Chapter 1: Why Turn Me Down?
"Luca Valenti, why did you turn me down?"
The woman in front of him wore a thin slip dress that did almost nothing to hide her body. White lace rested against the swell of her chest, and every time she moved, the fabric shifted just enough to make looking away feel like work. Her legs were bare, long, and smooth, planted in his line of sight as she came closer.
Under any normal circumstances, Luca would at least have registered the fact that she was beautiful.
Right now, he could barely breathe.
Oil snapped on the hob behind her. The sharp crackle bounced off the kitchen tiles. Then came the heavier sound of steel hitting wood as she pulled a cleaver from the knife block.
"Would it really be so terrible to be with me?" she asked softly, bending toward him. "Tell me what you want, and I'll give it to you."
Her mouth moved with a slow, coaxing rhythm. Her voice had the kind of warmth that made the threat worse, not better.
Luca could only make a muffled noise.
His wrists had been dragged behind the chair and tied so tightly that the rope had already rubbed his skin raw. A wad of cloth filled his mouth. He twisted hard enough to make the chair legs scrape, but the knots did not give, and neither did the woman watching him.
"Don't be scared," she said. "We're going to be together very soon."
The cleaver rose.
The kitchen light flashed across the blade.
Luca jerked against the chair with all the useless strength he had left and let out a strangled sound through the gag.
Then he tore upright in bed with a hoarse cry.
Darkness pressed against the room. Dawn had not come yet.
He sat there for a few seconds, chest heaving, heart pounding so hard it hurt. Sweat clung to the back of his neck and gathered at his temples. His breathing sounded rough in the small room, embarrassingly loud, like someone else had made it there before him.
"That was insane," he muttered.
It had felt real enough that his wrists still seemed to remember the burn of the rope.
The woman from the dream was Sofia Bellori, the neighbor who lived next door. She was eight years older than him, pretty in a quiet, polished way, and already married, at least on paper. According to the building gossip, the marriage had gone rotten months ago. She and her husband were living separately, dragging out a divorce, and for now she was alone in the flat beside his.
Luca scrubbed a hand over his face and let out a slow breath.
"A wash first," he said to himself. "I'm soaked."
He reached for the switch, and the bare bulb on the ceiling flooded the room with hard yellow light.
He had been in this world a long time by now, long enough that even the strangeness of it had started to dull around the edges. Even so, there were mornings when he still found the whole thing ridiculous. In stories, people got another life after being hit by a lorry or after working themselves to death at a desk. Something dramatic. Something that at least sounded half respectable.
He had died from food poisoning and the allergic shock that followed it.
At twenty-two.
That detail still offended him.
He could remember the hospital bed, the blurred ceiling above him, the weight in his lungs and the panic rising faster than the monitors could keep up with it. He had not wanted to go. He had been angry in the stupid, helpless way people got angry when there was nothing left to negotiate with.
I'm only twenty-two. I'm not done. I don't want to die.
Then, through the fog of half-consciousness, a voice had drifted in.
"Well, here's a body with quite a bit of resentment in it. Not dead yet, but not far off."
He had tried to open his eyes. He had tried to answer. Neither had worked.
Then the voice came again, calm and almost amused.
"If you refuse to leave quietly, then I'll give you a chance. Go and live somewhere else."
A few minutes later, he had felt strangely weightless, as if someone had lifted him out of himself and laid him down in a softer place. After that came a baby's crying, shrill enough to split his skull.
Reborn, he had thought dimly, absurdly pleased.
Another voice, one he had not truly heard at the time, had answered from somewhere beyond that haze.
"I hope you're lucky enough to survive this life."
At first, Luca had assumed that line was dramatic nonsense.
Then he grew up.
This Italy was not the Italy he knew from his first life. It had the same old streets, the same trains, the same cramped apartment blocks and corner cafés, but the structure of everything was different. Women sat at the center of public life. They carried the heavier share of work, held more obvious social power, and moved through romance and marriage with the ease of people used to choosing rather than waiting to be chosen.
Some things, however, were apparently universal.
Women still loved gossip.
In the courtyards and stairwells of his residential complex, over coffee and cigarettes and plastic shopping bags digging into their wrists, they talked about rich older women keeping younger men, about handsome boys from better families wasting themselves on plain wives, about who had lucky hands, who had a bad temper, who looked like husband material. If one of them ever got to touch a beautiful boy's hand or pull him in by the waist, the rest of the day would be spoiled for ordinary living.
Luca happened to have been born with the exact sort of face that made those conversations lively.
His lips were naturally red, his lashes thick enough to cast shadows against his skin, and his eyes were an improbable blue, the kind that made people stare a second too long before pretending they had not. In summer light, the color went bright and cold at once. When he left for school in the morning, the older women from the neighboring buildings sometimes arranged themselves by the benches outside as if by coincidence, only to light up the moment he appeared.
He had learned to keep walking.
He checked the time, saw that there were still a few hours before morning properly began, and lay back down.
No more nightmares, he told himself.
That was the plan.
When he opened his eyes again, sunlight was already pouring through the thin curtains.
The alarm on the table beside his bed vibrated angrily against the wood.
Luca reached for it with half his body still asleep, fumbled twice, and finally managed to silence it. He squinted at the display.
11:20.
He shot upright so fast the blanket twisted around his legs.
"What?"
His pulse kicked again, this time for an entirely different reason. He threw back the covers, dragged on clothes in a panic, jammed his feet into slippers, and sprinted toward the bathroom.
He was dead. Absolutely dead. His school would mark him absent, his homeroom teacher would call, and if it was a test day, he might as well start digging his own grave.
Then he stopped in the doorway and stared at the sink.
Wait.
What day was it?
He stood there, breathing hard, trying to force his brain into usefulness. Friday? No. Thursday had been his late shift. Yesterday had been Friday.
He snatched up his phone and checked.
Saturday.
Luca stared at the screen for another second, then let his head drop.
"Right," he said. "Excellent."
He brushed his teeth at a far more civilized pace, washed his face, and opened the payment app on his phone. A fifty-euro transfer had come in. That would be from last night's shift. He had been so exhausted when he got home that he had not even showered. He had gone straight down onto the bed and blacked out.
"Bath first," he murmured. "Then food."
Hot water beat down from the showerhead, filling the bathroom with steam. The mirror clouded over almost at once, but his outline still showed through it, blurred and pale. This body had grown into the kind of shape that was inconvenient in ways men were never warned about. Smooth skin. A narrow waist. No extra softness around the stomach. Elegant lines at the hips and shoulders. Women noticed. They always noticed.
If some shameless auntie from the next building saw him like this, she would probably carry him off to a bedroom and call it destiny.
He rinsed the soap from his hair, shut off the water, and towel-dried himself in a hurry. A few minutes later, he had pulled on a white shirt but had not yet bothered with trousers when someone knocked at the door.
He paused.
"Who is it?"
No answer came immediately, just another measured knock.
Luca walked over and opened the door.
His hand tightened on the edge of it.
Sofia Bellori stood in the corridor.
She was not wearing the dress from his nightmare. Today she had on a soft top and a fitted skirt, something ordinary enough for a late morning at home, but the thin material did very little to flatten her figure. Her hair was neatly pinned back, and she held herself with the composed ease of an older woman who knew exactly what impression she made and had no need to fuss over it.
The dream rushed back so fast it made his throat go dry.
"M-Ms. Bellori," he said, and hated the way the stammer sounded the moment it left him. "Did you need something?"
Sofia looked him over once, not crudely, not even obviously, but thoroughly enough that Luca became painfully aware of the damp patches still darkening his shirt.
"I made porchetta," she said. Her voice was gentle, almost amused. "There's too much for one person. I thought I'd bring some over, or better yet, you could come eat at mine. You haven't had lunch, have you?"
The smell reached him then, warm with roasted meat and herbs, rich enough to make his empty stomach twitch.
It would have been much easier if she sounded like the woman from the dream.
Instead she sounded kind.
"No, thank you," Luca said quickly. "You don't need to trouble yourself. I can throw something together."
"It's no trouble." Her gaze softened in a way that should have been harmless. "You're so thin that looking at you makes my heart ache a little. I ought to feed you properly."
Luca nearly took a step back.
The shirt clung to him in one damp patch across the chest, the fabric turning faintly translucent where the water had not fully dried. He folded one arm across himself without thinking.
"She's just being nice," he told himself. People said dreams reversed reality. That had to be all this was. An overworked brain, too little sleep, a stupid nightmare, nothing more.
Still, he forced a smile and shook his head.
"Really, I'm fine. You should go enjoy your lunch."
He gave a small wave, then started to pull the door shut.
A hand shot out and landed flat against the edge of it with a clean, hard smack.
The door stopped moving.
Luca blinked, then pulled harder.
Nothing.
He planted both hands against it and tried again. The wood shuddered once and held. Sofia did not even seem to be using much effort. In this world, women were built for labor in a way men generally were not, and Luca had known that his whole life, but knowledge felt different when it was his full weight against a door and hers against him.
He looked up.
Sofia was smiling.
It was a lovely smile, the sort that would have looked beautiful from a balcony or across a dinner table. In the narrow space between their flats, with her hand braced against his door and his pulse starting to race for reasons he did not want to examine, it did not feel lovely at all.
Her eyes curved like a crescent as she leaned the slightest bit closer.
"And where," she asked softly, "do you think you're going to hide?"