Chapters 6

Nora’s POV,

I woke to the soft, familiar click of Luca’s shoes on the marble and the low vibration of his voice in the corridor. For a second I lay there, eyes closed, pretending not to hear. My body wanted to pretend like last night had been a bad dream like a terrible, overlong play that I’d finally walked out of. But with the few days ice spent here, I realised that this villa never let you walk out of things. It stored them and handed them back to you in stranger ways.

“Mrs Luna,” Luca said, and there was a quiet in his tone that made my heart knot. He didn’t say more. He never wasted words.

I swung my legs out of bed and sat up. My head still throbbed a little from the night, and exhaustion had a weight to it that coffee couldn’t lift. I didn’t answer immediately. The house was an organism that moved in commands; if I spoke without listening first I might say something permanent. So I waited for him to speak.

“Boss wants you downstairs in twenty. Training starts after,” he said finally.

My mouth went dry. I let out a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding. Training. The word landed in the room like a stone dropped into a well. The echo took time to fold back into my chest.

“What training?” I managed, voice thick with sleep and a tiredness that wasn’t just physical.

“You’ll see when you come down,” Luca answered. He held my gaze for a beat and then he turned and left, soft footsteps fading down the corridor.

Of course. Another day in a house where decisions weren’t mine. Where silence and the unasked questions were the loudest orders. Goddammit, I thought, and the curse felt ridiculous whispered on my own tongue. What felt even more ridiculous was that my mouth was already shaping the small, polite smiles the house expected of me.

I showered slowly, letting hot water wash over my neck and shoulders. It was one of the few tiny resistances left to me, a place where I could pretend the water was carrying away other things too: smoke, fear, the taste of the banquet hall. I chose sweats and an oversized tee because they were armor without being armor. They hid, they absorbed. I braided my hair down my back in a lazy plait and shoved my feet into palms.

Downstairs the house smelled of coffee and lemon cleaner. The dining room was full of the steady, methodical sounds of morning: the clink of silverware, muted conversations, the low hum of staff arranging platters. I sat at the table and ate mechanically eggs, toast, something warm that slid down my throat. I tried to taste, but there was a flatness to everything. My mind was halfway back at the table from last night, to the way the chandelier had thrown diamonds like accusations.

I felt him before I saw him. Leonardo had a presence that arrived like weather: sudden, undeniable. He watched me as if cataloguing everything, the way I chewed, the way my leg jutted out under the table. There was something unreadable in his expression, a gravity that made the air heavier. I kept my face neutral, the practiced mask of the household, and finished my meal slowly, hoping not to meet his eyes.

When I rose, I let myself rest for ten minutes in the library off the dining room. The silence there shouldn’t have felt like safety, but it did, briefly. My phone lay in my bag, but it felt trivial against the scale of what had happened. I was not a child; I was not naive. I knew my place but knowing didn’t make it easier.

I nearly jumped when Luca appeared at my shoulder again. “Boss says come with him,” he said, quiet as a mouse. He didn’t explain. He didn’t have to. In this house silence had weight. Silence was a command.

“To where?” I asked anyway, because asking is something you do to give the air the illusion of motion.

He didn’t answer. There was no need. He began to move, and I followed. I knew better than to press. You don’t press when the person in front of you carries the authority of a room. You walk until told otherwise.

We moved deeper into the villa, downstairs, through corridors that smelled of oil and leather, into the veins of the house where servants hardly ever tread and men who wore faces like iron kept watch. The staircases narrowed, the light dimmed. The temperature dropped an easy degree. My skin prickled.

We stopped at a huge iron door. It was wrong for the house, too industrial a blunt chunk of metal that made a sound like a threat when Leonardo pressed the red button at its side. The door slid open with a hiss, revealing a room that swallowed the light. It was an underground war room kinda place. It looked like a place leo used for a thousand things that had no name in polite society since he’s the Don.

Inside were racks of weapons, cases of knives, duffel bags heavy with gear, targets hung and marked, and training dummies lined like silent men. There were heavy punching bags with knuckle marks already worn into them, racks of pistols, and a table strewn with practice daggers, the kind that glinted even in the low light like little lies.

My throat closed. I clutched the end of my top so hardly.

“Why did you bring me here?” I stammered. My voice sounded thin in the cavernous room.

“To train.” He replied bluntly.

“Train for what? Please, Leo, I don’t—” My words broke into a plea. The thought of this place being normal for someone made my skin crawl. I felt like I had walked into a movie set of a life I had never auditioned for.

“That’s not your place to decide.” He said it again with that cold patience everyone feared. “First lesson, Luna: obedience. You do not question what I decide.”

I swallowed, because there was no response that wouldn’t make the room colder or put a target on my back. I felt my insides roll into a knot. Silence settled over me, thick and oppressive.

“Now,” he continued, softer only because he was speaking to me and not because he was trying to comfort me, “we start with dagger training. That should be the easiest for a lady. I call it the gentleman’s knife”

A gentleman’s knife.

What a stupid thing to call it. I wanted to spit the words back in his face, to tell him how archaic and performative his expectations were. Instead he tossed a dagger across the floor to me a glinting thing with weight and intent.

“Pick it up,” he said.

I hesitated. The metal looked like a promise and a threat at once. My fingers closed around the handle; metal kissed my palm. It was cold… It vibrated like it had a pulse of its own.

Lesson two, he said was focus.

My every movement felt loud. The way my fingers adjusted on the handle. The way my shoulders braced. I could feel his eyes on me, on the way I moved, on the way fear made my hands tremble. Luca and Tiago were there, watching, and a couple of older men who had seen too much to be surprised. Diego stood a short distance back, expression unreadable.

“Stance,” Leonardo commanded. He showed me how: feet, posture, how to let your body be a pivot and your arm a whip. He moved the dagger in a demonstration that was more about control than violence. I copied. My body learned in half-rhythms, instincts my brain didn’t own. He corrected my grip, the placement of my thumb, the angle of my wrist. When I struck the dummy, the blade found the soft spot. It felt surreal. The first time it connected I felt a tiny, dangerous bloom of power, like I’d touched something I could use.

Weed by weed, he pulled me from myself. He taught me to breathe with impact, to let the dagger be an extension of thought. He taught me to move my hips, to ground through my legs, to let the mind map the opponent before the body reacted. Each correction was a small letting go of who I thought I was. Each strike taught me that this place required precision, concentration, and a cruelty that could be masked as necessity.

We trained until my arms shook and my palms were raw from the grip. I missed a parry and felt a sting across the side of my hand. A thin line of blood broke the skin of my palm, bright on the pale flesh. I tasted iron at the back of my throat. It surprised me how something so small could make the world flip.

“You need to focus,” Leonardo said, voice flat. “Faster than your opponent. Anticipate. Move before they do. Control the space between you and them.”

I was trying like my life depended on it because, in a way, it did. But the words felt pointless, like admitting weakness. So I kept punching air, kept striking the dummy, ignoring the dull burn in my lungs. The training became a rhythm I could bury inside and not feel the terror for a second.

When at last the session ended and I can’t say when exactly the hours slipped, Leonardo moved closer. He looked at my palm, at the blood, at the furious lines of effort on my face.

“You learn or you break,” he said, and there was an odd tenderness underneath the hardness. A soft, dangerous thread. He bent, scooped me up in a motion that was at once jarring and oddly intimate, and carried me bridal style out of the kinikan. The world tilted; my breath hitched. I didn’t struggle. I was exhausted in a way that lay beyond sleep.

Upstairs, Martha fussed at me like a mother, pressing bandages to the wound, her fingers sticky with antiseptic. “You must rest,” she told me, and there was a fury in her tone, not at me, but at the world that made a girl like me need to learn the things I had learned today.

I lay back on the bed, the pain throbbing in my palm like a tiny drum that would never stop. Leonardo stood in the doorway, watching, something like regret flickering and then gone. He didn’t speak. He never had to. The message of his eyes was enough: the first day had been survival; the next would be harder. That’s how it worked. We bled to learn, and we learned to use bleeding as a reason to get better.

I closed my eyes and tried to count breaths. Only God knew what would happen next. Maybe I’d be stronger. Maybe I’d be hardened. Maybe I’d be broken. Maybe I’d end up with a new kind of cruelty in my bones. I didn’t know.

All I knew was that my palm hurt and Leonardo’s hands had been warm when he’d lifted me, and I had not felt safe, not in the way children think of safety… since the night the head had been set on a platter.