The woman across the aisle—the woman whose ghostly presence had haunted my sleepless nights for six painful years—sat trembling under the harsh overhead lighting.

Elena Walsh.

The only woman who had ever broken through my iron clad defenses. The only woman I had ever truly loved. And the woman who had vanished into thin air overnight, taking my heart—and, as I now realized with crushing clarity—my unborn child with her.

"Luca..." she repeated, her voice choked with tears. "Please... don't look at me like that."

My hand was still tightly wrapped around six-year-old Lila’s small, warm fingers. Lila looked back and forth between us, her wide brown eyes—my eyes—reflecting sheer confusion.

"Mommy?" Lila asked softly, her little voice cutting through the hum of the aircraft. "Do you know the secret-man?"

I couldn't breathe. The air in my lungs felt like broken glass. I slowly turned my gaze back to the little girl beside me. The brown curls, the defiant tilt of her chin, the quiet intelligence behind her eyes... How had I been so blind?

"Six years, Elena," I rasped, my voice laced with lethal quietness. The deadly composure that made grown men tremble in boardroom meetings was crumbling into dust. "Six years I spent burning down half of New York trying to find your body. I thought you were dead. I thought someone murdered you to get to me."

"I had no choice, Luca!" Elena wept, clutching her seatbelt as the plane dipped sharply again. Oxygen masks dropped from the ceiling with a sudden, alarming pop. Red emergency lights flickered across the cabin. Passengers around us began screaming, but to me, the world was dead silent.

"You had no choice but to lie to me?" I demanded, leaning across the narrow gap between our seats, my knuckles white. "You let me live in hell. You let my child grow up thinking her father abandoned her!"

"Because if you knew about her, they would have killed her!" Elena screamed back over the alarm chimes.

"You were at war, Luca! Your uncle, your rivals—they were hunting everyone close to you! If Vincent had known I was pregnant with your heir, Lila wouldn't have survived her first breath!"

The mention of Vincent made my blood run cold.

Before I could answer, the aircraft dropped several hundred feet in a stomach-churning plummet. Sirens blared. The captain’s voice crackled frantically over the loudspeaker, ordering cabin crew to take their seats immediately.

Lila shrieked, burying her face into my side. Without thinking, I unbuckled my seatbelt, pulled her tiny frame onto my lap, and wrapped my body around hers like armor.

"I've got you," I whispered into her hair, my protective instincts exploding with a ferocity I had never known. "I've got you, Lila. Nothing in this sky is going to touch you."