Luciano set the cup down with deliberate care, the porcelain clicking softly against the saucer. He didn’t look at Andrés. He looked only at her.
"Partly," he admitted, his voice low and devoid of its earlier playfulness. "I don’t share what’s mine, Eloise. Not space. Not ti. Not air. And certainly not a taxi ride."
Andrés barked a laugh. "Jealousy looks good on you, hermano. Almost human. If you keep this up, people might start thinking you have a pulse."
Luciano ignored him entirely, his focus locked on Eloise as if he were trying to read the thoughts racing behind her eyes.
"Have you looked into what I asked?" he said instead, tone shifting to business.
Andrés’s playfulness vanished instantly. The brotherly banter evaporated, replaced by the mask of a soldier. "I have. But I’ll need more ti. The layers are deep on this one."
"I want it before next month arrives," Luciano stated, his voice a low, vibrating command.
"It would be easier," Andrés countered, his gaze flicking toward the kitchen where the maids were hiding, "if we got the information out of the spy. A few hours with the right tools and she’d spill everything."
Eloise felt a chill. She had once thought Andrés was the sunlight of the family—the easier smile, the safer laughter, the one who made the darkness feel less suffocating. She understood now how wrong she’d been.
He wasn’t sane.
None of the De La Vega n were.
They were simply different shades of the sa madness—Luciano wielded it like a blade, and Andrés like a joke sharp enough to draw blood.
Luciano’s eyes shifted to Eloise for a fraction of a second, noting the way she gripped the edge of the table. "Not now."
Andrés opened his mouth—clearly ready to argue—when Luciano cut him off.
"And the other matter—have Marcos and Leo handle it."
Andrés actually blinked, genuinely surprised. "Marcos and Leo? But you always deal with that. You said they’re sloppy. You said they take too much ti to get the perfect results."
Luciano turned back to Eloise, his expression softening in a way that made her heart stutter despite her anger.
"The reason I can’t do it now," he said, his voice smooth and utterly terrifying in its casualness, "is because I’m going on a movie date with my fiancée."
The silence that followed was absolute, a heavy, airless vacuum that seed to suck the sound right out of the room. It was the kind of silence that usually preceded a gunshot in this house, but the cause was far more shocking.
Andrés choked—actually choked—on air. His fork clattered to his plate with a tinny ring as his face flushed a panicked, mottled red. He began to cough violently, his chest heaving as he slapped the mahogany table with the palm of his hand, trying to find his breath while his eyes bulged in disbelief.
Eloise froze, fork suspended mid-air, stunned by the word "movie date." That was the part that truly caught her off guard.
"We are?" she asked, her voice small and bewildered, almost trembling with disbelief. Her mind raced, trying to reconcile the warmth in his tone with the gravity of his words. Was this real, or just another one of his tests? The question felt fragile on her lips.
Luciano’s expression softening in a way that still startled her. The usual edge of command and control had lted into sothing warr, almost tender, but no less intense.
"Of course we are," he said, his tone shifting into sothing almost tender, though the possessive glint remained. "Didn’t I say we have a day planned?"
"I thought the ’plan’ involved more... paperwork. Or threats," she managed, her brain trying to reconcile the image of Luciano sitting in a darkened theater with a bucket of buttery popcorn.
"There will be ti for threats later," Luciano dismissed with a flick of his wrist. "You wanted normalcy. I am giving you a matinee."
Even Listo went rigid. The fox’s ears shot up, swiveling like radar dishes, and he snapped his head toward Luciano so fast the strip of venison in his jaws swung back and forth like a bloody pendulum. The animal stared at his master with wide, unblinking eyes, as if he had just heard a ghost speak or seen the sun rise in the west.
Andrés finally recovered enough to speak, though his voice was a wheezing rasp. He wiped his mouth with a linen napkin, looking at Luciano as if his brother had been replaced by a changeling or a very high-quality hologram.
"Are you sure you’re my brother?" Andrés asked, his eyes darting to the windows as if checking for signs of the apocalypse. "Did you hit your head on the way down the stairs? Did soone poison the coffee?"
Luciano arched an eyebrow, his expression one of cool, detached amusent. He didn’t look like a man who had just suggested a mundane afternoon at the cinema; he looked like a man who had just successfully executed a perfect heist.
"Last I checked, our DNA remains an unfortunate match."
"You hate movies," Andrés pressed, leaning over the table, his breakfast completely forgotten. "You’ve spent years explaining to anyone who would listen that movies are a waste of cognitive resources. You get bored with people’s fictional lives. You think the dark is for work, for moving things that shouldn’t be seen—not for eating overpriced popcorn. You fell asleep during The Godfather, Luciano! You called it ’inefficient.’"
"Well," Luciano shrugged, leaning back in his chair with a slow, feline grace. The corners of his mouth twitched, dancing on the edge of a real smile. "Apparently, my fiancée prefers flowers over..." He glanced at Eloise, his eyes glinting with a dark, private heat that made her skin prickle. "...’questionable gifts.’ So I’m adapting. I decided that going to the movies is what... normal couples do."
Andrés stared at him, his mouth slightly agape, looking as if he were hallucinating. "Normal? Luciano, you haven’t been normal since our mothers—"
"Andrés," Luciano interrupted.
The na wasn’t shouted; it was breathed. But the temperature in the room plumted forty degrees. Luciano’s voice dropped an octave into a register of pure, lethal warning—the sound of a blade sliding out of a velvet sheath.
"Don’t you have sowhere to be?"
The silence returned, but this ti it was sharp. Luciano didn’t blink. He just stared at his brother until Andrés raised both hands in a gesture of total surrender. But his eyes lingered on Eloise for a long mont. There was a new look in them—curious, wary, and reluctantly impressed. He looked at her as if she were a scientist who had successfully dosticated a mountain lion.
He stood up, the legs of his chair scraping harshly against the floor, and grabbed a green apple from the crystal bowl in the center of the table.
"The movies," he repeated under his breath, shaking his head. "God help the people sitting in the row in front of you."
He smirked anyway, the bravado returning as he began backing away toward the arched doorway. "Enjoy the cinema," he said to Eloise, his tone a mix of warning and genuine pity. "If you survive the experience of watching him criticize the tactical errors of a romantic cody, that is."
He turned and left the room, his footsteps echoing down the marble hall. Even from the dining room, they could hear him still shaking his head, muttering a string of rapid-fire Spanish about "el fin del mundo"—the end of days.
Eloise sat very still, her hand still resting near Andrés’s plate on the table. The dosticity of the mont felt like a fever dream. She looked back at Luciano, searching his face for the punchline.
"You really don’t like movies?" she asked softly.
Luciano reached for his toast at last. He didn’t eat it like a hungry man; he disassembled it, cutting it into two perfectly symtrical halves with careful, surgical fingers.
"I don’t like predictability," he said, his voice returning to that low, cello-like hum. "I don’t like sitting in a room full of strangers with my back to a door, watching a story where the ending was decided six months ago in a boardroom. It feels... stagnant."
He paused, the silver knife resting against the edge of his plate. He didn’t look up, but his tone shifted, losing its edge and becoming sothing uncomfortably honest.
"But I like seeing what makes you smile. And I suspect that seeing suffer through a two-hour narrative about people with ’normal’ problems will make you very happy indeed."
Eloise’s breath caught—not loudly, not obviously, but enough for her chest to tighten. It was the lack of artifice in his voice that did it. He wasn’t performing for the maids or Andrés anymore. He was simply stating a fact: her happiness was a variable he was now willing to calculate into his day.
If she’d understood what "going to the movies" ant to a man like Luciano, she wouldn’t have let the warmth settle so easily in her chest.
Listo, however, was entirely unimpressed by the sentint. The fox let out a short, sharp huff—a dry sound of canine boredom. He dropped the venison, which hit the floor with a wet thud, and looked at Luciano with a look of pure dudgeon.
Luciano glanced down at the fox, his eyes narrowing. "You’re not invited, Listo."
Listo didn’t argue. He simply turned his head away in a choreographed display of royal offense. With a stiff, dignified gait, he hopped down from his velvet chair. He trotted toward the door, following the path Andrés had taken, but he paused at the threshold.
The fox looked back at Eloise, gave a singular, decisive flick of his bushy white tail—as if acknowledging her victory over Luciano’s schedule—and then vanished into the hallway.
Eloise stared at Luciano, the question burning on her tongue like acid. The air in the dining room felt heavy, charged with the ghosts of a history she wasn’t yet permitted to know.
"You haven’t been normal since our mothers—"
Andrés’s unfinished sentence hung in the air like smoke from a fresh gunshot.
She wanted to ask. God, she wanted to ask—what had happened to them? What tragedy or betrayal had been monuntal enough to carve that particular, jagged darkness into both brothers?
But she watched Luciano. She saw the way his shoulders tensed into granite, the way the tendons in his neck corded, and the way his knuckles turned a bloodless, porcelain white as his fingers tightened around the delicate curve of his coffee cup. She recognized the warning signs now. To press him was to step onto a frozen lake that was already beginning to groan.
She refrained from asking. So doors were better left locked until you were certain you had the key—and the armor—to survive whatever was waiting on the other side.
Instead, the anger she had been nursing since Andrés revealed the truth—the cold, sharp fury of being toyed with—rose in her throat like bile.
"So you let go," she said, her voice dropping into a low, dangerous vibration that matched the hum of the room. "You sat back and watched plan, watched sweat, watched breathe in the air of a future I thought was mine... just so you could have the thrill of crashing it? Just to watch the hope die in my eyes?"
Luciano didn’t look at her imdiately. He maintained his focus on his cup, lifting it to take a slow, agonizingly calm sip. He set it back down with that sa deliberate care that always made Eloise feel like the world was holding its breath, waiting for him to decide its fate.
"You wanted freedom, Paloma," he replied, his voice a smooth, terrifying silk that lacked even a hint of remorse. "And I gave you the only version of it you’ll ever have: the hope that it was possible. I allowed you to experience the high of the escape. The dream is always sweeter than the reality, isn’t it? If I had stopped you at the door, you would have hated for the loss of a fantasy. This way, you saw for yourself that there is nowhere to run."
Eloise stared at him, her eyes wide with a mixture of horror and disbelief. He sounded like a god playing with a bird he had already clipped, amused by the frantic flapping of its wings.
"You are mad," she whispered, her voice trembling before it sharpened into a blade. "That’s not generosity, Luciano. That’s cruelty dressed up as choice. You played with my life like it was a goddamn board ga."
He turned then, eyes eting hers—cold fire, unrepentant.
"Perhaps. But you confuse them because you still think freedom exists without consequence. In my world, the only thing more dangerous than an enemy is a delusion. I was simply curing you of yours."
Her hands clenched on the edge of the table, her nails digging into the wood. "Don’t."
"Don’t what?"
"Don’t turn this into philosophy," she hissed. "And the contract? You manipulated —you controlled my body—to force to sign sothing that wasn’t even necessary. All because you were jealous of a stranger in a taxi. And that is sothing, Luciano, that you don’t get to do. You don’t get to own my reflexes."
Luciano laughed. It wasn’t a mocking sound, but sothing low, dark, and genuinely delighted. It was the sound of a man who found her defiance intoxicating.
"Oh, Paloma," he murmured, his thumb tracing the gold rim of his cup. "You are so adorable when you try to rewrite history to save your pride."
She bristled, her posture stiffening. "Don’t patronize ."
"I didn’t control your body, Eloise. I simply invited it to speak, and it shouted." He leaned toward her, his voice dropping into a register that was silked with sothing dark and proprietary. "Your body responded because it knows the truth your mind is still fighting. You belong to . You ca apart on my tongue because you wanted to. Because you’ve always wanted to."
The sheer audacity of it stole the air from her lungs. A tidal wave of heat flooded her face—partly from the mory, partly from rage, and partly from a far more dangerous spark of recognition.
"You’re unbelievable," she said, standing so abruptly that her chair screeched against the floor, the sound like a cry of pain. "That’s not desire—that’s manipulation. And yes, you were jealous. Edward was just being kind. He wanted to be my friend."
At the ntion of the na, Luciano’s smile vanished as if it had never existed. The playful predator was gone, replaced by sothing ancient and jagged. His hand dropped to the table, his fingers splaying like a predator’s claws ready to sink into prey.
"I’m not jealous of his kindness," he said, his voice suddenly quiet. Too quiet. It was the sound of the air before a lightning strike.
He stood up and leaned in, bridging the gap between them until she could sll the dark roast of the coffee on his breath and the faint, sweet citrus of his skin.
"I particularly," he said, his voice dropping to a whisper that raised every hair on her arms and sent a shiver down her spine, "don’t like how his eyes share the sa similarities with soone I despise. I don’t like the way he looked at what is mine with eyes that reminded of a ghost I haven’t finished killing."
He straightened up, the movent fluid, cold, and final. He was cutting off the conversation like a blade through silk.
"Let the topic drop, Eloise. I’ve had enough of his na at my breakfast table. He is a footnote in a story that has already moved on."
He looked at her then, his gaze sweeping over her red dress with a slow, heavy intensity, as if he were deciding whether to kiss her until she forgot her own na or cage her until she rembered his.
"Go get your bag. The movie starts in two hours, and I don’t like to be late for things I’ve conceded to. We should leave soon. And Paloma?"
She looked up, trapped in the gravitational pull of his stare, her heart hamring a frantic rhythm against her ribs.
"The ring stays on. I want the light in that theater to catch every facet of it.
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