I move the grocery list to the side so as not to start a war this early. But the real things, the things that made him, those he keeps locked in a vault I haven't found the key to.
His hand stills on my back. The kitchen holds its breath.
"Rosa." The name leaves his mouth like a prayer he hasn't spoken in years. He leans against the counter beside me, his shoulder warm against mine. "She cleaned houses for wealthy families on the North Shore. Three jobs, seven days a week. Her hands were always raw and cracked from chemicals, but she'd still sit with me every night and make me tell her everything I'd noticed that day."
My brows pinch together. "Noticed?" I ask over the rim of my coffee mug.
"People's tells. She taught me to read them." A faint smile curves his lips, tinged with a sadness that makes my chest ache. "The woman who hid wine bottles behind the cleaning supplies. The husband whose cologne changed on Tuesdays and Thursdays when he visited someone who wasn't his wife. She said information was more valuable than gold. She never usedwhat she learned against anyone because she was too kind for that, but she wanted me to understand that everyone carries secrets, and secrets are power."
My throat tightens. I can see her in my mind, a woman with work-worn hands and her son's dark eyes, teaching him the skills that would eventually build an empire from shadows.
"She died when I was twenty-two." His voice doesn't break, but it flattens, the emotion compressed into something small and dense and heavy. "Worn down by work and worry. I'd just started making real money, enough to take care of her. I was three weeks too late."
The silence that follows fills with the coffee maker's quiet hiss and the distant tick of the grandfather clock in the hallway. I set my mug on the counter and turn to face him, pressing my palm against his chest, right over the panther's snarling jaw.
"She would have been proud of you."
"She would have smacked me upside the head for half the things I've done." His laugh is rough, caught between humor and grief. "But yeah. I think she'd like the parts that matter."
His hand covers mine, pressing it harder against his skin. Beneath my fingers, his heart beats strong and steady, and I feel the precise moment he decides to trust me with more.
"My father left before I could remember his face." The words come out stripped bare, no charm, no deflection. "I tracked him down when I was seventeen. Found him in Florida with a new wife and two kids who had no idea I existed. Watched him for three days and gathered enough information to destroy his entire life." He pauses. "Then I walked away."
"Why?"
"Because I didn't need a father. I needed to know I was better than mine."
The admission hits me somewhere deep and undefended. My own father, who kept me like a pet in a gilded cage. His father, who simply vanished. Two different kinds of abandonment that left the same wound.
"I've never told anyone that story," he adds quietly.
My eyes sting. I rise on my toes and press my lips to the corner of his mouth, a kiss that says I hear you and thank you and I understand all at once. When I pull back, the gold in his eyes burns brighter.
"Your turn," he murmurs.
So I tell him. Not the headlines he already knows, but the texture of it. The sound of my mother's voice growing quieter year by year. The way Abel's body looked flying over the balcony railing because three guards were given orders that my virginity belonged to my father's bottom line. How the sound of his head cracking against the edge of the neighbor's pool still wakes me up some nights. Two years of therapy. Two years of flinching every time someone stood behind me. The way Gino straightened his jacket afterward like he'd just taken out the trash and told me my maidenhead belonged to the family's wealth.
Luca listens without interrupting, his thumb tracing circles on the back of my hand. When I finish, his jaw is tight and his eyes have gone cold in a way that reminds me who he is and what he does to people who hurt the ones he cares about.
"Your father will answer for all of it." Not a threat. A promise. As certain as gravity.
"Not today," I tell him. "Today we have other things to deal with."
He lifts an eyebrow.
"The ultrasound is at eleven. Don't tell me you forgot. I did put it on your calendar back at the office."
The shift in his expression is instantaneous. The cold calculation vanishes, replaced by something raw and unguarded. Nerves. Luca Valentina, the man who stares down crime lords without blinking, looks genuinely nervous about a doctor's appointment.
"I didn't forget." He clears his throat. "I've had it on my calendar reminding me every day for three days."
"Daily reminders? When did you set that up?"
“Mm-hm. It wasn't me. Kon did because he said, and I quote, ‘you look like a man who would forget his own head if it wasn't attached to pretty hair.’”
My laugh rings through the kitchen, bright and real, and the sound surprises us both.
We spend the hours before the appointment in a state of restless domesticity that feels foreign and precious all at once. He reviews files on some casino deal at the kitchen table while I flip through a pregnancy book Katriana dropped off last week, both of us orbiting each other in the quiet way of people who are learning to share space. By the time we leave the house, the autumn sky has turned the color of brushed steel and my nerves have wound themselves into a knot beneath my ribs.