POV: Isabella
The nightmare was always the same.
Not for Dante. No violence or dark rooms. It was a more primal terror. I was in a vast, beautiful room—the library, the ballroom, the bedroom—and the walls were slowly, imperceptibly, closing in. The air grew thin. I'd run to a window, but the glass was a mile thick. I'd pound on it, screaming, but my voice made no sound. I was being buried alive in gilded splendor, and no one could hear me die.
This time, I was in the armchair. The walls pressed until the wings of the chair became a vise around my ribs. I couldn't draw breath.
I woke with a strangled scream tearing from my throat, my body jerking violently in the confines of the leather wingback. My legs, tangled in the blanket I'd taken from the bed, sent me tumbling to the floor with a thud. The breath was knocked from my lungs. I lay on the Persian rug, gasping, heart hammering against the floorboards, the cold sweat of the dream now a clammy reality. The room was dark, lit only by the silver moonlight through the windows. The chair. I'm still in the chair.
The sound of the main bedroom door opening was like a gunshot in the silence.
He stood silhouetted in the doorway from the hall, backlit by the faint night-lights in the corridor. He was barefoot, wearing only a pair of dark lounge pants slung low on his hips, his chest bare. His hair was disheveled, his eyes wide and alert, scanning the room for a threat. In one hand, held low and ready, was a gun.
The sight of him, half-dressed and armed, should have terrified me more. But in that moment, he wasn't the Don. He was a man who'd heard a crash and a scream and come running.
"Isabella?" His voice was rough with sleep, stripped of its usual calculated coolness. He saw me on the floor by the overturned chair. "What happened?"
I couldn't speak. A sob hitched in my throat instead. I pushed myself up to my knees, wrapping my arms around myself, the blanket dragging behind me. I was a mess of terror and humiliation.
He placed the gun on the high dresser by the door and was across the room in three silent strides. He didn't touch me. He knelt on the rug before me, bringing his eyes level with mine. In the moonlight, I could see the concern etched on his face, real and undisguised.
"Are you hurt?" he asked, his gaze sweeping over me, checking for injury from the fall. "Did someone get in?"
"N-no," I managed to choke out, wiping at my face with a shaking hand. "A dream. I fell… Just a dream."
The tension in his shoulders eased, but the intensity in his eyes didn't diminish. He studied my face—the tears tracking through the sweat on my cheeks, the wild fear in my eyes, and the fact that I was kneeling on the floor beside the chair I stubbornly slept in. The nightmare's aftermath was a humiliating vulnerability, laid bare before the one person I wanted to seem strong in front of.
"What kind of dream?" His voice was softer now, a low rumble in the dark room.
"The walls were … closing in," I whispered, the confession dragged from me. "I couldn't breathe. I couldn't scream."
A muscle twitched in his jaw. Understanding, and something that looked like pain, flickered in his dark eyes. He knew. He knew this house, his beautiful prison, was the source. He knew I slept in a chair to defy him, and now I was a trembling heap on its floor.
He didn't offer empty platitudes. He didn't tell me it was just a dream. Slowly, as if approaching a spooked animal, he reached out. His hand, large and warm, settled over mine where it clutched at my arm. His thumb stroked over my knuckles, a gentle, rhythmic motion.
The touch was electric.
It wasn't the possessive grip from our confrontation. It wasn't the clinical fastening of a necklace. It was comfort. Human contact. And my starved, terrified soul leaned into it despite my mind's screaming protests.
A fresh wave of tears spilled over. I was so tired. Tired of fighting, tired of hating, tired of being alone with my fear in this cavernous tomb, sleeping in a chair to prove a point that no one cared about but me.
"Shhh," he murmured, his other hand coming up to cradle the side of my face. His palm was calloused, but his touch was impossibly gentle, his thumb wiping away a tear. "You're safe, Isabella. The walls are stone. They're not moving. Breathe."
His voice was an anchor in the storm of my panic. I found myself matching my ragged breaths to the slow, steady stroke of his thumb on my cheek. The tremors began to subside. The crushing weight of the dream receded, replaced by the shocking, solid reality of his touch.
He stayed there, kneeling on the floor with me, holding my face, his eyes never leaving mine. The world narrowed to this point of contact—the heat of his skin, the faint scent of him—sandalwood and sleep and man. The moonlight caught the planes of his bare chest, the sculpted muscle, and the dark dusting of hair. My gaze dropped to his mouth, to lips that were usually set in a hard line, now softened with concern.
The air between us changed.
The fear melted, but something else rose to take its place—a thick, potent tension that had been simmering since the day he'd pinned me to the bedroom door. It was in the way his thumb still rested on my cheek, his breath catching. It was in the way my breathing shallowed, my lips parting. The space between our bodies—him kneeling on the rug, me crouched on the floor—hummed with an awareness so acute it was a physical ache.
His eyes darkened, the concern shifting into something hotter, more intent. His gaze dropped to my mouth. The hand on my face slid back, his fingers tangling gently in the hair at my nape. A soft, involuntary sound escaped me.
He was going to kiss me.
And God help me, I wanted him to. In the wreckage of my nightmare, on the floor beside the stupid, defiant chair, in the shocking oasis of his tenderness, I wanted to lose myself in the feel of his mouth on mine, to trade one kind of drowning for another.
He leaned in slowly, giving me every chance to pull away. His breath fanned my lips, warm and sweet with sleep.
The spell shattered.
What are you doing? The voice of reason echoed loudly and clearly. This is the man who bought you. Who owns you? This tenderness is just another chain, more insidious than the others. You are on the floor. He is kneeling over you. Such an act is not a choice.
I jerked back as if burned, scrambling away from him on the rug until my back hit the leg of the bed. The loss of his touch felt like a physical wound, cold and immediate.
His hands fell empty to his sides. The heat in his eyes banked, replaced by a shutter falling—but not before I saw a flash of raw, unguarded hurt.
Shame and anger flooded me, a toxic cocktail. Anger at him for being gentle. Anger at myself for wanting it. Anger at the chair, at the room, at this impossible trap. I pulled the blanket around me like a shield, my heart once again racing, but for an entirely different reason.
"Don't," I breathed, the word a weapon. "Don't touch me."
He rose from his knees in one fluid motion, looking down at me where I sat trapped between the bed and his shadow. The vulnerable man from moments ago was gone, replaced by the familiar, imposing figure. But he seemed taller now, the distance between us an unbridgeable canyon I had just created.
"I was comforting you," he said, his voice flat, carefully devoid of emotion.
"I don't need your comfort! I need you to leave me alone!" The words were lies, and we both knew it. My body still thrummed with the ghost of his hands.
A long, heavy silence stretched between us. He just looked at me, huddled on the floor by the bed, having fled from his kindness back to my self-imposed isolation. He saw my fear, my want, and my self-loathing.
Finally, he spoke, his voice so quiet it was almost a whisper, yet it seemed to shake the room.
"I hate you." I hurled the words at him, needing to rebuild the wall between us, brick by furious brick.
He didn't flinch. A sad, knowing smile touched his lips—a smile that held no joy, only a deep, weary understanding.
"No, you don't," he said softly. He turned and walked back toward the door, pausing to pick up his gun from the dresser. He looked over his shoulder, his eyes meeting mine one last time, holding a truth I couldn't bear.
"But you wish you did."
He closed the door gently behind him.
I sat on the floor in the moonlight, the echo of his touch still burning on my skin, the truth of his words echoing in the hollows he'd carved inside me. The armchair loomed beside me, a monument to my defiance that now felt like a childish, lonely throne.
His threats and cruelty did not cause the first crack in my armor.
It was made by his kindness, which I witnessed on my knees on the floor of my own choosing.
And that was the most terrifying thing of all.