Luca holds me while I shake apart, his chest solid against my back, his arms a cage I do not want to escape. I should push him away, collect myself, walk out of this room with my composure intact.
Instead, I turn into him and bury my face against his shoulder and let the sobs come—ugly, ragged sounds I have not made since the night I packed one bag and left this estate behind.
He holds me through it. His hand moves in slow circles on my back, patient and unhurried, asking nothing. The silence between us fills with my breathing, gradually steadying, and the warmth of him seeps through my clothes until the trembling stops.
When I finally pull back, my face is a disaster. I can feel that mascara is smeared, eyes are swollen, nose is running. I swipe at my cheeks with the back of my hand and try to find anything to say that does not sound pathetic.
Luca beats me to it.
His thumb brushes my cheek, wiping away a tear I missed. Then his gaze shifts to a point over my shoulder, and his mouth twitches with the ghost of a smile.
"Don't look now," he says, voice low and conspiratorial, "but I think that portrait is judging you."
I turn to follow his gaze.
A severe-looking man in Renaissance clothing stares down from an ornate gold frame, his expression caught somewhere between disappointment and constipation. The portrait hangs between two towering bookcases, surrounded by leather spines embossed with gold. The smell of old paper and binding glue fills my lungs.
The Serratore library. My favorite room in this entire prison of a house.
I walked straight into it without seeing a single detail.
"That's Aurelio Serratore," I say, my voice still thick from crying. "Seventeenth century. Rumored to have poisoned three of his rivals at a single dinner party."
"And now he's silently mocking your emotional breakdown." Luca tilts his head toward the portrait with mock solemnity. "The Serratores really do hold grudges across generations."
A sound escapes my throat—not quite a laugh, not quite a sob, a cracked and surprised noise that lives between both. I look back at Luca, and the gentle humor in his face softens into tenderness.
His hand is still on my cheek.
I look into his eyes. Really look. And I see what I have been too distracted to notice before.
Quiet passion. Want held carefully behind a door he has kept locked for years. The steady gaze of a man who has been standing in the margins of my attention since I arrived, asking for nothing, expecting nothing, and wanting everything he is too honorable to take.
I kiss him.
His mouth is warm. He tastes faintly of coffee, and the contact is soft, tentative—a question I did not plan to ask. For a terrible moment he does not respond, and I think I have made a mistake so catastrophic it will swallow me whole.
I pull back. "I'm sorry. I don't—the contract doesn't have terms for—I shouldn't have just—"
He kisses me.
No hesitation. His hand slides into my hair, cradling the back of my skull, and his mouth covers mine with a certainty that steals the apology from my tongue. He tastes like wanting held too long. Like patience worn thin. Like restraint finally snapping.
I gasp against his lips and he swallows the sound, walking me backward until my spine connects with the bookcase. Leather spines dig into my shoulders. A book tumbles to the floor with a thud neither of us acknowledges.
His hands are different from the Serratore brothers'. Rougher. More callused. The hands of a man who works for what he has, who digs in soil and carries weight and earns every gentle thing he touches. They find my waist, my hips, pulling me closer until there is no space left between us.
I arch into him, fingers digging into his shoulders, and the sounds I make are softer than the sounds I made with Nico—more desperate, stripped of performance. His mouth moves to my jaw, my throat, the place where my pulse beats visibly against my skin.
Then he stops.
His forehead drops to my shoulder. His breathing is ragged, his hands still gripping my hips, and I can feel the effort it takes him to hold himself back.
"Not like this," he says quietly.
The words land strangely. I am ready—he must feel how ready I am—and the rejection stings more than I expected.
"Luca—"
"Not like this." He lifts his head, and his hazel eyes are dark with want, but beneath the want there is something steadier. "Not against a bookcase in a room you stumbled into while crying over another man. Not because you're hurting and I'm here."
I do not know what to say. The refusal and the tenderness of it tangle together in my chest.
"You deserve intention, Arianna. You deserve someone choosing you with clear eyes and a steady hand, not scrambling to take what's offered in a moment of weakness."
"And if I want to be chosen in a moment of weakness?"
Luca's expression shifts, hurt moving behind his eyes. "Then you're not choosing at all. You're reacting. I've spent fifteen years watching people react in this house." His voice drops lower. "I want more than your reaction."
He is right. The kiss was impulse, born from grief and the devastating comfort of being held by someone who wanted nothing from me.
But wanting nothing has transformed into wanting everything, and the shift happened so quietly I did not notice until his mouth was on mine.
"I don't know what I'm doing," I admit. "I came here to save Ethan. And now I'm standing in a library kissing a man who is not my fiancé, who is not either of the brothers I agreed to sleep with, and I don't know which version of myself is the real one anymore."
Luca cups my face in both hands, tilting it up until I have no choice but to meet his gaze.
"All of them are real," he says simply. "The woman who loves Ethan. The woman who wants the Serratore brothers despite knowing better. The woman who kissed me just now." His thumbs stroke my cheekbones. "You don't have to choose which one is true. They can all exist at once."
"That sounds like madness."
"It sounds like being human." He presses a kiss to my forehead, gentle and brief. "Come to my room tonight."
The invitation hangs between us.
"I can't promise anything," I whisper. "I can't promise I won't still be confused, or hurting, or thinking about all the wrong things at all the wrong moments."
"I'm not asking for promises." Luca steps back, releasing me, and the absence of his warmth leaves me unsteady. "I'm asking for you to walk through my door with your eyes open. Whatever happens after that, we figure out together."