His smile sharpened.
Before he could reply, a hand settled against the small of my back.
Warm. Firm. Possessive.
Adrian.
He appeared beside me without a sound, his body angled toward mine, his attention fixed on Sebastian with chilling politeness.
“Excuse us,” Adrian said.
It wasn’t a request.
Sebastian lifted his glass in surrender, but I saw calculation flash behind his eyes. He was filing things away. Who stood close to whom. Who flinched. Who didn’t.
Adrian guided me away from the table with two fingers at my back. The touch burned through silk.
“You shouldn’t let him bait you,” he said as we stopped near a column.
“I wasn’t aware I needed your protection.”
His gaze dropped to my mouth, then rose again. “You do.”
“From Sebastian Russo?”
“From anything that smells weakness.”
I let out a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding. “And what exactly do you smell like?”
Something dark amused itself in his eyes. “Depends who’s asking.”
Life at the Moretti mansion after the wedding felt like moving into a museum curated by men who mistook silence for order. The place stood on the edge of the Hudson like it had been built to outlive governments. Stone staircases. Long halls. Staff who moved like ghosts. Dominic gave me a suite on the second floor overlooking the garden and otherwise left me alone.
On the third night, I cooked. Risotto, the one recipe my mother taught me before she died, because I wanted one thing in that house to belong to me. I set a small table in a private dining room and waited.
Dominic never came.
The next morning I found the dish in the kitchen refrigerator, neatly covered, and beside it a folded note in blunt, slanted handwriting.
It was excellent. I had some before my meeting. Tell the chef not to ruin it.
No signature. None needed.
It was the first thing Dominic Moretti ever gave me that felt remotely personal, and it confused me more than indifference would have.
At the first full family dinner, Adrian sat to my left before I even reached my chair. On my right sat his friend Cole Brennan, whose face looked carved from granite and bad news. Midway through the meal, a nervous young server spilled sauce across Adrian’s sleeve. The entire table froze.
Adrian looked at the stain. Then at the trembling kid.
“Next time,” he said calmly, slipping off his jacket, “use both hands.”
The boy stared.
“Go,” Adrian added. “Before the chef panics.”
The boy fled. Conversation resumed, but nothing in me did.
Because desire was one thing. Dangerous, manageable, humiliating.
Desire mixed with decency was another beast entirely.
Later that night, I escaped to the garden. Moonlight pooled silver across the fountain. The ivy walls made the world feel smaller, safer, almost private.
I sat on the stone bench and closed my eyes.
“You keep running from rooms I’m in,” Adrian said from behind me.
I stood at once. “You keep following me.”
He stepped into view, tie loose, jacket unbuttoned, hands in his pockets. “Maybe.”
“What do you want from me?”
For the first time since I’d met him, the game vanished from his face.
“Everything,” he said.
Not with arrogance. Not as a threat.
Like a confession he hated himself for meaning.
Then he turned and left me standing there with my heart pounding so hard it felt visible.
That was the first night I understood this wasn’t a passing temptation.
It was the beginning of a disaster.
Part 2
Sebastian Russo did not leave New York after the wedding.
That should have warned me how little of this was personal and how much was theater with knives hidden under the tablecloth. He kept reappearing in the orbit of the Morettis, always with a reason polished enough to sound legitimate. Documents for Dominic. A logistics meeting. Drinks with Arthur Bell, Dominic’s longtime adviser. Yet somehow Sebastian was always near me too long, smiling too carefully, noticing too much.
By the second week, I understood what he was doing.
He was not flirting.
He was investigating.
I found him in the front hall one afternoon as rain striped the tall windows and the staff moved quietly around us pretending not to listen. He said he had just dropped off paperwork. I said that was funny, because paperwork never usually looked at me the way he did.
His eyes lit with interest, the kind men get when prey unexpectedly grows teeth.
“You’re sharper than your father lets on,” he said.
“My father lets on very little.”
Sebastian took one slow step closer. “Then help me understand something. Dominic Moretti could have chosen any alliance in New York. Why choose you?”
I smiled the way my father had taught me, the smile that gave nothing and invited people to mistake it for softness.
“Because Dominic prefers loyalty over noise,” I said. “And because unlike most men in this city, he doesn’t need to explain his decisions to feel powerful.”
Sebastian’s gaze narrowed.
I leaned in just slightly, enough to make my voice feel intimate. “You were hoping for a weak bride, Mr. Russo. I’d adjust your expectations.”
For a heartbeat, silence crackled between us.
Then he laughed softly. “Now that,” he said, “sounds like a Moretti answer.”
“Maybe I’m learning.”
He tipped his head in acknowledgment, but I saw what my performance had done. It hadn’t eased his suspicion. It had sharpened it. He walked away looking almost pleased, which was somehow worse.
That night at dinner, Adrian watched Sebastian across the table with the patient stillness of a man deciding whether a door needed to be opened or kicked in. We barely spoke. That had become our new strategy, if silence could be called a strategy. I avoided him. He let me. On the surface, we were behaving.
Underneath, every room felt wired.
I heard the truth of it one Friday night when I couldn’t sleep and the hallway outside my room carried voices in the hush between midnight and morning. Adrian. Cole.
“You’re thinking too short-term,” Cole murmured. “This isn’t just about Sebastian. It’s about what happens when your father steps down.”
A pause.
“He won’t step down,” Adrian said.
“You know what I mean.”
Another pause, longer this time. Then Adrian spoke again, and all the steel I knew in him had gone quiet.
“No,” he said. “I’m not ready.”
The honesty of it struck me harder than if he’d shouted. Men like Adrian Moretti were not supposed to admit fear. They were built, publicly at least, from strategy and violence and self-control. Hearing the fracture underneath changed something in me I had been trying very hard not to touch.
Maybe that was why I made the worst possible decision an hour later.
I went to his room.
Barefoot. In a long ivory sleep dress. Pulse racing. Pride nowhere.
I knocked before I could lose courage.
He opened the door immediately, as if he had been standing there already knowing it was me.
For one suspended second neither of us spoke. He wore black slacks and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled to his forearms. No jacket. No tie. His hair was slightly undone in a way that made him look less like Dominic’s heir and more like a man who had been trying, and failing, to keep himself contained.
“You shouldn’t be here,” he said.
“That makes two of us.”
He stepped aside.
His room was dim and spare compared to the rest of the house. Dark wood. A decanter on the sideboard. A leather chair near the window. Manhattan burning low in the distance. It smelled like him, and that alone felt hazardous.
I stayed near the door. “This has to stop.”
He closed it behind me with a soft click. “What does?”
“The whispers. The looks. Following me into gardens like a lunatic.”
One corner of his mouth moved. “You came to my room in the middle of the night.” cook
“That is not the point.”
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