Off Limits

✦CHAPTER 5 — Who’s Watching

Silence lands hard.

*Nova POV*

I don’t cry. I sit back down because my legs forget how to be legs, and I press the heel of my hand into my sternum like I can pin my heart in place.

Luca doesn’t touch me. He sits on the edge of the coffee table instead, elbows on his knees, eyes on my hands. He looks like a sin carved by a careful god and a man who knows how to carry a consequence.

“Say it,” I whisper.

He tilts his head. “Which part.”

“The part you didn’t say to Mason. The part about your father. About obedience.”

His jaw works, slow grind. “He runs things that don’t make it into papers,” he says. “I run the parts that do.”

“And Elijah?”

“Runs himself,” he says, which is an answer and not one.

“Is this—” I gesture at the door, at the space where we almost kissed under a bridge, at the river that won’t stop moving— “—going to get me hurt?”

He should lie. For once, he doesn’t. “Yes.”

“But you still texted me.”

“Yes.”

“And I still came.”

He looks at me like a confession he’d burn a church for. “You still came.”

There’s a softness at the edges of his mouth that ruins me. I think of Sienna’s name in his phone, of Elijah cleaning up our shadows, of Mason calling me a weapon. I think of the bracelet on my wrist and the way Luca said mine without saying it at all.

Someone moves outside the window. A shadow blurs past the fire escape. My breath snags. Luca’s already up, silent, scanning. He crosses to the blinds and parts them with two fingers. The street below glows sodium-orange, empty and not. Across the way, a car idles too long. The silhouette in the driver’s seat lifts a phone. A small red light blinks to life.

Recording.

“Is that…” I start.

“Not cops,” he says. “Worse.” His mouth flattens. “Sienna’s people don’t wear badges.”

My skin prickles. The world tilts, and suddenly we’re not in a messy apartment with bad lighting; we’re on a board with pieces I don’t know how to play and rules I never agreed to.

Luca drops the blinds and turns, decision already formed in his eyes. “You can’t go back to your place tonight.”

“What?”

“They know where you live.”

“How?”

He looks sorry in a way that isn’t weak. “Because I did.”

The dryer buzzes into the silence like a joke with teeth. I stand there in his sweatshirt, dripping and shocked, and realize the choice I thought I had has been shrinking since the first look in the kitchen.

“I’m not running,” I say.

“I’m not asking you to.” He steps closer, not touching. “I’m asking you to let me keep you out of the worst of it.”

“And if the worst is you?” I ask, softer than I mean to.

He closes his eyes like the question is a prayer he can’t answer. When he opens them, they’re glassy and set. “Then you leave before it is.”

We stare at each other across a living room that has become a line. On the other side of the glass, the red light blinks again. Patient. Hungry.

There’s another knock.

Not a brother’s. Not a neighbor’s.

Three soft raps, evenly spaced. A pattern.

Luca’s shoulders go still. He doesn’t check the peephole. He doesn’t need to.

“Elijah,” he says, and the way he says his name tells me this is the chapter where the rules change.