The whiskey has done its work, softening the edges of everything—the estate walls, the deadline, the dread coiled beneath my ribs.
I look at Luca in the moonlight—the broken nose, the serious mouth, the callused hands that tend gardens because growing things is the only gentle act this world allows him—and I remember why I always liked him. In a house full of men who demanded and controlled and consumed, he was my first example of what safe could look like.
"Are you going to accept his deal?" Luca asks, his voice low against the night sounds of the garden.
The question hangs between us, heavy with everything it contains. I pull my knees tighter to my chest and stare at the roses I planted years ago, now wild and overgrown, thorns reaching toward the moonlight.
"I don't see another choice," I admit finally. "Not one that ends with Ethan alive."
The words taste like surrender, and I hate them. I hate that this is what my life has become—a woman calculating the cost of her own body against another person's survival.
Luca is quiet for a long moment. The bottle passes between us again, and the whiskey burns a path down my throat that feels almost like absolution.
"Ethan will be grateful to you for saving his life," he says finally, and there is no judgment in his voice, only understanding. "No matter the means, the man who loves you will understand that you did what you had to do. And if he doesn't understand, then he never deserved you in the first place."
The words land somewhere soft in my chest, a balm I did not know I needed. The thought loosens a knot I did not realize had been tightening since Nico made his offer.
"You make it sound simple," I say.
"Nothing about this is simple." Luca takes a drink and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. "But surviving rarely is, and you've always been good at surviving, Arianna."
A ghost of dark humor crosses his features, and he tilts his head toward me with careful consideration.
"Just be careful not to get swallowed by Nico entirely," he warns. "It is possible. He has a way of filling rooms, of making himself the center of gravity. Before you realize it, you are orbiting him instead of standing on your own ground."
"I am aware of the Serratore gravitational pull," I say dryly. "I spent eighteen months caught in his brother's."
Luca nods, and something shifts in his expression—practical, calculating.
"But there is an advantage you might not have considered," he says slowly. "Nico wears Dante's face. If it helps you survive the thirty days, you can close your eyes and imagine you are with someone else."
The suggestion is practical and brutal and so distinctly Luca that I almost laugh. The sound catches in my throat, transformed into something that might be a sob or might be relief.
"You are telling me to pretend Nico is Dante while I am in his bed," I say, and the absurdity should be horrifying, but instead it feels like permission.
"I am telling you to do whatever it takes to come out the other side intact," Luca corrects gently. "That is all any of us are doing, every single day inside these walls."
The conversation shifts, pulled by the gravity of the name we have both been circling. Dante. The passion that consumed me for eighteen months, the kind that felt less like love and more like a fever I could not break.
"That kind of passion does not just vanish," Luca says quietly, and there is no accusation in his voice, no jealousy. "It goes underground, maybe. Learns to hide. But it does not disappear. You can bury it as deep as you want, build an entire new life on top of it, and one day it will still find its way back to the surface."
I think of the dream. The wanting that surged through me, finally breaking through the walls I built to contain it.
"I wanted safe because I could not survive another fire," I admit, and the confession feels like peeling back skin to show the wound beneath. "I wanted ordinary mornings and predictable evenings and a love that did not feel like standing at the edge of a cliff, wondering if this would be the moment I finally fell."
Luca nods slowly, and when he speaks, his voice carries the weight of recognition—the particular understanding of someone who has lived inside the same kind of wanting.
"I understand," he says simply. "I want safe too. Have wanted it my whole life, trapped in a family that owns my debt and my labor and every choice I might have made for myself."
The shared geography of our longing settles between us. Two people who have spent years inside gilded cages, dreaming of ordinary lives that were never meant for people like us.
"Do you think we will ever get it?" I ask. "The safe life. The ordinary mornings."
Luca is quiet for a long moment, staring at the bottle in his hands.
"I do not know," he admits. "But hoping for it is the only thing that keeps me putting one foot in front of the other. And that has to count for something."
I stand, my decision crystallizing in the quiet between us. The garden stretches around me in silver and shadow, and somewhere beyond these walls, Ethan is waiting for me to save him. Somewhere inside this house, Nico is waiting for my answer.
"Thank you, Luca," I say, and the words feel inadequate for everything he has given me tonight—understanding, permission, the reminder that survival is not the same as surrender.
"For what?"
"For not making me feel ashamed of doing what I have to do."
He looks up at me, and the moonlight catches the hazel of his eyes, warm and serious and full of a tenderness that makes my chest ache.
"There is no shame in survival, Ari. There is only the next breath, and the one after that, and the stubborn refusal to let this goddamn world swallow you whole."
I walk back toward the house, my bare feet cold against the grass, my heart a strange mixture of dread and resolve. In the morning, I will find Nico.
And I will accept his terms.