Mine

Luca’s POV

The door opened slowly.

Sofia stood in the doorway in a way that managed to be both an entrance and a near exit simultaneously — one hand on the door handle, body angled slightly as though she hadn’t fully committed to being here. She was in different clothes than dinner. Dark loose trousers and a simple top, hair down, and she was looking at him with an expression he was beginning to recognize as her default around him — composed, careful, and doing a great deal of work to remain both.

“Sofia, the situation at the boutique today,” he said.

Her expression shifted. Closed slightly. “Valentina told you.”

“I had someone with you.”

A pause. He watched her process this — the particular quality of her stillness when something surprised her and she was deciding how to respond to the surprise.

“You had someone following us,” she said.

“Watching. Not following.”

“That’s a very fine distinction.”

“It’s an accurate one. I do it whenever any of them go out. It’s not specific to you.”

Something crossed her face at that. Brief. Gone before he could fully read it.

“It’s not specific to you.” He heard the words after he said them with the mildly detached awareness of someone who had perhaps said something slightly different from what they meant and couldn’t immediately identify the gap.

“I see,” she said. “Well. Nothing happened. It was fine.”

“I know what happened.”

“Then why are you asking me?”

“I wasn’t asking. I was telling you that I know.” He held her gaze. “I’ve spoken to the Marchetti head.”

The stillness again. More pronounced this time.

“About me?” Her voice was even. Measured. But something underneath it was not.

“About his daughter’s behavior.”

“Luca.” She called his name, and there was something in her expression that was different from the careful composure of the past two days. Something more direct. More — present. “I don’t need you to fight my battles. She was rude. People are rude. I handled it.”

“You handled it by apologizing to her.”

“I bumped into her—”

“She bumped into you.” He said it flatly. Factual. “The distinction matters.”

Sofia looked at him.

He looked back.

This was what he had not anticipated — the way she held eye contact with him. Not challenging. Not aggressive. Simply steady, in the specific way of someone who had spent a long time practicing how to stand in his presence without flinching and had gotten very good at it.

He found, somewhat to his own surprise, that he respected it.

“I heard she’s going to be at dinner Thursday,” Sofia said quietly. It wasn’t a question.

He said nothing.

“Valentina told me about her. And you.” She paused. “And that she doesn’t let things go easily.”

“Valentina talks too much.”

“Valentina talks exactly the right amount.” Another pause. Smaller. “Is it serious? Between you and her?”

The question was delivered with the same careful evenness she applied to everything around him. Like she had constructed it to sound like simple curiosity. Like she had built it on a frame of something else and covered it very neatly.

He could see the frame anyway.

He didn’t know what to do with that.

“No,” he said.

She nodded. Once. The small nod of someone filing something away and refusing to show what drawer they were putting it in.

“Okay,” she said. “Thank you for the Marchetti call. You didn’t have to do that.”

“I know.”

“But—” she stopped. Something shifted in her expression. Opened, slightly, like a door pushed a centimeter from its frame. “Thank you. Genuinely.”

He looked at her standing in the middle of his study with her arms loosely at her sides and her hair down and her eyes doing that thing where they went warm despite the careful construction around them.

Rule three.

You do not want things you cannot control.

“You’re under my protection,” he said. “Nothing and no one touches what is mine.”

The words landed in the room.

He heard them.

He had not said the family.

He had said mine.

Sofia heard it too. He saw it move through her — a wave of something she contained immediately and completely, but not before it reached the surface just long enough for him to see it. Her breath shifted. Her eyes dropped for precisely one second before coming back up.

“Alright Luca,” she said.

Quiet. Steady. Giving nothing.

She turned and walked to the door.

And Luca Virelli sat at his desk and watched her go and felt rule three doing something it had never done in thirty two years of holding.

Bending.

The mansion felt unusually quiet that evening. The remnants of sunlight cast long shadows across the polished floors, but Luca barely noticed. His mind had refused to rest.

He needed to see her. To hear her voice. Just for a moment.

That was all he told himself as he made his way to Sofia’s room.

But when he arrived, the room was empty.

At first, irritation prickled at him, but then something caught his attention.

Her belongings were scattered across the bed—clothes, trinkets, small notebooks, and other personal items. His fingers grazed over them, not out of curiosity, but out of possession, a subtle claim that made the pulse in his veins quicken.

And then—

A half-opened bag was tucked beneath the pile of clothes. He reached down and pulled it out carefully.

Inside, he felt something that made his breath catch.

A photograph.

His photograph.

Taken when he was in his early twenties, sharp jawline, dark eyes that had already learned to command respect—and command fear. The edges of the photograph were torn, and the surface was smudged, as if someone had traced their fingers over it countless times.

Beneath it lay a diary. Her diary

His fingers trembled slightly as he opened it, flipping through pages filled with her handwriting. The ink varied in shades, from soft pencil to dark pen, as if her younger self had spent hours pouring thoughts onto the paper. And everywhere he looked, there was his name.

His name. Written over and over.

On several pages, her name appeared alongside his, joined as if in some secret vow, some whispered fantasy of a child longing for someone she could never have.

Luca’s jaw tightened, his grip on the diary firm. A slow, dangerous smirk curved on his lips.

She had been thinking about him. Obsessed with him. While he had spent years resenting her presence in the family, hating her as the orphan who had been plucked into his life… she had wanted him.

And the knowledge was intoxicating.

Every careful thought, every memory of disdain, every calculated step he had taken to keep her at a distance—it all burned away, replaced by a single, consuming desire.

He didn’t believe in love. Never had. Never will.

But he could claim her. He could make her his.

Every nerve in his body screamed that he would.

Then the door clicked open.

Sofia.

She stopped dead, her eyes widening as she took in the scene.

His dark gaze was fixed in the diary in his hand.

The photograph and the pages of her secret thoughts—the proof of years she had hidden, of feelings she had never confessed and probably never would.

Her breath caught.

And in that moment, the room seemed to shrink around them.

Sofia’s mind raced, fear and realization twisting inside her.

Luca looked up slowly, the smirk never leaving his face. His eyes, dark and unyielding, met hers.

And just like that, the balance of power in the room shifted irrevocably.