I opened the wrong door and collided with him—shirtless, a crescent scar at the base of his throat, and the kind of quiet that makes you spill your secrets.
Vittorio Bianchi: silk-dark hair, gray eyes that catalog you like evidence, hands that steady as much as they claim. He’s the consigliere who keeps a city breathing and the man who decided my coat was his to drape over my shoulders.
We spar over press releases. He teaches me how to salvage a burnt frittata. He leaves a scrap of paper in his pocket—three words: I see you. We kiss in corners where the palazzo feels private. We promise small things. Then a grainy photo arrives: someone caught us leaving together. Messages from my mother. Don Marco’s warnings. A courier with ink that could burn.
They want to make my choice into their headline. He says he’ll stand with me. He says he won’t let the family turn me into a prop. I want to believe him with the whole unruly part of me that still remembers being abandoned.
Can I risk being chosen and not rewritten? Will he fight for me loud enough to drown the rest?
Vittorio Bianchi: silk-dark hair, gray eyes that catalog you like evidence, hands that steady as much as they claim. He’s the consigliere who keeps a city breathing and the man who decided my coat was his to drape over my shoulders.
We spar over press releases. He teaches me how to salvage a burnt frittata. He leaves a scrap of paper in his pocket—three words: I see you. We kiss in corners where the palazzo feels private. We promise small things. Then a grainy photo arrives: someone caught us leaving together. Messages from my mother. Don Marco’s warnings. A courier with ink that could burn.
They want to make my choice into their headline. He says he’ll stand with me. He says he won’t let the family turn me into a prop. I want to believe him with the whole unruly part of me that still remembers being abandoned.
Can I risk being chosen and not rewritten? Will he fight for me loud enough to drown the rest?