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And instead, I’d rescued myself.

“How did you find me?” I asked, surprised it was my first question when so many were playing bocce ball in my brain.

He seemed surprised by it, too, or maybe because he had assumed I would be more pleased by his arrival in my life.

But how could I be so simply ecstatic?

The last time I had seen this man, I was twenty years old, a girl with nothing to her name but the power of her father.

Now, I was Fia, a college graduate, wife to the infamous boss of Chicago’s Outfit, and the Oracle, an underworld power in her own right.

I would not be so easily wooed by the return of a ghost.

Especially not with another specter already haunting my life and playing havoc with my mind.

Something in my chest pinched at the thought of Luca, whom I had left at Edgemont House conferring in the study with Ciro and Cesare about what to do with the information from Joey Erizzo.

He’d looked at me intently as I told him about meeting Lily for lunch and then popping into the office for a bit, as if he didn’t quite trust my intentions.

To be fair, three days ago I’d tried to shoot him in the throat for being an impostor.

Like a predator, he might be able to smell the fear in my sweat as I’d hesitantly kissed his cheek in goodbye before scurrying off with Stefan and Luigi.

I was afraid of him.

Both the idea that he was truly as mad as Lando purported and could be the one behind Dario’s disappearance, and the idea that his very madness made him more appealing to me than his counterpoint.

There was its own kind of clarity and truth in being a psychopath, I decided.

But maybe the problem wasn’t that I was thinking.

I was feeling.

It had come on so gradually, in ebbs and flows across years like the erosion of arctic ice, that the depth of those feelings surprised me. It had been easier to remain oblivious, to think the difference between Dario and Luca was simply one man being hot and cold, tender and cruel in such an unpredictable pattern I could never settle in the relationship long enough to truly know how I related to my husband.

Now, though, I knew it had always been Luca who was looking out for me. Who sought me out even though it went against his nature and his orders to do so.

Would you take me as I am? Would you dream about a future with a man who kills because he must but also because he enjoys it?

His voice asking those bald questions resonated in my head even as the only man I’d thought I’d ever loved sat across from me.

You are the only reason I remember to breathe.

I wasn’t a girl anymore who dreamed of her Prince Charming and a pretty castle to call her own.

I’d had the prince, and he hadn’t fought for me.

I lived captive in the castle, and it had never been home for me.

Now I had a killer for a lover who didn’t know how to breathe without me.

And it felt fitting for the woman I was now. Not like a dream, but like a reality I had earned.

“What are you doing here, Niccolo?” I asked, as my heart moved in my chest, tectonic plates shifting to allow for the new shape of it with the added weight of Luca nestled in its folds.

Even if he had sent Dario into danger to get a chance at being with me, I didn’t think I cared.

It should have chilled me, but instead warmth flooded my bloodstream.