Page 62 of Alpha-Ex Wedding Ruse
The very man I’d been trying to wash away like sin was sitting in my living room.
Chapter Fourteen
Leila’s POV
My breath caughtin my lungs. My entire brain and nervous system short-circuited. The air suddenly vanished from the room.
For a second, I thought I was hallucinating.
But no—I wasn’t. He was really there.
Sitting in my living room. With his son.
Every muscle in my body went tight. My fingers twitched at my sides, unsure whether to reach for something or grab Ollie and disappear.
They hadn’t seen me when I walked in.
Not Luca. Not Ollie.
They were both completely immersed in the LEGO set I’d gotten Ollie a few months ago. He’d always loved puzzles and a good challenge, but even after all this time, he hadn’t made it a quarter of the way through building the car.
Until today.
Half the car was done. And I was willing to bet it had everythingto do with Luca.
I’d never pictured him as the puzzle type. He didn’t exactly scream patient—not the Luca I knew. His mind was always ten steps ahead, locked in on strategies, power plays, and profit margins. If it didn’t affect the ROI of his company or the welfare of his pack, I doubted it got more than a passing glance.
Yet here he was.
Calm. Grounded. Sitting cross-legged on the floor—yes, the floor—taking slow, careful turns placing one piece after another.
“I don’t think this is supposed to go there,” Ollie murmured, his brows scrunched in concentration. He squinted at the instruction sheet. “It looks…out of place.”
Luca leaned back slightly, one elbow braced on his knee, steepling his fingers under his chin as he studied the puzzle. His eyes narrowed on the unfinished car with the kind of intensity you’d expect from someone performing a delicate surgery.
“You’re right,” he finally said. “That piece does look out of place. Let me see the picture again.”
Ollie handed him the photo card, and for a few moments, neither of them spoke. They just sat there in focused silence, heads bent together, reading the instructions like they were decoding a treasure map. Something about the way they moved—so in sync, so easy—hit me harder than I was ready for.
It was natural. Effortless. Like they’d done this a hundred times before. Like this wasn’t the first time Luca had ever sat beside his son, helping him build something out of scattered parts.
Ollie, who usually grew impatient halfway through a project and tossed the instruction sheet aside to create his own version, was calm. Because Luca was beside him—present, engaged, treating that little LEGO car like it mattered more than anything else in the world.
It should’ve been beautiful. But all I felt was a sharp twist in my chest. Because I knew better than to trust the beauty of it. I knew how dangerous it was to believe, even for a second, in the fantasy of what could have been. What should have been.
A world where Luca never accused me. Never humiliated me. Never walked away. A world where Ollie knew his father. Where Ididn’t have to lie or deflect or carry everything on my own. Where I wasn’t standing in my own living room like a stranger, watching a life I should’ve had play out in front of me.
But that world didn’t exist.
What did exist was the cold, hard truth of what had happened between Luca and me—the betrayal, the scars. The very things that brought us to this exact moment.
Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Valerie stepping out of the kitchen with a bowl of popcorn. She froze when she saw me, mid-chew, like someone who’d just been caught shoplifting.
“Leila,” she said, her voice just a little too high.
That’s when Luca and Ollie noticed me.
Their heads turned at the same time. And when Ollie saw me, he lit up.
