Chapter Two
Word travels fast in a city seamed by secrets.
Within two days of the alley, rumors threaded through the Bellini Club and the kitchen where Elara worked.
She kept working, poured wine, moved plates, and tried to keep the memory of Luca like a pressed leaf — pretty, distant.
Luca returned to his life with the same ritualized precision. Meetings. Appointments.
His men who knew when to bow and when to vanish.
He was a man who made alliances like architecture, laying one solid stone atop another. Yet he found himself looking for Elara in the margins of the routine.
He attended to small things like the way she chewed on the corner of her napkin when she was thinking, or the way she cleaned between shifts as if the dishware were a liturgy.
When he asked her to meet — at a café with no music and a curtain that kept the street's worst light out — she arrived wearing a scarf that didn't hide the tiredness in her eyes.
"You're not like the others," he said, stirring his coffee. "You don't ask."
She shrugged. "I ask for small things. A shift off. A tomato handled with care. A fair wage."
"Fair can be complicated," he said. "But I'm not here to complicate you."
"Then why are you here?" she asked.
Luca was quiet for a long time. He had a life of investments and risks and a ledger of promises he couldn't break. He needed people to believe in him, to follow him without flinching. It had kept him alive, and it had cost him pieces of himself he no longer recognized.
"I can't keep you from everything," he said at last. "But I can make sure the parts that matter are protected. Consider it... an offer."
Elara did not answer, because she felt the weight of his words but did not want to be bought. "I'm not for sale," she said.
"No," Luca echoed. "You're not. You're only... wanted."
The difference was small but seismic. Wanted implied intention, a hand that reached. For the first time in a long time, Luca wanted something that wasn't about leverage or lineage. For the first time, Elara felt valued beyond the tips she earned.