Chapter 2 - THE CONFRONTATION AT ARIA
The distance between the entrance and my table was twenty feet, but as Luca crossed it, time stretched into infinity.
Evelyn attempted to hold his arm, but he pulled away without a word, his gaze locked entirely on Leo and Maya. The air around our table grew cold, heavy with a decade’s worth of unspoken grief and sudden, explosive revelation.
"Nia," Luca’s voice was a low, gravelly rasp, barely recognizable.
I forced myself to sit upright, masking the terror quaking inside me behind a mask of cool indifference. "Luca. What a surprise."
"Luca, who is this?" Evelyn asked, stepping up behind him. Her eyes darted from me to the children, and I watched the exact moment her sharp, socialite mind connected the dots. Her posture stiffened, her eyes widening in horror as she looked at Leo’s eyes—eyes that were an identical copy of her husband's. "Luca... what is this?"
Luca ignored her entirely. He dropped to one knee right beside Maya’s chair. The movement was so uncharacteristic for a man worth billions, a man who bowed to no one, that several waiters in the room stopped in their tracks.
"What are your names?" Luca asked softly, his voice trembling—a sound I had never heard from him in all our years together.
Maya shrank back slightly toward me, while Leo instinctively stepped in front of his sister. "I'm Leo," my son said bravely, squaring his little shoulders. "And this is Maya. Why are you staring at us?"
A ragged breath escaped Luca’s chest. He reached out a hand, his fingers shaking as if to touch Leo’s shoulder, but I moved faster. I placed a protective hand over Leo’s chest and looked Luca dead in the eye.
"Don't," I said, my voice cutting through the heavy silence like a razor. "You're scaring them."
Luca lifted his gaze to mine. The sheer agony and fury burning in his eyes was blinding. "Are they..." He couldn't even finish the sentence. The truth was standing right in front of him, written into their very DNA. "They're seven, aren't they?"
"They are mine," I replied steadily, rising from my seat and signalling the waiter for the check. "And we were just leaving."
"Nia, wait!" Luca stood up, his towering frame casting a long shadow over the table. "You cannot walk away from me right now. Not after this."
"I walked away seven years ago, Luca," I said, throwing a hundred-dollar bill onto the table without looking at the bill. "You made sure of that. Come on, sweethearts, grab your coats."
"Luca, please, we have a reservation with the mayor's team," Evelyn pleaded, her voice laced with panic as she caught the whispers beginning to circulate among the elite diners around us. "We need to go."
Luca didn't even turn his head toward his wife. "Cancel it," he commanded coldly.
He stepped directly into my path as I guided the children toward the exit. His dark eyes searched my face, searching for a trace of the meek woman he had discarded in that snowy penthouse years ago. He found none.
"This isn't over, Nia," he whispered, his voice laced with a dangerous promise. "I am going to find out everything."
May you like
"There is nothing to find, Mr. Moretti," I said, using his formal title like a weapon. "Excuse us."
I brushed past him, holding my children's hands tightly, and walked out into the crisp Chicago air, knowing that the fragile peace I had built for seven years had just been utterly destroyed.
