Chapter 2: Plural

The front door opened before I could breathe.

Heavy footsteps. Not Maya's. Not my roommate's. The kind of footsteps that didn't apologise for themselves, deliberate, unhurried, belonging to someone who had never once in his life walked into a room and wondered if he was welcome.

Bryan heard it too. His jaw went tight. "Natalie. Whose car is that?"

I couldn't answer. My throat had closed up completely, because I knew exactly whose car it was. I knew whose footsteps those were. I knew, before he even appeared at the bottom of the stairs, what I was about to be standing in the middle of, and there was absolutely nothing I could do to stop it.

Luca Wolfe didn't knock.

He never knocked.

He stepped into the hallway like he owned it, the building, the air, and me, wearing a black shirt and dark jeans with the kind of effortless danger that made every other man in the vicinity look like they were playing dress-up. His eyes moved once across the space: stairs, me frozen at the top, Bryan standing way too close. His expression didn't change. Not even slightly.

That was always the scary part. It never changed.

Bryan moved before I could stop him, stepping down and positioning himself between me and Luca like that was something you could do, like Luca Wolfe was the kind of problem a body could block. "You lost?"

Luca's gaze moved to him. Slow. Completely unbothered. The way you might look at something small that had wandered into your path. "No."

One word. That was it. Then his eyes cut back to me. "We're talking. Now."

"Bryan, don't..." I started, but Bryan was already moving.

"You don't get to walk into her dorm and..."

"Bryan." My voice cracked on his name and he stopped. Looked up at me. I shook my head, please, just don't... because I knew things Bryan didn't. Four months of knowing Luca Wolfe had taught me one thing above everything else: he didn't do scenes. He did damage. Quiet, permanent, irreversible damage. And Bryan, with his stupid loyal heart and his need to protect people, would walk straight into it without blinking.

I couldn't let that happen.

"Five minutes," Luca said to me. Not asking. He didn't ask.

Bryan laughed, short and humourless. "Like hell..."

"Please," I whispered. "Bryan. Five minutes. I'm okay."

His eyes searched mine, looking for the girl who'd stolen his hoodie in tenth grade and turned it into a six-year-long joke. Looking for an explanation I didn't have. After a second that stretched out longer than it had any right to, he nodded. Jaw tight. "Five minutes, Nat. Then I'm coming back up."

He brushed past Luca on his way downstairs, shoulders nearly touching, neither of them moving an inch and it was so loaded with everything unsaid that I had to look away. Then he was gone. The door at the bottom of the stairs swung shut.

And it was just me and Luca Wolfe and the pregnancy test still burning a hole in my makeup bag.

He climbed the stairs toward me. Two at a time. No rush, no effort, like gravity was a suggestion he occasionally entertained. He stopped one step below me so we were almost eye level, close enough that I could smell him, something dark and expensive that had no business existing in a university dormitory and looked at me the way he always did. Like I was the only thing in the room worth looking at and also like I was giving him a migraine.

"Show me," he said.

I blinked. "What?"

"The test."

My stomach lurched. "How did you..."

"Pharmacy two blocks from campus." Same flat, factual voice. "The cashier knows someone who knows Marco. She saw you. Cash only, hood up." A pause. "You weren't subtle."

Of course he knew. Luca Wolfe always knew.

"No, I'm not..." I tried to lie, then: "Stop it, don't lie to me." he said looking into my eyes.

I went into my room. He followed without being invited, he never waited for invitations, I dug through my makeup bag with hands that wouldn't cooperate, pulled out the test, and held it toward him without letting go. Screen facing out. Like the distance would help somehow.

He looked at it for three seconds. Didn't flinch. Didn't curse. Didn't do any of the things a normal person does when their entire future rearranges itself on a digital screen.

Then he said: "Plural."

I stared at him. "What?"

"Twins." Same calm voice. Same unbothered delivery, like he was reading something off a menu. "You're having twins, Natalie."

The floor disappeared.

Twins.

Not just pregnant. Twins pregnant. By Luca Wolfe. While in love with Bryan. While I still had a lit thesis due in three weeks and an internship application half-finished on my laptop and a best friend who thought I was a good person.

My knees gave. Luca caught me before I hit the carpet, one arm around my waist, firm and immediate and didn't let go.

"Breathe," he ordered.

I couldn't.

"Natalie." Sharper. He tilted my chin up until I had no choice but to look at him. "Breathe. Now."

I sucked in air. It hurt going down.

"Twins," I whispered. "I'm having twins."

"You are."

"How are you so calm?" My voice broke on the last word. "Why aren't you freaking out right now?"

His thumb brushed my jaw. Once. Then he stepped back and took his arm with him. "Because panicking doesn't change it."

Of course. Luca Wolfe didn't do emotions. He did solutions.

"What do we do?" The question came out before I could stop it, small and lost in a way I hated. But he was the only person in the world who knew right now, and that made him, insanely, the only person I had.

He looked at me for a long moment. "You move in with me. Tonight."

I jerked back. "What? No! my parents..."

"Will find out," he said, finishing the sentence like it was already done. "And when they do, you think they'll want you staying here? With him downstairs?"

Him. Bryan.

My stomach twisted so hard I had to press a hand against it.

"I'm not leaving Bryan..."

"You're not his." Still calm. Still completely terrifying. "You never were. You've been mine since the night you let me stay and you know it."

"You don't own me," I said.

"I own the situation," he said. "Two situations. In your stomach. With my DNA."

He kept saying it. Twins. Like repetition would make me accept it faster.

Downstairs, a door slammed. Bryan's voice carried up the stairs. "Five minutes are up, Nat."

Luca didn't blink. "Tell him."

"Tell him what?" I hissed. "That I'm pregnant with twins? That they're yours?"

"Yes."

"You're insane."

"Probably," he agreed, already moving toward my wardrobe. He pulled out my duffel bag like he knew exactly where I kept it and started putting my things inside. My clothes. My life, zipped up without my permission.

"Luca, stop..."

"You can hate me later." He didn't look at me. "Right now, pack."

Footsteps on the stairs. Bryan, not waiting anymore.

Luca zipped the duffel in one motion and turned to face the door just as Bryan appeared in it. Bryan saw the bag first. Then me. Then Luca. His face went blank, then furious.

"What the hell is this?"

"She's pregnant," Luca said, before I could find a single word. "Twins. They're mine. She's leaving with me."

Four sentences. That's all it took.

Bryan looked at me. Only me. "Natalie. Tell me he's lying."

I opened my mouth. Closed it.

I had nothing. Because it was true, every single word, and Bryan could see it on my face before I said anything at all.

His face broke. I had never seen it do that before, not in six years. It just broke. Quietly. Completely. The way things break when they've been holding too long.

"Six years," he said, voice raw. "Six years I've been..." He stopped. Couldn't finish. Ran a hand through his hair the way he always did when he was drowning.

Luca picked up the duffel. Walked past us both. At the door he paused, not looking back, never looking back. "Car's running. Five minutes, Natalie. Don't make me come back up."

Then he was gone.

Bryan didn't look at me. He stared at the spot where Luca had been standing. When he finally spoke his voice was barely there.

"Say something."

"I'm sorry," I choked out.

He turned to look at me then, the way he had a thousand times before, except this time it felt like the last time. "For what? For being pregnant? For it not being mine?"

For all of it.

"I didn't know," I whispered. "About the twins. I found out today. I swear."

"Did you know you loved him?"

The question hit me somewhere I didn't have a name for. Because I didn't know. That was the entire problem. I had never known, not for certain, not in the way you're supposed to know things that matter.

I loved Bryan. I had loved Bryan since I was fifteen years old.

But I had let Luca Wolfe into my life. Into my bed. Into my body. And now I was carrying his twins and destroying the one person who had never once given me a reason to.

"Bryan..."

"Don't." His hand came up. "Don't lie to me. Not you. Anyone else, but not you."

He walked to the door. Stopped with his back to me. And I waited for him to turn around, the way he always did, because in every version of this moment I had imagined he always turned around.

He didn't turn around.

"Maya's going to kill you," he said quietly, to the doorframe. "And honestly?" A pause that lasted a lifetime. "I don't think I'll stop her."

Then he was gone.

And I was alone in my room with a duffel bag packed by the father of my twins and a grey hoodie that smelled like the boy I had just destroyed and Luca's car still running somewhere below like a countdown I had no way to pause.

Five minutes.

I reached for the hoodie.

My phone lit up on the desk.

Not Luca.

Maya.

I know what you did.

I stared at the screen. My hands had gone completely still. Three seconds passed. Then the next message came through and it turned my blood to ice in a way that even Luca Wolfe, with all his quiet danger and his twins and his running car, had never once managed.

"I'm already here, and I brought mom."