Chapter 3 Before He Became a Stranger

Lucia did not remember the first time she met Matteo De Luca.

That was the truest, most devastating measure of how deeply he was woven into the fabric of her life. He had simply always been there.

There were faded photographs somewhere in her mother’s heavy leather albums: Lucia at four years old in a white eyelet summer dress, sitting on the sun-warmed stone steps of the Moretti estate. A red popsicle was melting in a sticky trail down her fingers, and Matteo was sitting beside her. Even at ten years old, he looked entirely too serious for a child. In one picture, he was staring at the camera with a blank, profound boredom that belonged to a much older man. In another, his attention was completely detached from the world around them; he was looking only at Lucia, watching her laugh at a joke only she seemed to understand.

Her mother used to say Matteo had watched over her long before either of them truly understood what protection meant in their violent world.

Lucia used to believe that.

Now, sitting on the cold hardwood floor of her bedroom with her spine pressed hard against the base of her bed, she wondered how much of her reality had been constructed from beautiful, desperate myths rather than the ugly truth.

The rain had followed her home from the gala. It tapped softly against her bedroom windows, less violent now, almost apologetic, as if the storm itself pitied her. The hem of her expensive dress was still damp, the heavy silk clinging uncomfortably to her bare legs, but she could not summon the physical energy required to stand up and strip it off.

Stripping it off meant the night was over. It meant the nightmare was real.

Her heels lay abandoned in a haphazard heap near the door. One diamond earring was missing. And her phone had been vibrating relentlessly against the nightstand for the past hour.

She had not looked at the screen.

She already knew who it was.

Matteo.

The name alone made something inside her chest ache with a pathetic, unbreakable loyalty. Lucia squeezed her eyes shut, pressing her palms against her cold face, but the darkness behind her eyelids offered absolutely no sanctuary. Instead, it weaponized her own mind against her, forcing her to watch the memories play out. And memories, she was quickly learning, could be infinitely crueler than lies.

The first clear, pristine memory she had of Matteo was from the suffocatingly hot summer she turned seven.

The Moretti and De Luca families had gathered at a sprawling private vineyard just outside the city limits. The adults spent the entire afternoon under the shade of white canvas tents, drinking expensive wine and pretending their hushed conversations were about real estate rather than territory, gambling debts, and blood.

Lucia had been bored to the point of misery almost immediately. She was wearing a pale yellow dress that she actively despised because the stiff lace collar scratched the delicate skin of her neck. Her father had instructed her to behave. Her mother had ordered her to smile. Every adult she passed had demanded she be charming.

Lucia, naturally, had done the exact opposite.

She had escaped through the estate’s massive kitchen while the catering staff was distracted, stole two ripe peaches from a wooden bowl near the pantry door, and sprinted barefoot toward the endless, emerald rows of vines behind the main house.

She hadn't made it very far before Matteo found her.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” he said.

He was thirteen then. Tall, narrow-shouldered, and dressed in clothes that were a little too formal for a summer afternoon. His dark hair fell carelessly over his forehead, but his gray eyes already carried that heavy, unnerving stillness — the look of a boy who was routinely exposed to things he shouldn't know. He stood at the absolute edge of the vineyard, his hands shoved deep into his pockets, evaluating her as if she were a tactical problem he had been dispatched to solve.

Lucia immediately hid one peach behind her back.

“I’m allowed,” she lied smoothly.

“No, you’re not.”

“How do you know?”

“Because nobody is allowed beyond the stone wall unless they’re with the staff.”

She frowned, looking him up and down. “Are you staff?”

“No.”

“Then you’re not allowed either.”

For a long, tense moment, Matteo only stared at her. The air between them was thick with the humid summer heat. Then, to her complete surprise, the corner of his mouth twitched. He smiled. It was a microscopic, incredibly reluctant thing, but Lucia remembered feeling a sudden, triumphant rush in her chest, as though she had just won a prize no one else was allowed to touch.

She tossed him one of the peaches. He caught it effortlessly out of the air.

“You stole these,” he noted.

“I borrowed them.”

“From who?”

“The kitchen.”

“That’s not borrowing, Lucia.”

“It is if I was starving.”

Matteo looked down at the bruised fruit in his palm, shook his head slowly, and looked back at her. “You’re strange.”

Lucia took a dramatic, messy bite from her peach, speaking around the sweet juice. “You’re boring.”

He laughed then.

It wasn't loud, and it wasn't entirely free, but it was enough.

From that exact second, Lucia decided that Matteo De Luca belonged to her.

For the rest of the afternoon, they hid between the fragrant, sun-baked vines while the adults carved up the city inside the house. Matteo taught her how to climb onto the low, crumbling stone wall without tearing the fragile hem of her yellow dress. Lucia showed him how to spit peach pits as far as humanly possible, though her aim was terrible and he beat her distance every single time.

At some point, she tripped over a loose stone and went down hard, scraping her knee violently against the gravel path.

She braced herself, fully expecting him to laugh or call her clumsy.

He didn’t.

Matteo knelt in the dirt in front of her, completely disregarding his tailored trousers. He examined the small, bloody wound with the grave seriousness of a battlefield medic, then reached into his pocket and ruthlessly tore a strip of pristine white fabric from his own handkerchief.

“My father will be angry if he sees that,” Lucia sniffled, a stray tear cutting through the dust on her cheek.

“Then we don’t show him,” Matteo replied evenly.

“He sees everything.”

Matteo tied the makeshift bandage gently, securely around her knee. “Not everything.”

Lucia looked at him then — really looked at him — and felt the first, quiet architecture of absolute trust settle into her bones.

“Will you tell?” she whispered.

“No.”

“Promise?”

Matteo held out his pinky finger with a solemn, unbreakable gravity. “I promise.”

She linked her tiny finger with his.

That was the first promise Matteo ever made to her. There would be dozens of others over the years. And for a very long time, he kept them all.

When Lucia was ten, the cruelty of their world bled into their childhood for the first time. It happened during a suffocating August garden party. One of the older Valenti boys — a heavy, mean-spirited teenager raised by ruthless men — demanded Lucia give him the silver bracelet her late grandmother had left her. When she stubbornly refused, he shoved her hard into the estate’s deep marble fountain.

Lucia vividly remembered the shocking, icy violent rush of the water closing over her head. The stinging chlorine in her eyes. The heavy, dragging weight of her soaked dress. But worst of all was the sound that greeted her when she broke the surface, gasping for air.

Laughter. Cruel, echoing laughter from the other children.

The laughter died instantly the second Matteo appeared on the terrace.

He was sixteen by then, his shoulders broadened by training, his height already intimidating enough to make grown men hesitate. He didn't shout. He didn't rush over to pull her out of the water. He walked with terrifying, measured steps straight toward the Valenti boy. He grabbed the older teenager by the collar of his expensive shirt and shoved him backward with such sudden, explosive violence that the boy’s spine cracked audibly against the marble edge of the fountain.

“Apologize,” Matteo commanded. His voice was quiet, but it carried a lethal, freezing weight.

The Valenti boy tried to nervously laugh it off. “Relax, De Luca. It was just a joke.”

Matteo stepped into the boy's space, the air around them dropping ten degrees. “No. It wasn’t.”

There was something in Matteo’s eyes — a dark, fractured glimpse of the monster his father was molding him to be — that made the Valenti boy’s face drain of all color. The boy looked frantically toward the adults mingling on the lawn, expecting a parent to intervene, but no one stepped forward. In the mafia, children learned the hierarchy of power before they learned algebra. The De Luca heir had spoken.

The boy swallowed hard and muttered a pathetic apology.

Matteo didn't look away from him. “Louder.”

The boy’s face flushed a deep, humiliated red. “I’m sorry, Lucia.”

Lucia stood waist-deep in the fountain, shivering violently, water dripping from her eyelashes, absolutely furious and secretly, wildly delighted.

Twenty minutes later, while her mother was inside frantically fussing over her ruined dress and demanding retribution, Matteo waited quietly in the shadowed hallway outside the library. He was holding a thick, dry towel he had stolen from one of the master bathrooms.

“You didn’t have to do that,” Lucia said, pulling the heavy towel tightly around her shaking shoulders. She was trying to sound tough, but her teeth were chattering.

“He shouldn’t have touched you.”

The words were simple, completely devoid of theatrics, but the absolute certainty in his tone made a rush of heat bloom in Lucia’s chest, chasing away the chill of the fountain water.

She looked up at him, offering a small, grateful smile. “You sound like an old man.”

“You sound ungrateful.”

“I am grateful.”

“You have a strange way of showing it.”

Lucia let out a soft laugh, and after a heartbeat, the hard, unyielding lines of Matteo’s face softened, and he smiled back.

That was the profound, heartbreaking tragedy of Matteo De Luca. He was not an easy creature. Around adults, he was a guarded fortress. Around other boys, he was a calculated threat. Around his father, he became a silent, obedient weapon.

But with Lucia, in the quiet, stolen spaces between the violence of their world, the armor always fell away.

Not always completely. Not without a struggle. But he had always given her enough to see the fiercely protective, deeply human boy buried beneath the ruthless training. He had given her enough to let her believe, with every fiber of her being, that he was hers.

And last night, he had proven her wrong.