Luciano had never held a pen for anything other than signing contracts… or death warrants.

But tonight, he sat in her writing room, alone.

Holding a pen.
Staring at an empty page.

The silence was thick, broken only by the occasional creak of the mansion or the storm brewing outside.

She wasn’t here.

She’d gone to visit her sister in the city—with guards, of course.

But for the first time since she arrived, he felt it—

The weight of her absence.

It gnawed at him.

Her laughter.
Her smart mouth.
Her ridiculous addiction to red ink.

So he did something insane.

He wrote.

Just a sentence.

“She wasn’t mine. But I would tear the world apart to make her stay.”

He stared at the words.

Then at his hands—ink smudged across his knuckles like blood.

Her blood.

Because that’s what this felt like—like she had crawled into his veins, bleeding herself into him.

Serena returned late.

Wet from the rain. Exhausted. Smiling softly at the guards who escorted her in.

Luciano watched her from the shadows, then stepped out when she reached her room.

“Missed me already?” she teased, removing her damp coat.

He didn’t answer. Just handed her the page.

She read it. Slowly. Twice.

Her eyes didn’t meet his.

“Luciano…”

He stepped closer. “I don’t write, Serena. I command. I demand. I take.”

“Then why write this?” she asked, voice barely above a whisper.

His jaw tensed.

“Because I didn’t want to take you tonight,” he said. “I wanted to tell you.”

Serena swallowed hard.

“You’re scaring me,” she admitted. “Because the moment you start feeling is the moment everything can fall apart.”

Luciano nodded.

“I know,” he whispered. “But if I fall… I want to fall with you.”

They didn’t kiss that night.

Didn’t touch.

But they stayed in the same room, the manuscript between them.

Two people who had built empires out of lies—

And were now risking it all for something neither of them knew how to survive:

The truth.