“Luca—”
“Emma.” He looked at her. Really looked at her. “You agreed to humiliate yourself at a dinner table because I promised you a favor you didn’t think I’d actually grant. You’ve spent three months working doubles in my house and never once asked me for anything. You just listened to my grandmother romanticize something that doesn’t exist and didn’t correct her because it would have hurt her feelings.”
Emma couldn’t breathe.
“So I’m going to make a phone call,” Luca continued, voice dangerously soft. “And by morning, your sister will be safe. And you will never, ever think you have to earn that.”
He made the call.
Emma watched as Luca Moretti, the man who terrified half the city, spoke with cold precision to someone named Marco about a girl in Chicago who was now under Moretti protection.
The conversation lasted four minutes.
When he hung up, Emma was crying.
“She’s safe?”
“She’s safe.”
Emma’s knees buckled. She caught herself on the arm of a chair, but Luca was already there, one hand steadying her elbow.
“Breathe.”
She tried. Failed. Tried again.
“Sophie doesn’t know about this,” Emma managed. “She doesn’t know I work for you. She thinks I clean houses.”
“Then we’ll keep it that way.”
“Why are you doing this?”
Luca’s hand was still on her arm. Warm. Steady. Impossible to ignore.
“Because three months ago, you walked into my office and called me a coward.”
Emma blinked through tears. “I did not.”
“You said any man who hires a stranger to lie for him is afraid of something real.”
She had said that. Late at night, when exhaustion had stripped her filter away and Luca had asked why she’d accepted his offer.
“You were right,” Luca said quietly.
The distance between them felt suddenly unbearable.
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to say.”
“Then don’t say anything.”
They stood there in a room full of Moretti history, surrounded by photographs of people who had loved and lied and survived.
Emma looked up.
Luca was already looking at her.
“Karaoke,” he said.
“What?”
“If we’re going to convince my grandmother this is real, we need to get our story straight. So tell me—when I allegedly sang at this karaoke bar, what song did I choose?”
Emma laughed through her tears. “Something Italian. Emotional. Probably about loss.”
“I’m not that predictable.”
“You absolutely are.”
Luca’s mouth curved. “What else?”
“You were terrible. Off-key. But you committed to it.”
“Committed to it.”
“Fully. There were hand gestures.”
“I’m going to regret this, aren’t I?”
Emma wiped her eyes. “Completely.”
For one suspended moment, Luca looked like he wanted to say something that would change everything.
Instead, he stepped back.
“Get some sleep, Emma. We’ll talk in the morning.”
He left before she could respond.
Emma stood alone in the sitting room, surrounded by photographs of a family that had learned to survive by holding onto the people who mattered.
She touched the frame Teresa had touched earlier.
The terrified bride.
The groom who had chosen her anyway.
Emma had come to this house because she needed money. Had agreed to lie because she was desperate. Had stood beside Luca Moretti and invented a relationship that didn’t exist.
But somewhere between the karaoke bar that never happened and the moment Luca had touched his grandfather’s ring, something had shifted.
