Chapter 9

The morning light seeped through the tall windows, washing the quiet room in gold. The house in Prague was quiet except for the soft creak of old wood and the distant flutter of pigeons outside.

Luca sat in a chair across the room, a book open but forgotten on his lap. His eyes, steady and unreadable, were fixed on the figure tangled in the linen sheets of the low bed. Emilia stirred slowly, her brow knitting as wakefulness took her.

She blinked toward the ceiling first, as though unsure of where she was. Then, with a sudden shift of tension in her shoulders, she turned her head and saw him.

Luca didn’t smile, not exactly. He waited.

“Good morning,” Emilia whispered, her voice rough from sleep. She pulled the blanket a little higher up her chest.

“You slept deeply,” Luca said quietly, almost too casually. His accent curled around the syllables.

She nodded, eyes flicking away from him, then back. “I guess I was tired.”

She first discovered that he was indeed shirtless this morning, but he was a black linen pant, not the shorts from last night, she also realized she was in a big tee shirt and Mickey Mouse shorts.

“What did you dream about?” he asked, as though asking the time.

Emilia hesitated. It was brief—barely a pause—but Luca caught it. Her expression settled into careful neutrality. “I didn’t dream,” she said. “Or… if I did, I don’t remember.”

He closed the book gently, setting it on the small side table beside him. Then he leaned back, studying her with something that almost resembled amusement.

“That’s strange,” he said. “Because I distinctly remember hearing my name last night.”

Her eyes widened slightly. She said nothing.

“In fact,” he continued, his tone feather-light, “you moaned it. Twice, maybe three times.”

Emilia’s cheeks flushed, barely perceptible in the morning light. Her throat worked as she swallowed.

“I must have been talking in my sleep.”

“Moaning, not talking,” Luca said. “There's a difference.”

She looked away, pulling the blanket tighter still, as if it could shield her from memory. From possibility.

Luca stood then, crossing the space between them slowly. When he reached her side, he bent slightly, meeting her eyes.

“You where dreaming about Emilia, and it wasn’t anything decent.” He said.

IT WAS FREAKING DREAM!!! All the wetness and hardness was her imagination. She should have realized that she was dreaming from the exotic nightwear.

Emilia’s breath caught in her throat.

He was close now — close enough that she could smell the faint citrus and smoke of his cologne, the warmth of his skin against the cool morning air. Luca’s eyes were calm, but too direct, too knowing. That quiet intensity that always made her feel like he saw more than she was ready to share.

“It was just a dream” she lied, though the words came out softer than she meant.

Luca tilted his head slightly, studying her like a puzzle with one piece missing. His voice was a murmur now, but no less clear.

“Funny thing about dreams,” he said. “Sometimes they come from places we try to ignore when we’re awake.”

She met his gaze, and for a second, everything in her face softened — fear, desire, confusion swimming together behind her eyes.

“Don’t do that,” she said quietly.

“Do what?”

“Make it sound like it meant something.”

His lips curved, faint and enigmatic. “I didn’t say it did.”

“Good.” But her voice wavered.

Luca straightened, stepping away just enough to give her breath, but not enough to break the invisible thread between them. He crossed to the window, pulling back the curtain just slightly to glance at the street below.

“You always talk in your sleep?” he asked, back turned to her now.

No,” she said after a moment. “Only here.”

His hand froze on the curtain. He didn’t turn around.

Then, calmly: “Maybe I should have invited you into my bed in Naples. Prague seems to have shown me a new side of you.”

Emilia swung her legs over the edge of the bed, the blanket falling from her shoulders. She pulled on the robe slung over the footboard and tied it with a sharp knot.

“Or maybe it confuses me.”

Luca finally looked back. His gaze wasn’t playful now — it had sharpened into something quieter. Something real.

“You weren’t confused last night,” he said.

She flinched, just a flicker. “It wasn’t real.”

“I know it wasn’t kitten, you wouldn’t be standing or awake if it were.”

Silence stretched.

“I’m going to make coffee,” Emilia muttered, brushing past him as she moved toward the kitchen.

“I’m going to make coffee,” Emilia muttered, brushing past him as she moved toward the kitchen.

He didn’t stop her. He didn’t follow.

But just as she reached the doorway, she heard him say — low, certain, like a promise or a warning:

“You can pretend it was a dream, kitten. But you can’t pretend you want it to be real.”

Luca 

He hadn’t meant for her to end up in his bed.

Not in Naples, and certainly not here, in Prague, in the house where he’d once vowed no one would ever get that close again.

But there she was.

Emilia.

He stood at the edge of the terrace now, the sky above the bay still dark, just beginning to soften into slate gray. Inside, the sheets on his bed were tangled, the room still holding the heat of her body. And him. Whatever that had been.

He exhaled through his nose, eyes sharp and unblinking as the wind swept up from the water below.

She had the face of a ghost.

The same storm-green eyes. The same high cheekbones. The same mouth that once whispered lies into his neck in the dark.

Isadora.

The woman who burned him — stole from him, betrayed him, and vanished into the shadows of Nice with a USB drive worth every secret he used rule.

And now, four years later, her twin was here.

Sleeping in his bed.

Moving through his house like she didn’t know exactly who he was. Or maybe she did. Maybe the whole act was part of it.

He didn’t trust it.

Didn’t trust her.

And yet…

Emilia didn’t walk like Isadora. She didn’t speak like her. She didn’t flirt like her — too hesitant, too honest, too unaware of her own effect.

Isadora had been sleek and calculated. A chameleon. A seductress who always knew where the exits were.

Emilia was… something else entirely.

There was a kind of purity in her confusion, a soft strength behind her stares. When she looked at him, it wasn’t manipulation — it was like she was trying to understand him. That unnerved him more than any weapon ever had.

He lit a cigarette with a flick of his wrist, the ember flaring in the wind.

Dimitri Volkov.

That name had sent something sharp down his spine when he first heard it from the file. And when it came through her voice, barely a whisper, picked up by the bug he’d left behind the painting in her Prague bedroom, it had almost made his blood run cold.

She knew Volkov.

Which meant she knew danger. Real danger. And that changed everything.

He didn’t know yet what she was up to — not exactly. 

But that’s what the surveillance was for.

Still, he hated using it on her. Not because he thought it was wrong — he'd done worse to better people — but because it meant admitting he cared what she was hiding. And he didn’t want to care. He refused to care.

His rule was simple: never again.

Not after Isadora.

But Emilia…

Emilia had a way of looking at him like he was still capable of something good. Like she hadn’t yet decided if she should run — or stay.

And he hated that it mattered.

He crushed the cigarette in the ashtray and looked back toward the open balcony doors.

***

Emilia had just stepped out of the shower when the knock came.

Three precise raps. She knew better than to expect Luca himself. She wrapped the towel tighter around her and crossed the stone-tiled floor.

When she opened the door, Marco stood waiting, ever-stoic in a dark blazer and earpiece.

“Signor Luca asked me to escort you,” he said, not unkindly. “They’re ready for you in the other room”

“Ready for me?” Emilia raised a brow, heart already tensing.

“Hair and makeup. He said, and I quote, ‘No excuses this time.’”

She huffed softly under her breath. That sounded like Luca.

Ten minutes later, Emilia found herself seated in front of a full-length mirror framed in gold, in a room she hadn’t known existed in the house — a kind of private dressing suite on the top floor. The scent of jasmine and hairspray lingered in the air. A quiet, elegant woman — Italian, early forties, with expert hands — was already brushing through her hair.

“He said soft waves, not too polished,” the stylist said. “Your cheekbones do the work.”

Emilia blinked. “He said that?”

The woman smiled at her through the mirror. “He said everything.”

Luca’s Room

Luca adjusted the cufflink on his right wrist, the black onyx catching the low light of the room.

He wasn’t a vain man, not exactly — but there was a ritual to dressing that calmed the nerves. A rhythm. One that sharpened focus.

The jacket was Tom Ford. Tailored last fall in Milan. He wore it like armor, the cut of it clean against his frame. There was something final about the act of fastening the top button — a man declaring he was ready for anything, or anyone.

He glanced toward the mirror, then down at the invitation on the desk — cream vellum, gold-embossed seal of the D’Alessandro Foundation.

He hadn’t planned to bring her, not originally.

But she was useful.

Beautiful.

And unpredictable — which meant everyone would be watching her instead of him. A perfect distraction.

And then there was the dress.

He smirked slightly to himself.

Emilia wrapped in a silk robe as the makeup artist added the last touch — a soft shimmer near her tear ducts, something that caught the light.

“Your dress is in the armoire,” the woman said, cleaning her brushes with quiet precision. “He insisted it be hung behind the divider.”

Emilia padded across the room. She had seen it briefly earlier — rich, elegant fabric in a color she hadn’t recognized. Luca had asked her, on the way to the hangar days ago, what she was wearing.

She’d told him it was for him to know when he saw her in it. Whole time he knew what she was wearing, but as she pulled the armoire open, her breath caught.

It was emerald green.

Dark, opulent, iridescent in a way that made the color of her eyes suddenly shift in the mirror — not hazel, not gold, but something fierce and alive. Like wet moss. Like wildfire under glass.

He switched it.

And he had done it knowing she’d notice only when it was too late to argue.

Damn him.

Still, as she stepped into the gown and drew it up over her hips, she couldn’t deny the truth.

It suited her better.

The cut hugged her waist and flared subtly at the hip, off-the-shoulder with a delicate fold of silk at the neckline. It made her look taller. Sharper. Like a woman who could shatter glass if she felt like it.

She turned once in the mirror, watching the fabric catch light like water.

And smiled.

Not for him.

Not yet.

But soon.

Emilia stepped through the archway, the last of the setting sun slanting across the stone as she approached.

Luca turned.

And for a moment, he said nothing.

The silence wasn’t empty—it was charged.

He’d seen beautiful women. Been with them. Hired them. Lost to them. But this was something different. This was deliberate, sharpened by the fact he had chosen the color, the cut, the moment.

And she had become the embodiment of it.

Emerald green. The color of ambition. Of memory. Of danger.

It brought out everything in her—her eyes, her cheekbones, even that undercurrent of something wild he couldn’t quite name. She didn’t just wear the dress. She became it.

“You knew I’d hate you for this,” she said, voice cool, hands smoothed over the silk at her hips.

Luca’s gaze lingered before he finally met her eyes.

“You don't hate me,” he said.

Emilia tilted her head. “Then what do I feel?”

His smile was slow, unreadable. “Conflicted.”

He stepped closer—just enough for her to catch the scent of leather and spice on him, the quiet command in the way he carried himself.

“You changed the dress, color too” she said, quieter now.

Her eyes narrowed. “You like being right, don’t you?”

“I don’t care about being right.” He leaned in, voice low. “I care about results.”

“Is that what I am? A result?”

He let the silence hang for a moment too long.

Then: “You’re a risk.”

He looked at her one last time, slow and deliberate, then reached for the thin clasp at the back of her shoulder and adjusted it with maddening precision.

“You’ll distract every man in the room tonight,” he murmured.

“And you?”

He straightened, one hand smoothing down the front of his jacket.

“I’m already distracted.”