CHAPTER ONEThe Life That Looks Like a DreamThe flowers were always perfect in Dante Moretti's world.That was the first thing I noticed when he brought me here, how everything was manicured, deliberate, almost painfully beautiful. The penthouse in Manhattan's Upper East Side had floor-to-ceiling windows that made the city look like something you could own if you stared hard enough. Ivory roses sat in crystal vases on every surface. Fresh ones, delivered every morning by a team of staff I still hadn't learned the names of after eight months of living here.I used to be the girl who arranged the flowers.Now I was just the girl who stood among them.My name is Elena Vasquez. I am twenty-four years old. Originally from a two-bedroom apartment in Queens with thin walls and a mother who worked double shifts at the hospital. I grew up with the smell of takeout and the sound of neighbors arguing through the ceiling, and I thought that was the world, small and loud and a little bit exhausting.Then I met Dante.He came into my shop on a Tuesday afternoon in October, the kind of cold day when the sky turns the color of old pewter. He didn't look like a man who bought flowers. He looked like a man who acquired things with purpose, with certainty, without asking twice about the price. He wore a charcoal suit that probably cost more than three months of my rent, and he looked at the white peonies in the front window like they were mildly interesting.He looked at me like I was something else entirely."Those," he said, pointing to the peonies. "Two dozen. And whatever you think pairs well with them."His voice was low and even the kind of voice that didn't need to raise itself to command a room. I wrapped the arrangement without rushing. He watched me the entire time without speaking, which should have unsettled me, but somehow didn't.He came back the next Tuesday. And the next.By the fourth visit, he asked me to dinner. By the sixth, he told me I was the most interesting woman he'd met in years. I should have asked what that meant but interesting to a man like Dante Moretti could mean anything. I should have asked a lot of things I didn't.But I was twenty-three and lonely and he looked at me like I was worth something.So I said yes. And then I kept saying yes, long after I should have started asking better questions.Now I stood in his kitchen on a Thursday morning in a silk robe that cost more than my first paycheck, watching coffee drip into a gold-rimmed cup, trying to remember the last time Dante and I had a real conversation. Not a logistics exchange. Not a schedule. A real one where he asked about something that mattered to me, where I said something and he actually heard it.I couldn't remember."You're up early."His voice came from the doorway of the kitchen, and I turned to find Dante standing there already dressed in navy suit, silver cufflinks, expression perfectly neutral. He was handsome in the way that expensive architecture was handsome: structured, cold, designed to impress rather than to welcome."Couldn't sleep," I said.He walked to the coffee maker, poured himself a cup, and checked his phone in the same three seconds. "I have a meeting at seven. I'll be back late.""How late?"He looked up then not annoyed, but mildly curious, the way you'd look at an alarm clock that beeped at an unexpected hour. "Does it matter?"I wrapped both hands around my mug and looked out the window at the city waking up below us. Taxis and dog walkers and a woman in a yellow coat laughing at something on her phone. All of them are moving. All of them are going somewhere."No," I said. "I guess it doesn't."He kissed my temple on his way out, a practiced gesture, warm enough to be affectionate, brief enough to cost him nothing.The door closed.The flowers on the counter didn't move. The city kept going. And I stood there in the most expensive silence I had ever known, wondering how a life that looked this good could feel so hollow.I didn't know then that in three days, everything would change.I didn't know about Luca.