Vivienne's POV
I locked my door and didn't come out for three days.
Not because I was afraid of Dante — though I was, in the way you fear a storm that's already decided to find you. But because I needed to be in a room where nothing was a lie. My furniture was real. My books were real. The water stain on the ceiling from two winters ago was real.
Everything else in this house had turned out to be something other than what it appeared.
So I stayed in my room and I thought, and I paced, and I sat on the floor with my back against the bed and stared at the wall until the wall felt like the only honest thing left.
Matteo brought meals.
Not a maid. Not a nurse. Matteo himself — the second most dangerous man in Ashford City, carrying a tray with both hands, knocking with his elbow because his hands were full. The first time he appeared I almost didn't open the door. The second time, I was hungry enough not to care about dignity.
He set the tray down and didn't hover. Didn't try to fill the silence with reassurance. I respected that.
On the second day, I started asking questions.
"How long has he known everything about me?" I asked. "Not watching. Knowing. The coffee order. The volunteering. All of it."
Matteo considered this with the expression of a man carefully deciding how much truth was appropriate. "Month two," he said finally. "He started requesting detailed reports. Not security reports. Personal ones. What you read. What music was playing in your wing. Whether you'd eaten."
I stared at him.
"I told him it was too much," Matteo said, with the careful tone of someone who had lost that argument comprehensively. "He didn't agree."
"And the — the feelings. When?"
"Month three," Matteo said. No hesitation this time. Like this particular fact was simply too big to soften. "He called me at two in the morning. Said he had a problem." The corner of his mouth moved. "In ten years, the boss has never called me at two in the morning for anything short of a crisis. I asked what the problem was." He paused. "He said: she was reading in the garden today and she laughed at something in her book and I need you to find out what she was reading."
I opened my mouth.
Closed it.
"That was month three," Matteo said simply. "It never got better. Only worse."
I lay awake that night thinking about a man I believed was dying, secretly calling his lieutenant at two in the morning over a book. Over a laugh in a garden he watched through cameras because he couldn't risk being seen watching in person.
I didn't know what to do with that.
I still didn't know on day three when Helena called.
I almost didn't answer. Her name on my screen still made my stomach clench the way it had since I was twenty-two years old and she'd sat across from me and explained, very calmly, that marrying a dying stranger was the most useful thing I could do for my family.
I answered.
"The memorial is tomorrow morning," Helena said. No greeting. No pretense. "You'll be there. We need to present as a united family."
I sat very still on my bed.
United family. This woman who had called Caruso. Who had offered me to a crime lord like a bargaining chip. Who had looked at her stepdaughter for fifteen years and seen nothing but a resource to be spent.
"No," I said.
A pause. "Excuse me?"
"I'm not attending Delilah's memorial." My voice was steady. Steadier than I expected. "Your daughter spent years making my life miserable. She called me a whore in front of twelve people forty-eight hours ago. I'm not standing at her grave performing grief I don't have."
"Vivienne." Helena's voice dropped to its most dangerous register — the quiet one, the one that meant consequences. "You will do as you're—"
I hung up.
I sat there holding the phone with both hands, and my hands were shaking — not with fear, with something else. Something electric and unfamiliar. Like a muscle that had been held rigid for five years had finally, finally been allowed to move.
I hung up on Helena.
A knock at my door.
"Vivienne." Dante's voice.
I didn't ask how he knew. Of course he knew. He had ears everywhere in this house, and possibly on Helena's phone line directly.
I opened the door.
He was leaning against the doorframe — not filling it aggressively, just present, watching me with those dark eyes that I still couldn't look at for too long without feeling something shift uncomfortably in my chest.
"Are you going to the memorial?" he asked.
"No."
Something happened to his face. The controlled, careful stillness cracked open just enough to let something warm through — proud and genuine and completely unguarded for about three seconds before he assembled himself again.
"Good," he said quietly.
I looked at him standing in my doorway, this man who had built an empire on fear, who had killed people without flinching, who had spent five years watching over me from a distance while pretending to be someone who was slowly disappearing from the world.
"I should hate you," I said.
Dante didn't move. "You should," he agreed.
"You lied to me for five years. You've had men following me. You killed people—"
"Yes."
"You refused to let me leave. You said no to a divorce like it was nothing—"
"It wasn't nothing," Dante said. His voice was quiet. "It was the only answer I was capable of giving."
"That's not a justification—"
"No," he said. "It's not."
The honesty of it stopped me.
He wasn't defending himself. Wasn't building a case. Just standing there holding the weight of every true thing I'd said, not trying to put it down.
"I should hate you," I said again. Softer this time. More honest.
Dante looked at me steadily. "But you don't," he said.
The words landed quietly.
And the horror that moved through me wasn't about him.
It was about how completely, undeniably right he was.
I didn't hate him. I had opened that door and looked at his face and felt — complicated, terrifying, infuriating things — but not hatred. Not even close.
And I didn't know what to do with a truth that inconvenient.
"This doesn't mean anything," I said, which sounded weak even to me.
Dante's expression didn't change. He pushed off the doorframe. "I'll have Matteo bring dinner." He turned to leave.
"The boardroom," I said quickly. "The eleven other people who voted against me. You said they were being handled differently. What does that mean?"
Dante paused with his back to me. "It means none of them will be able to harm you financially, professionally, or otherwise. Their leverage is being removed."
"No one else dies?"
A pause. "Not from that room," he said carefully.
"Dante—"
"Helena is a different matter."
My blood chilled. "What are you—"
He looked at me over his shoulder. "She called Caruso, Vivienne. She offered to help him take you." His voice was perfectly calm, which somehow made it worse. "That conversation has consequences."
"Don't hurt her," I said. The words surprised me — because Helena had never protected me, had never deserved my protection, had spent fifteen years treating me like furniture. But something in me couldn't be silent. "I know what she is. I know what she did. But don't—"
"Why?" Dante asked. Not coldly. Genuinely.
I struggled for a second. "Because if you hurt everyone who hurts me, there's no line. There's no stopping point. And I need there to be a line, Dante. Even in all of this, I need there to be one thing that doesn't end in blood."
He was quiet for a long moment.
"I'll consider it," he said.
He left.
I stood in my doorway and breathed and told myself that I'll consider it was not good enough and that I should be more alarmed than I was and that the flicker of something warm I'd felt when he looked proud of me for hanging up on Helena was meaningless.
My phone buzzed.
Aria. A text this time instead of a call.
Viv. Something is wrong. A man came to the gallery today asking questions about you. Said he was a journalist. He wasn't. I know what journalists look like and this wasn't it. He wanted to know your routine. Where you go. Whether you live at the estate full time.
I read it twice.
Then I read the second message that came immediately after.
He left a card. The name on it was Vincent Caruso. Viv, who is Vincent Caruso and why does he know your name?
My legs stopped working for the second time in three days.
Caruso wasn't waiting for Helena to deliver me.
He was already moving.
And he had just walked into my best friend's gallery.
Not possessively. Not dramatically. Just — took it, his fingers wrapping around mine, warm and certain.
"You surprised me," he said. "In the best way."
I looked down at our joined hands. At the scarred knuckles of a man who had fought his way through a decade of darkness to stand here, holding my hand outside a warehouse at midnight like it was the most natural thing in the world.
"I surprised myself," I admitted.
And for the first time in five years — maybe longer — something lit up inside my chest that wasn't grief or rage or exhaustion.
It felt terrifyingly like being alive.
Dante opened the car door. I got in.
As Matteo started the engine, my phone buzzed.
A message from an unknown number. Different from the one that had asked if I was safe.
This one had no words at all.
Just a photograph.
Aria. Sitting inside the estate guest room I'd left her in forty minutes ago.
Taken from outside the window.
From inside the grounds.
My blood turned to ice.
Someone was already inside the estate.