Chapter 4 — Uninvited

Isabella

Sofia Marchetti smelled like expensive perfume and old history, and she settled into the booth like she owned it, which, Isabella suspected, was probably true in every way that mattered on this campus.

“I’m sorry, I’m being so rude,” Sofia said, not sounding sorry at all, extending a manicured hand across the table. “Sofia. Luca and I dated freshman year. You must be the famous girlfriend everyone’s been talking about.”

“Isabella.” She shook the hand because refusing would look worse on camera than accepting, and camera optics, apparently, were the only currency that mattered tonight. “I didn’t realize we had fans yet.”

“Oh, sweetheart, you have fans the second Luca De Santis holds your hand in public. Trust me.” Sofia’s eyes flicked toward the boom mic hovering above them, toward Trent, who had abandoned all pretense of professional distance and was now standing directly beside the camera operator, grinning like Christmas had come early. “I just think it’s so brave of the athletics department, doing this. Really leaning into the redemption story.”

“Sofia.” Luca’s voice had gone flat, controlled, the practiced calm of someone who’d had this exact conversation before and knew exactly how badly it could go. “What are you doing here?”

“I was meeting a friend for dinner. This is a public restaurant, Luca, I’m allowed to exist in it.” She smiled, sweet as poison. “Though I’ll admit, I might have heard through the grapevine that Northridge Confidential was filming here tonight. My roommate works for the media department. Small world.”

Isabella watched something behind Luca’s eyes go very still and very careful, and filed that away, too the fact that he clearly knew this woman well enough to recognize exactly when she was lying.

“We’re in the middle of something,” Luca said.

“Clearly.” Sofia’s gaze slid to Isabella, assessing, unhurried, the kind of look that had probably worked on generations of intimidated freshmen. “You know, it’s funny Luca never brought me here. Not once, in the year we dated. I always thought it was because he thought I was too” she made a small, elegant gesture, taking in her own coat, her own rings “ much for a diner booth. But here he is with you, week one, cameras rolling. Must be nice.”

“Sofia.” The warning in Luca’s voice had teeth now.

“I’m just making conversation.” She turned back to Isabella, and something in her expression shifted sharper now, more deliberate. “Do you know what actually happened with Dominic Hale? The real story, I mean. Not the clip.”

The booth went very quiet. Even Trent, Isabella noticed, had leaned in.

“I know what everyone knows,” Isabella said carefully, aware of the cameras, aware that this had stopped being about Sofia and become about something else entirely. “That it’s still being investigated.”

“Mm. Interesting that he’s never actually told you why he did it.” Sofia’s smile didn’t waver, but her eyes stayed locked on Luca, and there was something underneath the sweetness now old hurt, maybe, or old anger, hard to tell which. “You’d think, if you were dating someone even fake dating someone you’d want to know the truth before you signed a contract defending him to four million strangers.”

Isabella turned to look at Luca, and for the first time all night, his composure cracked just barely, just at the edges, a tightness around his jaw that hadn’t been there a minute ago.

“That’s not something we’re discussing tonight,” he said, and his voice had gone low and final in a way that closed the subject like a door slamming.

“Of course not.” Sofia rose from the booth, smoothing her coat, entirely unbothered, victory already banked in her expression. “Well. It was lovely to meet you, Isabella. I hope you know what you signed up for.” She paused at the edge of the table, looking back at Luca with something almost soft, almost sad, buried under all the performance. “For what it’s worth I hope this one actually asks you the truth before she falls for you. I never got the chance.”

She walked out into the night without waiting for a response, the diner door chiming behind her, and it took a long moment before anyone at the table moved.

Trent, predictably, looked thrilled. “That was incredible,” he murmured to the camera operator. “Please tell me we got all of that.”

“Cut,” Luca said sharply, not to Trent, to the room in general, and something in his tone made even the boom operator lower the mic without being asked twice.

Isabella watched him for a moment the tight set of his shoulders, the way his hand had curled into a loose fist on the table and something in her, some instinct she didn’t fully trust yet, softened despite herself.

“Are you okay?” she asked, quiet, off-script, no performance in it at all.

He looked up, surprised, like he hadn’t expected the question to be real. “Yeah. Sofia’s just” He exhaled, dragged a hand through his hair. “She’s not wrong, exactly. That’s the annoying part.”

“About the truth?”

“About the fact that you signed a contract defending a version of me you don’t actually know.” His eyes met hers, and there was something raw in them now, stripped of all the easy charm from earlier. “You should probably know that going in.”

Isabella studied him, weighing that the careful way he’d avoided Hale’s name all night, the flash of something haunted whenever the subject came close to the surface. She thought of Jordan Pierce again, of every reason she had to assume the worst of a hockey player who wouldn’t explain himself.

But something about the way Luca had gone quiet, protective, almost frightened at the mention of the real story it didn’t look like guilt. It looked like a man guarding something that wasn’t his to give away.

“Then tell me,” she said. “Off the record. No cameras.”

Trent, still hovering nearby, opened his mouth like he might object, but Luca cut him off with a look sharp enough to end the conversation before it started.

“I can’t,” Luca said, and the words cost him something visible, something that made Isabella’s chest tighten in a way she hadn’t signed up to feel. “Not because I don’t trust you. Because it’s not my secret to tell.”

Isabella sat with that for a long moment, the diner humming quietly around them, cameras still rolling somewhere at the edge of her vision, and felt the first small, dangerous crack of something that wasn’t quite trust yet but wasn’t quite suspicion anymore, either.

“Okay,” she said finally. “Then I guess I’ll believe you have a reason. For now.”

Something shifted in Luca’s face relief, maybe, or gratitude, or something closer to both and for one unguarded second, he reached across the table like he might take her hand the way she’d taken his in Suarez’s office.

He stopped himself halfway, fingers curling back before they touched hers, and the movement wasn’t lost on her.

Neither was the fact that, somewhere behind the counter, Trent Coleman was watching the whole thing with the sharp, hungry expression of a man who had just found his season’s best footage and had absolutely no intention of leaving it on the cutting room floor.