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It was more than enough.

“Why?” I begged, my hand clasping his wrist too tightly.

“Because, mia piccola fiamma, you are smarter than most people in any given room and kinder than anyone I’ve ever known. You have a curiosity about the world that strips you of the judgment so many others employ. You are the light and warmth I feel even when I’m not near you, like the sun feels even when the clouds cover the sky.”

“Why do I deserve that power over you?” I croaked, feeling utterly stripped raw and humbled by his words.

His brow crumpled as he stared at me with obvious consternation. “Is that a part of it? Deserving love? If so, there is no way I will ever earn that from you. Not after . . .” He waved a hand to encompass the lies and tragedies between us.

I wondered if he was referring to killing Papà, Ricco, and Beppe. I wondered if it hurt him as much as it hurt me to know the same hands that brought me such pleasure and touched me like a treasure had ripped my family from me in an instant.

It was the way of our life in the Mafia, but it still left a poisonous residue inside me.

“I don’t know,” I whispered. “I guess deserving something is weighed by the mind, and love seems like something that is entirely heartbound, so maybe not. And as for you not deserving love . . .”

I trailed off as I raised a hand to trace his square, stubbled jaw, the incongruously silken skin of his full mouth with the cupid’s bow upper lip and the strong line of his nose. His gaze was avid on me, almost manic with passion.

I loved it. That edge of madness. I felt it echo inside of me, like calling like.

“I guess it depends,” I said finally, through the acid burn in my throat of warring emotions, “on who the real Luca is. The man who committed horrible atrocities or the child who was programmed to commit them?”

“Does it matter?” he asked, harsh now, brows slashing black exclamation points to his anger. “In the end, I almost always enjoyed it.”

“It was in your nature already, but they nurtured you to be this kind of killer,” I argued quietly. “In a way, I’m glad you enjoy it because you’ve had so little to bring you joy at all.”

I sucked in a deep, stabilizing breath and forced myself to be as brave as the woman I thought I’d become, consequences be damned. I knew well enough that the future could change on a dime and nothing was eternal. If I didn’t take a chance now to express the secret specters in my heart, would they haunt me forever?

“Maybe love is about finding the most devastated places inside of a person and loving them back to life,” I suggested softly, tunneling both hands into Luca’s hair, searching his hard face for that softness that existed just for me. “Maybe that’s what this feeling is.”

“This feeling I have,” he said in a way that was a question but not a question.

His yearning was a scalpel applied directly over my heart, and the resulting ache was the break of my ribs peeling back so Luca could reach inside for the beating organ.

“This feeling between us,” I clarified, pulling him down until his forehead was pressed to mine. “This madness that feels like rightness.”

“Love,” he confirmed, testing the word in his mouth.

“A reason to keep breathing,” I clarified, because I didn’t care what word you applied to the complicated sensation.

It was his truth.

And my own.

No matter what happened tonight, no matter what was revealed about Luca’s part in these mechanisms, a part of me would also breathe for him because he made me feel alive and whole in a way no one else ever had.

Without another word, I pushed him to his back and took my turn worshipping at his altar, starting with his deliberately scarred feet, kissing each of the tally marks in a way that made his eyes flare. Because I wanted him to know that even monsters deserved love, maybe they even deserved it most of all.

I left Luca passed out in my bed.

It wasn’t easy to leave him, but my plans began at two in the morning, and I couldn’t be late to my own planned rescue.

A part of me wanted to wake him up and tell him everything, but I knew it wasn’t smart.

There was a mole in the Outfit, and too many arrows pointed to Luca.

I might have loved him, but I owed too much to Dario to leave him to die, even if Luca was the one who’d orchestrated it.

So I dressed quietly in the clothes I’d laid out earlier that afternoon, leather leggings tucked into soft-soled boots, a thin long-sleeved shirt, and a cap to tuck my hair into, all in the deepest black. I had the gun Luca had given me in a holster on my thigh, a knife in my boot, and a few lock-picking tools attached to my belt. Cerberus was with me, too, outfitted in his custom canine Kevlar vest that Finn had helped me find. He had been trained by professionals as a guard dog with skills equivalent to a military asset. I didn’t always take him with me on outings as the Oracle, because I didn’t want people to associate him with both my persona and my private person, and I didn’t want to put him in danger if it was too extreme, but tonight, I needed him.