When you found me. Who did you think the father was?”
Luca is quiet for a long time. “I thought it was me,” he says finally. “The timing, the night. I thought...” He trails off.
“You thought you did something to me?”
“I thought I might have,” he says, and the honesty in it steals my breath. “And I’ve been trying to live with that since I saw the test.”
Oh.
“Was it?” I ask, even though I don’t know why.
“No,” he says. “I wasn’t at Vesper that night. Dante was.”
Dante.
The name sits between us, heavy and wrong.
“Does he know?”
“He suspects,” Luca says. “But we won’t know until the test. And until then, we protect you. All of us. Even if it kills us.”
The sincerity in it is terrifying.
I lie back down, turning away from him. “Then watch,” I say. “But don’t talk.”
I hear him shift in the chair. I hear him breathe.
Hours pass.
Just before dawn, I’m finally drifting off when I feel it, a blanket being pulled up over me, gentle and careful.
“Night, Aria,” Luca says, so low I think I imagined it.
I don’t answer.
But I don’t pull the blanket off either.
Tomorrow, the war starts.
And tonight, for the first time since the alley, I don’t dream.
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