All Chapters of THE ROMANO HEIR : Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

Viktor Sorin had learned long ago that the most dangerous thing a man could do was look as though he were paying attention. So he didn’t. Beneath the bakery awning, he held his phone and moved his thumb over a screen that showed nothing more than an email he had already read. He let his eyes work at the edges, where no one thought to look. The flower shop across the street was unremarkable: gold letters, chipped paint, a window faintly fogged where the warmth inside met the cold outside. He had passed it eleven times in three days, at different hours and from different angles, circling a possibility he had not yet decided was worth pursuing.Today he had been close enough to see her clearly. She was arranging ranunculus in the window, her hands moving with the unconscious competence of someone who had practised for years. Dark curls were pulled loosely back. Her face held little of the guardedness Viktor expected to find in the world. At her throat, catching the light when she tilted

Lorenzo Moretti had been standing in the same window for eleven minutes, and his father had not yet noticed. That, too, was the point.The Moretti estate occupied the kind of hill that made a statement without needing to say anything at all—old stone, black iron gates, grounds kept immaculate by men who were paid handsomely to notice things like a single dead leaf on an otherwise perfect lawn. Lorenzo had grown up inside these walls the way other men grew up inside their own skin: so completely that he’d stopped noticing the weight of it, most days, and only felt it in moments like this one, standing at the study window while his father read through a folder of reports with the slow, deliberate attention of a man who trusted nothing he had not personally verified.“You’re hovering,” Salvatore Moretti said, without looking up.“I’m waiting.”“You’ve been waiting since I sat down. A patient man doesn’t need to announce it by standing where I can feel him doing it.”His father closed the

Rain had been threatening all afternoon by the time Anastasia decided to close up ten minutes early, gathering the day’s unsold stems into a bucket by the door and pulling her coat tight against the first fat drops beginning to fall. Eleanor had left an hour before for a doctor’s appointment, leaving Anastasia alone to lock up, and she was fumbling with the stubborn old deadbolt—the one that stuck every time the weather turned damp—when the bell above the door chimed behind her.“We’re closing, I’m sorry, if you—”She turned, and the rest of the sentence simply left her. The man standing just inside the doorway did not belong on Eighth Street. That was her first, useless thought—not because of his clothes, exactly, though the expensive precision of his coat made her suddenly aware of the flour-dust and stem-sap staining her own apron, but because of the way he occupied space: still and contained, like a held breath that made the small shop feel smaller. He was tall, dark-haired, somew

The walk to Isabella’s building took eleven minutes on an ordinary night. Tonight it felt longer, every doorway and parked car suddenly worth a second glance, every gust of wind through the wet streets enough to make Anastasia’s pulse jump. Lorenzo walked half a step behind and to her left, she noticed—not beside her, not in front, but positioned in a way that put his body between her and the street, an arrangement so deliberate she suspected he’d done it a thousand times before without needing to think about it.“You keep watching the parked cars,” she said, mostly to fill the silence, mostly because the alternative was listening to her own heartbeat.“Habit.”“A habit most people don’t have.”“No,” he agreed, without elaborating, and something in the flatness of his voice told her not to push, not yet, not while her legs still felt unsteady from adrenaline and the cold rain soaking through her coat. They were two buildings from home when she felt it—that same prickling awareness she

Lorenzo left sometime near midnight, after extracting a promise from Isabella—low-voiced, at the door, in words Anastasia wasn’t meant to hear but caught fragments of anyway—that she would lock every window, that she would call a number he wrote on a torn scrap of paper if anything at all felt wrong before morning. Anastasia watched from the kitchen window as his dark shape dissolved into the wet street. The moment the door closed, she found herself absurdly missing his solid, watchful presence. Isabella went to bed not long after, pleading exhaustion, her face grey with something deeper than tiredness. Anastasia didn’t press her. There didn’t seem to be any strength left in either of them for pressing. She should have slept.Instead she lay awake for hours, staring at the same water stain on the ceiling she’d been staring at since she was young enough that it had once looked, to her, like the shape of a running horse, and listened to the apartment’s small sounds settle into silence a