Bargaining with the devil's son

Lucia's POV "If you want to save your brother, meet me at the De Luca empire in no less than twenty minutes." Then silence. Whoever it was hung up before I could even process what I'd just heard. Fear gripped me, and for a moment I couldn't think straight. The air turned cold. Everywhere went silent — even the sound of my own breathing seemed to disappear. My eyes dropped to the kitchen table, where our mother's hospital bills sat in the same crooked stack I'd been adding up for hours, as if the numbers might be kinder if I added them differently. On my phone, Nico's last message was still there from noon: busy, don't wait up. I'd told myself that was good news. Busy meant the business. Busy meant maybe, finally, something was working. I don't remember grabbing my coat. I don't remember the drive, or how I found the address, or how my hands stayed steady enough on the wheel to get me there in one piece. All I remember is the gate — iron, twice my height, swinging open before I'd even come to a full stop, like they'd been expecting me down to the second. The gate closed behind me without a sound, which somehow felt worse than if it had clanged. The drive curved uphill through a garden that had clearly cost more than my entire street. Trees trimmed into perfect, identical shapes. Hedges clipped into sharp, unforgiving lines. In the middle of the circle, a fountain was still running at this hour, its water black under the lamplight. Nothing out here was allowed to grow the way it wanted. Even the ivy climbing one side of the house seemed to be growing with permission. And then the house. It stood against the night like a cliff, black stone and glass, three storeys of it, with windows far taller than any window needed to be. Every one of them was dark except a single window high up, where one light burned. I couldn't stop wondering who was standing behind it, looking down at me. A wide staircase climbed to a door twice my height, flanked by two stone lions whose faces had been worn smooth by years of rain, as if even they had stopped being impressed by whoever came to this door. It didn't look real. It looked like something built to remind you how small you were. A man in a dark suit led me inside without a word, down a hallway that swallowed the sound of my own footsteps, until we reached a set of double doors. He opened them, and stepped aside. My brother was on his knees in the middle of the room, and a man I didn't recognize stood behind him with a hand resting on his shoulder — not gripping, not threatening, just resting there, like he was patting a dog he hadn't decided whether to keep. "Lucia." Nico's voice cracked around my name. "I'm so... s-sorry. I'm so sorry." "Sorry for what?" I asked, waiting for clarity and dying of curiosity, wondering what the hell he had done to end up in this mess. "Nico, what is this? Who are these people? What have you done?" My heart was beating so fast I could feel myself nearly dying of anxiety. I tried to look him in the eyes, but he was looking away, avoiding my gaze. His eyes held so much guilt, and his hands were trembling, and he couldn't speak. Someone coughed, and I realized I'd been so fixated on my brother that I hadn't noticed two other people were in the room. The first stood a step behind the leather armchair, hands clasped, so still he might have been part of the furniture. He was older, with grey at his temples and a charcoal suit that fit like it had been cut around him. When his eyes found me, they didn't linger on my face. They went to my hands, my coat, my shoes, quickly and thoroughly, like a man taking inventory. He wasn't a guard. He was the man the guards reported to. Then I looked at the one he was standing beside, and I forgot the older man existed. He sat like the room belonged to him, like the house, the street, maybe the whole city belonged to him. I looked him up and down. His shoulders were broad, his chest solid under the shirt, not huge, not skinny, just the perfect size. He was seated, but I could tell he was tall. Tall tall. He wore a dark suit, no tie, the top two buttons of his shirt undone, his sleeves rolled to the forearm and the veins there standing out. Something about those veins. His hair was dark and wavy, tousled in a way that looked effortless. His eyebrows were perfect. His lashes were long, unfairly long for a man who looked like he'd never cried. And then I saw the scar. It cut through his right eyebrow and curved down past the corner of his eye, thin and pale against his skin. Whatever had made it had come within a breath of taking the eye itself. It should have ruined his face. Instead it made it unforgettable, the one flaw that made the rest look deliberate, and I hated how strikingly beautiful it made him. I looked into his eyes, dark brown and unmoving, and for a second I forgot why I was here. Are you done staring?" I heard him say, his left eyebrow raised, and only then did I realize I'd been shamelessly staring. "Lucia." Not a question. He already knew. "Who are you?" "Adrian De Luca." The name meant nothing to me. It clearly meant something to Nico, who flinched like he'd been struck. "He owes me," Adrian said. Nothing else. He didn't elaborate, didn't explain — like the debt was so obvious, so beneath discussion, that spelling it out would be an insult to everyone in the room. "How much?" "Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars." He said it once, flatly, and then said nothing further. He let the silence do the work of showing me exactly how little he cared whether I could afford it. I gasped. How on earth had Nico gotten himself that deep? Where did he expect me to get two hundred and fifty thousand dollars? I didn't have a job. I was barely surviving as it was. The floor tilted under me. It was more than our mother's medical bills. More than the business Nico swore he was trying to build for us. It was the kind of number that didn't belong to people like us — it belonged to a different world, one with men who sat like kings on borrowed thrones and said he owes me like it was as simple as returning a cup of sugar. "We don't have that," I said. "We'll never have that." The fear that had gripped me earlier came rushing back. My eyes were wet, and I was close to tears — one blink and they'd pour. "I'm aware." Adrian finally stood. I looked up at him. He wasn't tall in a way that filled a doorway, but the room seemed to shrink slightly anyway, like it was making room for him out of instinct. He stood tall — taller than every man in the room. "Which is why I didn't call you here to collect money." The man behind Nico shifted his weight. I saw, for the first time, the shape of a gun beneath his jacket. I was startled; a gasp escaped my mouth. I hadn't understood the gravity of this until now. These people didn't just look dangerous — apparently, they were danger. Everything about Adrian screamed it. I looked down at my brother, still shivering, then at the other man — tall, but short compared to Adrian. Then I finally rested my gaze back on Adrian. "Then why am I here?" I asked. "Two ways to settle this." Adrian walked toward me slowly, unhurried, the way a man walks when he already knows he's going to get what he wants. My breathing stopped, and a shiver ran down my spine. I was suddenly hot, sweaty — he was so close to me. I couldn't breathe. He stared at me, his gaze intense, unblinking, holding it far longer than a stranger should. He stepped back. He nodded once toward the man behind Nico. I looked at him and saw the gun again, and I understood immediately what that meant. He'd kill us both. "That's the first." "And the other?" I trembled. Once again he took two steps toward me, stopping close enough that I had to tilt my head back to keep looking at him. Up close, his eyes weren't cruel, exactly. They were worse than cruel. They were empty — like whatever used to live there had been evicted a long time ago and never replaced. "You," he said. "One year. My fiancée." Confused, I waited for him to explain. He didn't. Explaining wasn't something he seemed to think he owed anyone. "I don't understand." Me? How? "That's the whole offer?" "Debt disappears. He walks." A glance at Nico, brief, almost bored. "Far." I almost laughed. It was such an insane thing to say out loud, in this house, with my brother trembling on the floor and a stranger's gun catching the light. "You must be joking," I let out. His eyes deepened. He looked scary — he looked at me like I'd committed a great sin. Like he was saying, how dare you question me. "I'm not asking you to understand. If you can't comprehend what I said, then kiss your brother goodbye. Don't f*****g make me repeat myself." His eyes were threatening. "I don't joke." He said my name once, like he'd already filed it away somewhere. "Miss Moretti. Choose." Behind him, the man's hand moved from Nico's shoulder to the back of his head. He raised his gun, ready to pull the trigger. I screamed, but I was cut off by Nico's voice. "Wait—" Nico's voice broke. "Lucia, you don't have to—" "Shut up, Nico." I don't know where the steadiness in my own voice came from. Maybe fear does that sometimes — burns away everything except the one clear thought you need. I looked at Adrian De Luca, at the terrible patience in his face, like he already knew how this ended before I'd said a word. "One year," I said. "And then it's over. Completely over. He's free, and so am I." Something moved behind his eyes — so fast I almost missed it. Not warmth. Nothing as simple as that. More like interest. Like I'd said something he hadn't expected to hear. "Agreed." One word. Then nothing more. He extended his hand toward me, like this was a business transaction and not the moment my entire life had just been sold to a stranger with empty eyes and a casino full of other people's ruin. I stared at his hand. Behind him, the man's grip tightened on the back of Nico's neck. I took it.