Chapter 4 The Boy Beneath the Training

At thirteen, Lucia began to truly understand that their world was constructed of much more than just beautiful clothes, guarded iron gates, black cars, and endless, lavish family dinners.

It was a world of sudden, terrifying silences. It was the whispers that abruptly stopped the second she entered a room. It was men standing in the shadows with bruised knuckles and split lips. It was women who drank their wine and smiled entirely too calmly while their husbands lied to them. It was fathers who disappeared for days at a time and returned in the dead of night with blood soaking the crisp white cuffs of their custom shirts.

Matteo changed around that time too.

Lorenzo De Luca’s shadow had begun to swallow his son. Matteo stopped laughing as easily. His shoulders broadened, carrying a physical tension that never seemed to leave him. His father began bringing him into closed-door meetings and sending him away on trips with men Lucia knew better than to trust. Sometimes he arrived at the Moretti estate with freshly split knuckles or dark, exhausting circles under his gray eyes. When she asked him what had happened, he always gave her the exact same answer.

“Nothing.”

Lucia hated that word.

In their world, nothing meant absolutely everything.

One crisp October evening, she found him sitting alone on a cold stone bench behind the private chapel on the Moretti property. A single cigarette was burning untouched between his long fingers. The overgrown garden around him smelled of wet stone, damp earth, and dying roses, and the sky above the chapel had just turned the deep, bruising blue of early evening. He was nineteen, and she was thirteen — still too young to understand the dark complexities of his life fully, but old enough to recognize when someone she loved was hurting.

“You smoke now?” she asked, sitting down beside him on the freezing stone.

He glanced at the burning cigarette as if he had completely forgotten it was there. “No.”

“You’re holding one.”

“I didn’t say I was good at quitting.”

Lucia turned slightly to study him. There was a fresh, angry cut near his left eyebrow and a dark bruise turning a violent purple along the sharp line of his jaw. Someone had physically hurt him, though she could not begin to imagine anyone being brave or stupid enough to actually do it.

“Who did that?”

“No one.”

“I hate when you lie.”

Matteo exhaled a long, slow breath and looked out toward the dark, tangled garden. “Then stop asking questions you don’t want answered.”

She should have been frightened by the coldness in his tone. Maybe any other girl would have been. But Lucia only felt a profound, heavy sadness, because even then she understood that Matteo did not speak like that to scare her. He spoke like that because he was exhausted to his bones, because there were ugly, violent parts of his life he had already been ruthlessly taught to lock away.

After a moment of heavy silence, she reached over, plucked the burning cigarette directly from his hand, and dropped it into a shallow puddle beside the bench. It died with a faint hiss.

“Hey.”

“You weren’t smoking it.”

“I might have.”

“No, you were brooding with it.”

The corner of his mouth twitched.

She leaned back against the rough stone wall of the chapel, immensely pleased with herself. “You’re very dramatic for someone who barely speaks.”

“That’s rich coming from you.”

“I speak because I have interesting things to say.”

“You speak because silence makes you nervous.”

Lucia turned to glare at him, fully prepared to argue, but the sheer accuracy of his observation stole half her anger. Matteo looked at her then — really looked at her — and for a split second, the teasing vanished, replaced by something painfully sincere.

“You shouldn’t worry about me,” he said quietly, the gravel in his voice more pronounced in the dark.

“Too late.”

His expression tightened, a flash of genuine regret crossing his features. “I mean it, Lucia.”

“So do I.”

The autumn wind swept through the garden, biting and cold, and Lucia tucked her hands tightly beneath her arms for warmth. Matteo noticed immediately — as he always noticed the smallest things about her — and without a word, he shrugged out of his heavy dark jacket. He leaned over and draped it carefully around her shoulders.

“No,” she said immediately, trying to push it back.

“Yes.”

“You’ll be cold.”

“I’ll survive.”

The oversized jacket swallowed her frame. It smelled deeply of cedar, faint smoke, and the unmistakable, comforting scent of him. Lucia pulled the lapels closer to her chest, trying very hard not to smile.

At thirteen, she did not yet understand the devastating mechanics of romantic love. But she understood safety. And Matteo, bruised, silent, and inherently dangerous even then, had always felt like the safest place in the entire world.

When she was fifteen, everything changed in a quieter, far more dangerous way.

It was winter, and New York had been swallowed by a massive snowstorm. The city looked softer beneath it, as if the freezing cold had managed to cover all the mafia ugliness with something pure and clean. Lucia had been forced to attend yet another lavish dinner at the De Luca house, where the adults drank heavy red wine and discussed matters she was expressly forbidden to hear.

She escaped the suffocating dining room, as she always did, and went looking for him. She found Matteo in the sprawling, mahogany-lined library.

He was twenty-one now, standing near the roaring fireplace with a crystal glass of amber whiskey in one hand and a leather-bound book open in the other. He looked years older than he actually was. Not because of his face, which was still almost unfairly beautiful, but because of the absolute, commanding stillness in him.

Matteo never simply stood in a room anymore.

He occupied it. He controlled its gravity.

“You’re hiding,” Lucia said from the doorway.

He didn't look up from the page. “So are you.”

“I’m avoiding Mrs. Castellano. She cornered me near the appetizers and keeps asking if I have a boyfriend.”

“Do you?”

The question was entirely too casual.

Lucia felt a sudden, traitorous heat rush to her cheeks and hated herself for it. “No.”

Matteo finally looked up, his gaze dropping back to his book a second later. “Good.”

She blinked, stepping further into the warm room. “Good?”

“You’re fifteen.”

“So?”

“So boys are idiots.”

Lucia crossed her arms defensively. “Were you an idiot at fifteen?”

“Yes.”

That made her laugh — a bright, genuine sound that echoed in the quiet library. He glanced at her over the top of the book, and for some reason, the intensity of that single look made the laughter fade slowly from her lips. Something in the atmosphere of the room violently shifted. It was a small, almost invisible change, but Lucia felt it resonate all the way down to her bones.

She was suddenly, acutely aware of the narrowing physical distance between them.

Of his loosened silk tie.

Of the golden firelight flickering across the sharp angles of his face.

Of exactly how different, how incredibly masculine he looked compared to the boy who had once stolen peaches with her in a summer vineyard.

Matteo seemed to notice her noticing. His expression changed. Not dramatically, because Matteo never did anything dramatically unless violence was actively involved. But his gray eyes sharpened slightly, darkening as they swept over her, and Lucia, who had known him all her life, understood instantly that he had just seen something in her he did not expect.

For the very first time, the silence between them felt electric. It felt dangerous.

Then her aunt called her name sharply from the hallway, and the fragile, heavy moment shattered like glass. Lucia turned toward the door much too quickly, her heart hammering against her ribs, embarrassed by nothing and everything all at once.

Right before stepping out into the hall, she looked back over her shoulder.

Matteo was still watching her.

That night, she lay awake in her bed for hours, staring blindly at the ceiling, furious with herself for endlessly replaying a single, heated look that might have meant absolutely nothing.

But it had not meant nothing.

She knew that now.

By seventeen, Lucia was entirely, hopelessly lost.

She did not admit it to anyone, not even to Sofia, but her feelings for Matteo De Luca had grown roots so incredibly deep she no longer knew where the girl ended and the love began. He was the anchor in the background of every single important memory she possessed. He was the person her eyes desperately searched for the second she entered any crowded ballroom. He was the first name that came to her mind when something terrified her, and the very last thought she allowed herself to indulge in before she fell asleep.

Matteo, however, had become infinitely harder to reach. There were weeks when he disappeared into the family business entirely. When he returned, he always looked colder, more controlled, more distant — more like Lorenzo. Sometimes Lucia missed the boy from the vineyard so much it physically ached in her chest. Sometimes she wondered whether that boy had ever truly existed at all, or whether she had simply invented him because her childhood had so desperately needed softer myths.

Then, just as she was ready to give up, he would do something incredibly small.

He would bring her favorite, specific order of coffee without ever asking. He would leave a rare book on the hood of her car simply because she had mentioned wanting to read it six months earlier. He would cross a crowded room to stand silently beside her at parties the exact moment other men began to look at her for too long.

And with those small, quiet confessions of loyalty, she would believe in him all over again.