Lucerne had a way of making strangers feel temporary.
It was a city of transit, a beautiful, gilded waiting room for the wealthy and the weary alike. People passed through like seasons—tourists chasing photos of the Musegg Wall, businessmen in sharp Zurich suits chasing deals, and lovers chasing moments they would later swear had changed their lives.
No one asked questions here. No one looked twice at a girl with a cheap coat, fraying at the cuffs, and eyes that looked like they hadn't seen a full night's sleep in a decade. As long as I paid in cash and kept my head down, I was a ghost.
I liked being a ghost. Ghosts didn't have bruises that ached in the cold. Ghosts didn't have fathers whose voices sounded like breaking glass.
But even as I tried to fade into the grey stone of the city, I couldn't stop thinking about him.
Luca.
The name was a sharp, elegant note that stayed hummed in the back of my mind. I told myself it was just the shock of the collision—the way he had anchored me against the gravity of the ice.
I told myself it was the sheer contrast of his existence against mine; he was a creature of silk and steel, and I was a creature of shadows and survival. I replayed the way his eyes had lingered on me. They hadn't held the hungry, terrifying look of the men back home.
They held calculation. It was as if he were a mathematician and I was a variable he hadn't expected to find in his equation.
I had found a room in a small boardinghouse tucked away in a narrow alley near the edge of the old town. It was the kind of place that smelled of beeswax and ancient dust, with creaking floorboards that sighed under my weight and lace curtains that had yellowed to the color of old bone. My room was barely larger than a closet—just a narrow bed, a rickety chair, and a washbasin—but it had a window.
From that window, I could see the Reuss River. For the first time in twenty years, no one was screaming my name through the walls. No one was pounding on the door demanding I fix a meal or hide a bottle.
Freedom was a terrifyingly quiet thing.
By the second afternoon, the silence began to itch. I needed to move. I needed to work. Work was the only thing that made me feel like I wasn't just waiting to be caught.
I found a job at a small café near the lakefront, a place called Le Café des Montagnes. It was busy enough that I could disappear into the steam and the clatter of porcelain. The owner, a stout woman named Greta with flour on her forearms, didn't ask for papers. She looked at my hands—red and raw from the cold—and then at my face. She saw the desperation I tried so hard to mask. She simply handed me a heavy canvas apron and pointed toward the industrial sink in the back.
"Scrub," she said. "And don't break the saucers."
The hot water was a luxury that made my skin tingle and burn. I welcomed the pain. It was a grounded, physical sensation that drowned out the frantic "what ifs" spinning in my head. I spent hours hunched over the sink, the rhythm of the work lulling me into a dull trance. Wash, rinse, stack. Wash, rinse, stack.
I was carrying a heavy tray of clean cups back to the service counter, my muscles protesting the weight, when the bell above the door chimed.
I felt him before I saw him.
It was a sudden shift in the room's pressure, like the air had been sucked out to make room for something heavier. My fingers tightened instinctively around the tray. I didn't look up, but my heart began a frantic, uneven gallop against my ribs.
The café, which had been a low hum of German and French chatter, seemed to dip in volume. Luca walked in with a presence that didn't demand attention so much as it simply occupied it. He was wearing the same black coat, but it was unbuttoned now, revealing a dark, impeccably tailored suit beneath. He looked entirely too expensive for a place that served three-franc coffee.
I kept my head down, pretending to organize the spoons, but I could feel his gaze. It was like a physical heat on the side of my neck.
He moved to the counter. He didn't look at the menu.
"Un espresso," he said. His voice was a low, resonant chord that made the barista, a young girl named Elena, blush a deep crimson.
I risked a glance.
For a split second, our eyes met. The recognition was instantaneous. A spark of something—not quite a smile, but a narrowing of his pupils—flickered in those winter-sea eyes. He didn't look surprised to see me scrubbing floors. He looked... satisfied. Like he had found a misplaced book and was checking to see if the pages were still intact.
Then, the mask returned. He became a stranger again, cold and distant.
He took his coffee and didn't move to the window tables where the tourists sat. Instead, he chose a small, high table directly across from the service station. My station.
"You know him?"I jumped at the voice. Sofia, a waitress who had been at the café for a decade, was leaning against the espresso machine, watching me with narrow, knowing eyes. She was a woman who saw everything and forgot nothing.
"No," I said, a second too late and a note too high. "I just... I saw him on the street yesterday. We bumped into each other."
Sofia hummed, a sound of deep skepticism. She watched Luca as he lifted the tiny cup to his lips. He moved with a terrifying economy of motion. Everything he did was precise.
"He looks like trouble," Sofia whispered, leaning closer. "The expensive kind. The kind that leaves a mess for other people to clean up."
"How so?" I asked, my voice barely audible over the hiss of the milk steamer.
"Look at the way people move around him, Anna," she said, using the name I'd given her. "They don't want to bump into him. They don't even want to be in his line of sight. It's the way people react when they're afraid of being remembered."
I looked. She was right. A group of teenagers at the next table had lowered their voices. A businessman had shifted his chair away. Luca sat in a circle of invisible space, an island of quiet power in the middle of the bustle.
"What's his name?" I asked.
Sofia shrugged. "He didn't give one to Elena. But the man who came in here earlier this morning—one of the local 'businessmen' who thinks he runs this street—he saw that man through the window. He turned white as the snow and left out the back door."
My stomach did a slow, sickening roll. "Did he say who he was?"
Sofia leaned in so close I could smell the peppermint on her breath. "He didn't say a name. He said a surname. I didn't catch all of it, but it sounded like... Moretti."
The name meant nothing to me, yet it felt heavy. Like a stone dropped into a deep well.
"In Europe," Sofia continued, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial thread, "some surnames mean money. Some mean history. But names like that? They mean you don't ask questions. They mean that if you see them coming, you walk the other way."
I looked back at him. Luca—Moretti?—was staring straight at me. He didn't look away when I caught him. He didn't look embarrassed. He just watched, his expression unreadable, as if he were waiting for me to realize something he already knew.
The rest of my shift was a blur of shaking hands and broken focus. I dropped a saucer. I burned my finger on the steam wand. Every time I turned around, he was there, a dark sentinel in the corner of my vision. He stayed for one espresso, then another. He didn't look at a phone. He didn't read a paper. He just existed in that space, watching me.
When he finally left, he didn't say a word. He just left a folded bill on the table—far more than the coffee cost—and walked out into the gathering twilight.
I stayed late. I volunteered to mop the floors just to delay the walk home. I didn't want to be outside in the dark where the shadows lived. But eventually, Greta turned off the main lights and handed me my small envelope of cash.
"Get some rest, little bird," she said, her voice unusually soft. "You look like you're waiting for the sky to fall."
"Maybe it already did," I murmured.
The walk back to the boardinghouse was brutal. The wind had picked up, whipping off the lake and slicing through my coat. The streetlamps were flickering, casting long, distorted shadows against the medieval walls. I walked quickly, my boots clicking rhythmically on the cobblestones.
Moretti. Moretti. Moretti.
The name echoed in time with my steps.
I reached the stone bridge, the one that led toward the quieter residential district. The river below was a black ribbon of rushing water.
And there he was.
He was leaning against the stone railing, his back to the wind, staring at the water. He didn't have a hat, and the snow was beginning to catch in his dark hair. He looked like a statue, frozen in time.
My first instinct was to turn and run. My second was to walk past him without a word. But my feet had other ideas. They slowed. They stopped.
"You follow people often?" I asked. I tried to sound brave. I sounded like a child playing dress-up in a storm.
He turned slowly. A ghost of a smile touched his lips, but it didn't reach his eyes.
"Only when I'm curious."
I crossed my arms over my chest, partly for warmth, partly for protection. "About me? There's nothing to be curious about. I'm a waitress who can't hold a tray straight."
"I'm curious about why a girl with a French accent and a fake name is hiding in a Swiss café," he said.
The air left my lungs. "You don't know anything about me."
"I know that when the door opens, you look for an exit before you look for a customer," he said, stepping away from the railing. He moved toward me, and I felt the overwhelming urge to flinch. I forced myself to stand my ground. "I know you have the eyes of someone who has spent a long time looking over her shoulder. And I know you don't belong to anyone."
"That's a strange thing to say," I whispered.
"It's a dangerous thing to be," he corrected. He was close now. I could smell the sandalwood again, mixed with the cold. "In this world, if you don't belong to someone, people try to own you."
"I'm not for sale."
"I know that too." He looked down at my hands, tucked into my sleeves. "What's your real name, Anna?"
The way he said Anna made it feel like a thin, fragile shield he was about to shatter. I wanted to tell him. I wanted to scream that I didn't know who I was, that I was just a girl from a gutter in Marseille who had run until her legs gave out.
"I told you," I said, my voice trembling. "It's Anna."
He studied me for a long beat.
"Liar," he murmured. It wasn't an insult. It was an observation, almost tender.
"Then tell me yours," I challenged. "The one Sofia said. Moretti. What does that mean?"
The air between us seemed to freeze. The subtle softness in his face vanished, replaced by a mask so cold it rivaled the glacier water below us.
"My name...," he said, his voice dropping to a whisper that carried more weight than a shout, "...is not safe for people like you."
"And what kind of person is that?" I asked.
"The kind who still believes she can run forever," he said.
"The kind who thinks that if she stays quiet enough, the world will forget she exists."He reached out. I expected him to grab me, to pull me into the shadows. Instead, he simply brushed a stray flake of snow from my collar. His touch was electric, a jolt of heat that made my breath hitch.
"Don't look for me, Anna," he said.
"And if you see me, don't walk toward me. Because my world doesn't allow for coincidences, and it certainly doesn't allow for mercy."
"Then why are you here?" I shouted at his back as he began to walk away. "If it's so dangerous, why are you in Lucerne?"
He stopped. He didn't turn around.
"Because my father sent me to settle a debt," he said. "And because Switzerland is neutral ground. For now."
Neutral ground...
I watched him disappear into the darkness, his long black coat merging with the night. I stood on that bridge for a long time, the cold seeping into my bones until I couldn't feel my toes.
I thought about the word 'neutral.' It implied a place where no one took sides. A place where the war hadn't reached yet.
But as I looked at the dark mountains rising like jagged teeth against the sky, I realized that I wasn't in a sanctuary. I was in a cage of a different kind. I had traded the loud violence of my past for a quiet, sophisticated danger I didn't understand.
I reached into my pocket and felt the card he had given me the day before. The lion and the serpent.
Sofia was right. I should walk the other way. I should pack my bag tonight and take the first train to Zurich, then maybe to Italy or Germany. I should keep running until the name Moretti was just a fading echo.
But as I walked back to my creaking room, I knew I wouldn't.
Because for the first time in my life, someone hadn't looked at me as a victim or a burden. He had looked at me as a secret. And God help me, I wanted to know what happened when the secret was finally told.
I climbed the stairs, the wood groaning under my feet. I locked my door—not that the flimsy latch would stop someone like him—and sat on the edge of the bed.
The snow kept falling outside, burying the city in a thick, white silence.
I closed my eyes and whispered the name to the empty room.
"Moretti."
It felt like a vow. It felt like a warning.
It felt like the end of the world.