“Someone with the kind of connections that make loan sharks wet themselves.”
“Yes.”
“Emma. What the hell have you gotten yourself into?”
Emma smiled. “Something terrifying.”
“Is he good to you?”
The question made Emma’s chest ache.
“He’s everything I didn’t know I was allowed to want.”
Sophie exhaled. “Then I’m happy for you. And also scared. And also—Emma, if this person ever hurts you, I will burn down whatever city he lives in.”
“Noted.”
“I mean it.”
“I know.”
They talked for another twenty minutes. Sophie cried twice. Emma cried once. By the end, Sophie had promised to visit next month.
When Emma hung up, Luca was standing in the doorway.
“She’s okay?”
Emma nodded.
Luca crossed the room and pulled her against his chest.
They stood there for a long time, not speaking, just breathing.
“Thank you,” Emma whispered.
“You don’t need to thank me.”
“I do.”
Luca pulled back just enough to look at her. “Then thank me by staying.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“I mean permanently.”
Emma’s breath caught. “Luca—”
“Move into the east wing. Not as staff. As my partner. As the woman I’m in love with. As someone who belongs here because I can’t imagine this house without you.”
Emma had spent her entire adult life learning to survive alone. Learning to need nothing. Learning to expect disappointment so it couldn’t blindside her.
But Luca was looking at her like she was the only sure thing in his entire violent, complicated world.
“Okay,” she said.
Luca’s smile could have powered the entire city.
He kissed her.
And Emma, who had come to this house as a maid and a liar and a desperate sister, realized she’d become something infinitely more dangerous.
She’d become someone who was loved.
The weeks that followed felt like stepping into someone else’s life.
Emma moved into the east wing. Her belongings looked absurd in the massive space until Luca spent an entire weekend helping her arrange furniture and arguing about where to hang the cheap art she refused to throw away.
Teresa visited constantly, always with some excuse about needing to discuss event planning or family business, but really just to watch Emma and Luca navigate their new reality.
She approved.
Emma could see it in the way Teresa smiled when Luca touched Emma’s shoulder in passing, or the way she lingered in doorways when they thought they were alone.
One evening, Teresa found Emma in the library.
“I owe you an apology.”
Emma looked up from her book. “For what?”
“I pushed you into a corner the night of that dinner. I wanted to see if you’d run.”
“I didn’t.”
“No. You didn’t.” Teresa sat down across from her. “Do you know why I kept setting Luca up with women I knew he’d hate?”
Emma shook her head.
“Because I was waiting for him to choose someone himself. To fight for someone. To look at a woman the way his grandfather looked at me.”
Emma’s throat tightened.
“I knew the moment you called him darling,” Teresa continued. “Not because it was convincing. Because it wasn’t. You were terrified and improvising and so obviously in love with him that I wanted to laugh.”
“I wasn’t—”
“You were. You just didn’t know it yet.”
Teresa stood. Paused at the door.
