CHAPTER 42 - SAFER WITH HIM

The nightmares started on the fifth night, and Elena understood, waking gasping in the dark with her shoulder screaming from the sudden, violent motion of sitting upright, that whatever calm she'd managed during her waking hours hadn't extended nearly as far into sleep as she'd hoped.

She dreamed of the corridor.

Not the shot itself, strangely, but the moment just before it, the particular, suspended awareness of the barrel swinging toward Luca's back, the half-second in which her body had already decided to move before her mind had finished processing the danger.

In the dream, she was always half a step too slow.

In the dream, the bullet always found him instead of her, and she woke each time to the same visceral, gasping relief that it hadn't, tangled inseparably with the horror of watching it happen anyway, over and over, in whatever version of the night her sleeping mind insisted on replaying.

The door opened before she'd fully caught her breath, the guard stationed outside apparently alert enough to catch even her muffled distress through the walls, and Luca appeared behind him a moment later, still dressed despite the hour, his expression sharpening the instant he took in the sight of her.

"What happened?" Luca asked.

"Nothing. Just dream." Elena pressed a hand against her chest, willing her heart to slow, embarrassed in a way she hadn't expected to be, caught this raw and unguarded in front of him. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to wake anyone."

"You didn't wake anyone I mind having woken." Luca crossed the room, dismissing the guard with a small, economical gesture, and settled into the chair beside her bed with the same unhurried care he'd shown every visit since the surgery. "Tell me what you dreamed."

"It's not important," Elena said.

"I disagree," Luca said, his voice carrying none of its usual flatness, something quieter underneath it, more patient than she was used to. "You've been sleeping poorly for three nights, Elena. I've heard it from the guard each morning, though he's been considerably more diplomatic about mentioning it than I'm being right now."

Elena studied him for a moment, some old instinct toward deflection warring with a considerably more exhausted instinct toward simple honesty. "I dream about the corridor. About being too slow. About the bullet finding you instead."

Something in his expression went very still, and Elena watched him absorb the admission with the same careful, deliberate attention he gave everything, weighing it, turning it over before deciding how to respond.

"That didn't happen," Luca said finally.

"I know it didn't happen. That's not the point of a nightmare," Elena said, managing something that wasn't quite a laugh, exhaustion bleeding into the sound. "The point is that some part of me apparently still needs to relive the version where I fail."

Luca was quiet for a long moment, his eyes fixed on her face with an intensity that made her feel, despite everything, considerably more seen than she was used to being in this house. "I could have someone sit with you through the night. If it would help."

"You have considerably more important things to manage than my sleep," Elena said.

"I have exactly one thing I currently consider more important than anything else in this house," Luca said, his voice low, absolute, "and she's currently sitting in front of me, arguing that her own recovery isn't worth prioritizing."

Elena felt something tighten in her chest at that, the particular, careful weight of a sentence that came close enough to something softer than ownership that she found herself, despite every warning she'd given herself over the past five months, wanting to believe it meant exactly what it sounded like it meant.

"Stay, then," Elena said, quieter now. "If you're not doing anything else."

He didn't answer with words.

He simply settled more fully into the chair, unhurried, and Elena, watching him make himself comfortable for what was apparently going to be the rest of the night, felt something in her chest ease slightly, a strange, unfamiliar safety settling over her that she understood, even as she felt it, she had no business finding as comforting as she did.

She lay back against the pillow, and for a while, neither of them spoke, the quiet of the room settling around them in a way that felt considerably less strained than most of their silences.

"Does it bother you?" Elena asked eventually, her voice barely above a whisper. "That I'm afraid, even now, even with all your men, all the locks, all the precautions."

"Fear isn't a failure, Elena. I've told you that before," Luca said, his voice low, careful. "What would concern me is if you stopped being afraid entirely. A person who's stopped being afraid has usually stopped paying attention."

"That's a grim way to think about it," Elena said.

"It's an accurate one," Luca said, something almost like humor touching his voice, dry, understated. "I've built an entire life around the principle. It's served me reasonably well so far."

Elena studied his profile in the low light, the particular, controlled stillness he carried even now, sitting in a chair meant for visitors rather than for a man who ran an empire, and found herself, despite the exhaustion still weighing on her, unwilling to close her eyes yet, some old, stubborn need to keep the conversation going a while longer.

"Did you ever have nightmares?" Elena asked. "When you were young."

Something shifted behind his eyes, brief, and for a moment Elena thought he might simply deflect the question the way he deflected most things that veered too close to his own history.

"Once, that I remember clearly," Luca said instead. "After my mother died. I don't recall the specifics of the dream itself, only that I woke from it more times than I could count, for the better part of a year."

"What did your father do? When you woke like that?" Elena asked.

"Nothing," Luca said, his voice carrying no particular weight to the word, simply a fact stated plainly. "He believed a child who cried out in the night needed to learn, considerably more urgently than most lessons, that no one was coming. I don't believe he intended cruelty by it. I believe he genuinely thought he was teaching me something useful."

Elena felt something ache in her chest at that, the particular, quiet tragedy of a boy learning, at eleven years old, that fear was something to survive entirely alone. "That's an awful thing to teach a child."

"Perhaps," Luca said, considering the observation with the same careful, genuine uncertainty he brought to most conversations that touched on anything he hadn't fully examined before. "I've never had reason to question it until recently. It kept me alive, Elena. Whatever else it cost me, I can't discount that it worked, in its own way."

"It worked, and it also left you sitting in a chair at three in the morning because you don't know how to comfort someone without listing the reasons it's practical to do so," Elena said.

Something flickered across Luca's face at that, surprise, mostly, and something else underneath it Elena couldn't quite name. "That's an uncomfortably accurate observation," Luca said.

"I've had considerable time to make it," Elena said, her voice carrying a tired, gentle humor that surprised even her. "You're here. That matters more than the reasons you give for it."

Luca said nothing to that for a long moment, and Elena, watching him, understood that whatever he might have wanted to say in response, he genuinely didn't have the words for it yet, and she found, closing her eyes finally against the low lamplight, that she didn't need him to find them tonight.

The room settled into its late night quiet around them, the particular, watchful silence that had become familiar over months of exactly this kind of vigilance, and Elena, drifting toward sleep, found herself listening to the steady, unhurried rhythm of his breathing beside her, an anchor she hadn't asked for and hadn't expected to need this badly.

"Elena," Luca said, once her breathing had gone slow and even, believing her already asleep, his voice barely above a murmur. "I don't know what to call this. I want you to understand that isn't the same as not caring what it is."

She didn't answer.

She wasn't entirely certain, drifting somewhere on the edge of sleep, whether she'd actually heard the words or simply dreamed them, and by the time she woke fully the next morning, she couldn't have said with any confidence which one was true.

She fell back asleep eventually, his presence a steady, watchful weight at the edge of her awareness, and didn't dream again that night.