LUCA'S POV
She didn't say a single word to me when we got back to the house.
That was fine. I didn't say a word to her either.
She walked through the front door ahead of me, took off her coat, handed it to the maid without so much as glancing in my direction, and went straight up the stairs with her chin level and her back perfectly straight, like a woman who had decided I no longer existed. I watched her go. I let her go. I told myself I had more important things to occupy me than the fact that she'd just dismissed me from my own staircase like a draft she'd shut a window against.
I went to my office.
I sat down. I picked up the folder Romano had left for me and I read the same line in it over and over without absorbing a word, because all I could see was Serena standing in that narrow passage with the candlelight on her face, saying the order of things back to me like she was reading it off a page.
