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The guards seized Naomi’s arms with brutal, reflex-trained efficiency, yanking her back just as the splintered oak doors of the music room were kicked entirely off their reinforced hinges with a deafening crash. / Chapter 6 / 20

Chapter 6 - The Healing Hand

When the doors clicked shut, the music room returned to a heavy, sacred silence.

Luca exhaled slowly, the terrible tension in his broad shoulders finally dropping an inch. He walked back to where his mother sat on the floor, knelt down, and pulled a clean linen handkerchief from his pocket. Very carefully, with infinite tenderness, he wiped the black ink residue from his mother’s fragile thumb, kissing her knuckles as he finished.

Isabella looked up at her son, her faded blue eyes shining with quiet validation. Then, with a slow, deliberate movement, she raised her left hand and pointed a single, trembling finger toward Naomi.

Luca turned.

Naomi was still standing by the piano, nursing her bruised shoulder, her heart hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird. She had risked her life, her job, and her physical safety to protect an elderly woman she had only known for five months.

Luca stood up, crossing the distance between them with slow, measured strides. Standing close, he towered over her, his dark eyes searching her bruised face with an intensity that made the air feel thin.

"You took a blow for my mother," Luca said, his voice dropping into a low, rumbling timbre that vibrated through the quiet room. "You put yourself between a sociopath and an eighty-year-old woman with zero regard for your own safety."

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"I did what anyone with a conscience would do," Naomi replied, her chin tilted up defiantly.

"In my world, conscience is a luxury item," Luca murmured, his large hand coming up to gently, almost reverently, brush his fingertips against the swollen bruise on her cheekbone. "People in my world look away. You stepped into the fire."

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