I look back up at him.
"I'd rather die," I say.
Luca blinks. Genuinely startled, and Luca never gets startled. "You—"
"I mean it." My voice is steady. "I'd rather die than live in a world where I chose to leave her. That's not dramatics. That's just true."
He stares at me. Reading my face the way only a man who has known you for decades can read it, going past the surface straight to the architecture underneath.
"You really feel this strongly," he says slowly.
"I wish I didn't." Something almost like a laugh moves through me. "Believe me, there are days I wish I could look at her and feel nothing. My life would be considerably simpler." I shake my head. "But I do, Luca. God help me, I do."
He leans back. Crosses his arms. "If you could go back," he says. "Knowing everything from the start. Knowing who she was. Would you still—"
"If I'd known from the beginning she was your daughter?" I don't hesitate. "I would have done everything in my power to stay away from her. Everything. She deserved better than to be pulled into whatever this is." I hold his eyes. "But if I did everything right and still ended up here, still ended up feeling this way — I'd make the same decision. Every time." A pause. "I can't imagine my life without her in it. I've tried. The picture doesn't form."
Luca looks at me for a long time.
"I'm sorry," I say. "For everything. I don't want this to be the thing that ends our decades of history. I know I might not deserve to ask that, but I'm asking. Because I love your daughter, and I want to love her without it costing her the people who matter to her."
The silence that follows is different from the ones before it. Thicker. Something moving underneath it.
Luca runs both hands through his hair, and for a moment, he looks tired in a way I recognize because I feel it too — theparticular exhaustion of a man who has been fighting the wrong battle for too long and is only just realizing it.
"She loves you," he says finally. Quiet. Almost reluctant. "I saw her face today. That's not—" He stops. "My daughter doesn't do anything halfway. When she loves someone, she loves them with everything she has, she always has, since she was this small." He holds a hand low to the ground. "If she says you deserve it." He exhales. "Then you deserve it."
I stare at him.
"What does that mean?" I say carefully.
He looks almost pained. Luca, who negotiates with the composure of a man made of stone, looks almost pained by what he's about to say.
He runs his hand through his hair again.
"It means I don't know what I'm doing." The admission comes out rough. "It means I'm a father who spent three months being proud and stubborn and wrong, and my daughter is in a hospital corridor because I wasn't there." His jaw tightens. "It means this is me deciding to stay in my daughter's life no matter what her love life looks like." He meets my eyes. "And this is me trying to protect the man she loves." A beat. "And my friend."
Something happens in my chest that I have no name for.
He puts his hand out.
I look at it for one second — that hand, extended across everything that's happened, across seven years and blood and betrayal and a friendship that should by all accounts be dead.
I take it.
We shake, and Luca's grip is exactly what it always was, firm and certain and familiar, and something that has been broken for a very long time makes a sound like it might be considering otherwise.
He almost smiles. Almost.
"Let's end this," he says. "All of it. The Volkovs, Leo, every last piece of this." His voice drops into the register I remember from forty years of sitting across from him when the stakes were absolute. "My daughter and my grandchild deserve the safest world we can build for them."
I look at my oldest friend.
"I agree," I say.
34
AURORA