Chapter 4 - The Midnight Confession
Standing in the shattered doorway was Luca.
He had not stayed downtown after all. His charcoal overcoat was still draped over his broad shoulders, his tie slightly loosened, and behind him stood two armed guards with their hands resting on the grips of their holstered pistols.
Luca’s gaze swept the room in a single, terrifying second: Vanessa, standing over me with her fingers still tangled in my hair; me, trembling on the edge of the bed, a fresh red handprint blazing across my right cheek to match the bruise on my left.
For a heartbeat, no one breathed.
The silence that followed was far worse than any shout. It was the silence of a predator assessing a kill.
Luca stepped into the room. He didn't rush. He moved with a measured, deliberate calm that caused the color to completely drain from Vanessa’s face. She instantly released my hair, stumbling back a step, her hands fluttering up as if to smooth her cashmere sweater.
"Luca," she breathed, her voice suddenly trembling, trying desperately to recapture her sweet, aristocratic timbre. "Darling... you're back early. I was just... I came in to check on her. She spoke to me with such shocking disrespect, I lost my temper—"
Luca didn't look at her.
He walked straight past his fiancée, stopping right in front of me. He bent down on one knee, bringing his eyes level with mine. With an agonizingly gentle touch, his warm thumb traced the burning outline of the fresh slap on my right cheek.
"Did she touch you again?" he asked softly.
Tears, hot and uncontrollable, spilled over my lower lashes and rolled down my face, wetting his fingers. I didn't want to cry—crying made me feel weak, made me feel like the victim Vanessa wanted me to be—but the mention of my mother had completely shattered my defenses.
"She know... she knows about my mother, Mr. Moretti," I choked out, my voice breaking into a ragged sob. "She knows where she is."
Luca’s expression hardened until he looked like an ancient statue carved from dark granite.
Slowly, he rose to his full height. He finally turned his head to look at Vanessa.
"Get out," he said.
Vanessa swallowed hard, her haughty façade fracturing into panic. "Luca, listen to me. She’s lying. She’s trying to drive a wedge between us because she knows how powerful the alliance between the Bellinis and the Morettis will be! My father—"
"Your father," Luca interrupted, his voice dropping into a register that made the windowpanes vibrate, "is currently sitting in an interrogation room at the federal building on Dearborn Street. Daniel handed over four years of your family’s falsified shipping manifests twenty minutes ago."
Vanessa gasped, clutching her throat. "What? You... you wouldn't."
"You brought a foreign investigator into my home," Luca said, taking a slow step toward her. Vanessa instinctively backed away until her spine hit the mahogany mantelpiece. "You plotted to frame me for a five-year betrayal of my former wife. You attempted to extort the historical archives of the Moretti bloodline. And then," he tilted his head, his dark eyes flashing with lethal fury, "you laid your filthy hands on a woman who sits under my protection."
"She’s a servant!" Vanessa shrieked, hysteria finally cracking her polished veneer. "She’s a nobody! I am a Bellini! You were going to marry me!"
"I was going to merge our commercial interests," Luca corrected coldly. "I was never going to love you. But now? You don't even have an interest to merge. Daniel!"
The door opened wider, and Daniel stepped into the room, flanked by two stone-faced guards.
"Escort Miss Bellini to the gatehouse," Luca commanded without taking his eyes off her. "She does not take a single bag. She does not touch her jewelry. She leaves this property with only the clothes on her back. If she sets foot past the perimeter wall again, treat her as an armed hostile."
"You can't do this to me!" Vanessa screamed as Daniel seized her arms, dragging her toward the door. Her designer shoes scraped against the floorboards as she kicked and writhed. "Luca! My family will tear Chicago apart! You hear me? We will burn this city to the ground!"
Her screams echoed down the long corridor, growing fainter and fainter until the heavy front doors slammed shut downstairs, plunging the mansion into absolute quiet once more.
The guards vanished, leaving only Luca and me in the room.
My whole body was shaking uncontrollably. The adrenaline that had kept me upright seemed to evaporate all at once, and my knees buckled.
Before I could hit the floor, Luca’s arms caught me.
He lifted me effortlessly, cradling me against his chest as if I weighed nothing at all. He carried me back to the bed, sitting down beside me and keeping an arm wrapped firmly around my shoulders until the violent tremors began to subside. His scent—cedarwood, expensive tobacco, and clean rain—enveloped me, grounding me in the reality that I was safe.
"Breathe, Olivia," he murmured near my ear, his voice startlingly tender. "She will never touch you again. I swear it on my life."
"My mother..." I whispered into his shoulder, clutching his lapel. "Luca, she’s sick. If Vanessa’s people cut her power—"
"No one is touching your mother," Luca said with absolute certainty. "Two of my personal security details were dispatched to St. Jude’s forty minutes ago. Her room has been secured. Her account has been paid in full for the next five years. Nothing—and no one—reaches her unless they go through me."
I pulled back slightly, staring up into his face through blurred vision. "Why?" I asked, bewildered. "Why are you doing all of this for me? I'm just the maid who carried the roasted vegetables to your table. I have nothing to offer you."
Luca looked at me for a long, quiet moment. His fingers reached up, tucking a loose strand of dark hair behind my ear, his knuckles lingering against my cheek with reverence.
"Because in nine months," Luca answered quietly, "you are the only person who ever looked at me like a man, rather than a weapon or an empire to be conquered. And because last night, when you could have stayed silent to save your own skin, you chose to protect what was mine."
He leaned in closer, his voice dropping to a raw whisper.
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"Tonight, Olivia, you and I are going to visit my former wife. And together, we are going to finish this."
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