Marco's hands are on me before the front door fully closes, fingers digging into my arms as he spins me around, examining me like evidence at a crime scene he's already convinced happened.
"Where is it?" His breath reeks of airport whiskey and whatever paranoia Miami planted in his brain. His hands move roughly over my body, checking my neck, my wrists, pushing my hair back to inspect behind my ears. "Where are the marks?"
"I don't know what you're talking about." The lie slides out smooth as silk while his fingers bruise new territories on my skin.
"Three days I'm gone, and you look different." He grabs my chin, forcing me to meet his bloodshot eyes. "You think I'm stupid, Lucia? Think I don't know when my wife's been contaminated?"
His hands continue their investigation, and I let my mind drift to those three stolen nights that rewired my understanding of what bodies can do when they're trying to say everything words can't.
The first night after he carried me to his bed, we couldn't stop. Every surface in his room became a confession—against the window with city lights witnessing our sacrilege, his hands gripping my hips as he took me from behind while Manhattan sprawled below us, my palms leaving prints on the glass that housekeeping would never completely erase.
The second morning in his shower, water streaming over us as he pressed me against marble tiles, his mouth swallowing my cries while steam turned the air opaque. We were trying to wash away evidence that had already soaked too deep to ever clean.
That second afternoon, I'd found Joana's perfume in his bathroom cabinet—Chanel No. 5, the bottle still half-full. I'd held it up, expecting him to shatter or rage.
Instead, he'd gone still as death before crossing the room in two strides, backing me against the wall with a hunger that bordered on violence. He'd taken me right there on the floor, desperate and almost punishing, like he was trying to exorcise her ghost through my body.
"You're delusional from your Miami bender," I tell Marco now, his hands still mapping my body for proof of sins he can sense but not see. "I've been working."
Which is true, during daylight.Outside his bedroom, we've maintained professional distance with the precision of Swiss watches.
He hands me contracts without our fingers touching. I deliver his coffee without meeting his eyes. We exist in the same space like parallel lines, never intersecting where anyone can witness.
But I feel his gaze when I'm not looking—the weight of it against my spine when I'm filing, the heat of it on my neck when I'm taking notes. It's a frequency only my body can tune to, this constant awareness that makes every mundane moment feel charged with electricity.
"Get dressed," Marco finally releases me, apparently satisfied he can't find physical evidence of what his instincts scream is true. "We have a situation to handle."
The situation, as it turns out, is my father being spectacularly himself.
Salvatore's study feels arctic when we enter, the kind of cold that precedes executions. He sits behind his desk like a judge who's already decided the sentence, and my father stands before him, trying to shrink into his expensive suit.
"Fifty thousand wasn't enough of a lesson, Franco?" Salvatore's voice could freeze blood in veins. "You're now running unauthorized games under my family's protection?"
"Don Caruso, I can explain—"
"Marco, wait outside." The dismissal is absolute, and even Marco doesn't argue with that tone. The door closes, leaving just the three of us in this careful choreography we've been dancing for two weeks.
"Your father has been using our name to guarantee his illegal operations." Salvatore's eyes find mine, perfectly controlled, revealing nothing of the man who spent three nights showing me how many ways a body can shatter and rebuild. "He's becoming a liability that needs addressing."
"I'll handle it." The words come out steady despite the nausea crawling up my thoat. "Let me talk to him, make him understand—"
"This isn't your responsibility, Lucia." His tone remains professional, but I catch the slight softening around his eyes, the tell he doesn't know he has.
"Everything my father does becomes my responsibility. That's been established." I move closer to his desk, close enough to see his hands tighten almost imperceptibly on his pen. "I'll make him stop. I promise."
"Your promises aren't the issue." He stands, coming around the desk, and we're suddenly closer than we've been in daylight for three days. "Franco, leave us. Now."
Dad scurries out like a kicked dog, and the moment the door closes, the air shifts. The careful distance we maintain cracks just enough for truth to leak through.
"You look pale," he says, the Don facade slipping. "Have you been eating?"
"I skipped breakfast." The admission comes out defensive. "I knew Marco was coming back today."
The change in him is immediate. He steps closer, hand lifting toward my face before he catches himself, freezing mid-reach. "Has he hurt you already? If he's touched you again—"
"No, it's not that. I just couldn't eat knowing that after today, we go back to being strangers who happen to share the same walls."
"I can't keep watching him hurt you." The words tear from him, raw and unguarded.
"You watch everything else without difficulty," I counter, my voice dropping to match his intensity. "The shipments, the territories, every detail of your empire. Why is watching this any different?"
The challenge hangs between us for three heartbeats before he moves.
He catches my wrist, pulling me behind his desk where the tall windows can't witness. His hands slide into my hair as he kisses me with suppressed hunger, pressing me back against the bookshelf. Legal volumes dig into my spine but I don't care—this kiss is reckless, desperate, tasting like every word we can't say during daylight hours.
My fingers tangle in his hair, pulling him closer, needing to crawl inside his skin and live there. A knock shatters the moment like a brick through glass.
We separate with the efficiency of people who've practiced this separation in their minds a hundred times. By the time he opens the door, we're standing at professional distances, my breathing the only evidence of what almost happened.
Marco enters, his eyes moving between us with the calculating suspicion of someone who knows a secret exists but can't quite catch it.
"Are we finished discussing my father-in-law's incompetence?" He studies my face, looking for flush or swelling, any evidence of what his paranoia insists is happening. "Because we have more pressing matters. There's a family gathering tomorrow night. All the associates will be there. Full formal protocol."
He grabs my wrist, possessive and pointed. "My wife and I should prepare. Together."