Chapter 5: The Vitale Name

I didn't go back to sleep.

I told myself I was going to lay down, I closed my eyes, pulled Bryan's hoodie tighter around me like it could block out the sound of a woman's laugh drifting up through the floor of a house I didn't know in a life I hadn't chosen. But sleep wasn't interested in me tonight, and honestly, after everything that had happened between seven this morning and whatever time it was now, I wasn't sure I deserved it.

So I lay in the dark and I listened.

Not obviously. Not with my ear pressed against the floor or anything that would have felt as desperate as it actually was. Just... listened. The way you listen when your body is too exhausted to do anything else but your brain refuses to stop. Voices below low, occasional, the kind of conversation that had a history to it, a familiarity, the easy back and forth of two people who had been in the same rooms enough times that they didn't need to fill the silence.

Her laugh again. Twice more before it stopped.

I stared at the ceiling and told myself it didn't matter. Told myself I had bigger things to think about... twins, and a locked door, and a doctor's appointment at nine am, and Bryan's text sitting in my phone like something I needed to answer but couldn't find the words for yet. Told myself that whatever was happening downstairs was none of my business because Luca Wolfe was none of my business except in the specific, unavoidable, biological sense that he very much was.

It didn't work. The not-mattering. It kept failing every time she laughed.

I fell asleep somewhere around four, and woke up to grey light coming through the blackout curtains at the edges and the sound of the house being quiet in a different way, the quiet of morning instead of night, emptier somehow, like whatever had filled it had left.

My door was still locked.

I tried it anyway, then went and sat on the edge of the bed and looked at my phone. Bryan's text was still there, exactly where I'd left it, those last three words sitting at the bottom of the screen like a question I hadn't answered yet.

It was always real.

I read it three times. Put the phone face down on the mattress.

The lock clicked at eight forty-five.

Luca opened the door without knocking, he never knocked, and stood in the doorway in a dark shirt with his sleeves rolled up, looking exactly as composed as he always did, like he hadn't spent half the night downstairs with a woman whose laugh I had memorised against my will.

"Get dressed," he said. "We leave in ten."

I looked at him. At the complete, unbothered calm of him. At the way he stood in my doorway like nothing had happened last night, not Bryan, not the conversation I had listened to through the floor, not the woman, none of it.

"Who was here last night?" I asked.

Something moved across his face. There and gone so fast I almost missed it. "Get dressed, Natalie."

"I heard her." I kept my voice level. "I was awake for most of it. I heard her laugh and I heard your voice go..." I stopped. Soft. I had been about to say soft. I didn't. "I just want to know who was in this house while I was locked upstairs."

He looked at me for a long moment. Then he stepped inside the room, which he hadn't done since last night, and closed the door behind him with a quiet click, and I had the sudden, specific awareness of how small the room felt with him in it.

"Her name is Selene," he said. "Selene Vitale."

The last name landed like a stone in still water.

Vitale. I didn't know that name yet, not fully, not with the weight it deserved, but something in the way he said it, in the particular set of his jaw when he did, told me it was important. Told me it was the kind of name that changed the shape of a room.

"Vitale," I repeated. "As in..."

"Don Adriano Vitale's daughter." He said it simply, the way you say things that are already settled facts. "She is... was... an arrangement. Between her father and mine, years before I had any say in it. Business. Alliance. Nothing more."

I looked at him. At the careful neutrality of his face. "She didn't sound like nothing."

"She's familiar with this house," he said. "That's different from mattering."

I didn't know what to do with that distinction. Filed it somewhere in the back of my mind next to all the other Luca Wolfe things I didn't know what to do with yet.

"And her father," I said slowly. "Don Vitale. He's your..."

"My boss." A pause. "The man I work for. The man whose name opens doors and closes throats, depending on which he decides is necessary." He held my gaze. "The man who does not yet know that you exist."

The room felt smaller.

"And when he finds out?" My voice came out steadier than I felt. "About the twins?"

Luca was quiet for a moment, the considered kind of quiet, not the evasive kind. "The Vitale name carries a legacy," he said carefully. "Succession. Inheritance. Don Adriano has spent thirty years building something he intends to pass on. Selene was part of that plan. Our arrangement was part of that plan." His eyes dropped to my stomach for just a second. "Two heirs with my blood and his legacy, his line's connection changed the architecture of that plan considerably."

I stared at him. "You're saying my babies, our babies... are heirs to his..."

"To everything he built," Luca said quietly. "Yes."

The word sat in the room between us and I let it sit there because I didn't have anything to say to it yet. I was twenty-one years old and I had been awake since seven yesterday morning and I was carrying twins and apparently those twins had just inherited a place in a world I had never asked to know existed.

"Does Selene know?" I asked.

"Not yet."

"And when she does?"

He didn't answer. Which was, I was learning, its own kind of answer.

I stood up from the bed and crossed to my duffel and pulled out the first clothes I found because ten minutes was ten minutes and I needed something to do with my hands before the full weight of what he'd just told me landed on me completely. I was aware of him behind me, not close, not threatening, just present in the way he always was, taking up more space than the room technically gave him.

"You should have told me this last night," I said, without turning around.

"Last night you had enough."

I stopped. Turned to look at him. And there it was, that thing I had caught glimpses of before, in the dark, in unguarded moments. Not softness exactly. Something adjacent to it. Something that looked, from a certain angle, in certain light, almost like the thing that normal people called concern.

I looked away first.

"Ten minutes," I said. "I heard you."

He left without another word, pulling the door closed behind him, not locked this time, I noticed. Not locked.

I stood in the middle of the room and pressed both hands over my face and breathed.

Selene Vitale. Don Adriano's daughter. An arrangement that had a laugh I had memorised and a history with this house that I was now living in. A woman who didn't know yet that everything she thought was hers had just been complicated by a girl from Velmoor University and two pink lines on a test.

I should have been thinking about Bryan. I should have been sitting with his text, with it was always real, with six years of the safest and most uncomplicated love I had ever been offered. I should have been planning how to call my mom, how to talk to Maya, how to navigate the disaster I had made of every relationship that mattered to me.

Instead I was standing in Luca Wolfe's spare room thinking about the way his voice had changed when he said she's familiar with this house, that's different from mattering and the fact that I had felt something loosen in my chest when he said it, something I had no right to feel, something that had absolutely nothing to do with Bryan or twins or mafia arrangements and everything to do with the fact that I was apparently losing my mind.

I don't care, I told myself firmly. I do not care who Selene Vitale is or how long she's been in this house or whether Luca's voice goes soft when she's in the room. I care about my babies. I care about getting through today. I care about Bryan's text which I still haven't answered and should answer and...

But even as I thought it, even as I constructed the argument carefully and laid it out in order, some small, traitorous, exhausted part of me knew it wasn't entirely true.

And that the knowing was the most frightening thing that had happened since yesterday morning.

More frightening than the twins. More frightening than the locked door and the gun on the counter and the name Vitale landing in the room like a stone.

Because I could navigate danger. I was learning how.

I had no idea how to navigate this.

I grabbed my jacket. Pulled Bryan's hoodie over it, because I was cold and it was there and I was not ready to examine why I still needed it. Picked up my phone. Looked at the text one more time.

It was always real.

I typed: I know. I'm okay. I'll explain everything when I can.

Sent it before I could rewrite it six times.

Then I opened the door, unlocked, Luca had left it unlocked, then I walked out into the hallway of a house that wasn't mine, toward a life I hadn't planned, carrying two heirs to a dynasty I hadn't known existed twenty-four hours ago.

And somewhere between the bedroom door and the top of the stairs, without permission and without warning, I thought about the way Luca had looked at me when he said that's different from mattering.

And I couldn't decide if I wanted it to be true.

“Natalie.”

His voice came from the bottom of the stairs.

I froze.

“We need to leave,” Luca said.

A pause.

“Now.”