We talk quietly after that—plans, contingencies, the first steps of the impossible thing we’re about to do. Eventually her voice softens, her lashes lower, and she yawns.
I guide her into my bed, settling her beneath the sheets. She sinks into the mattress, exhaustion pulling her under. I stay long enough to feel her breathing steady against the pillow, to watch her face smooth into sleep for the first time in God knows how long.
Only then do I slip out from beside her.
This is the moment everything changes.
And I know—I will burn down the world before I let her be taken from me again.
I pause at the doorway, hand on the frame, looking back at her wrapped in my sheets. Something about it feels dangerously right.
She was always meantto be mine.
The realization hits me with the force of a two-ton truck, flattening everything that came before it. I need to protect her. And that baby. At all costs, without hesitation, without mercy for anyone who stands in my way.
I step out of the room and close the door quietly, sealing her inside the only sanctuary I can give her for now. The living room is dim, shadows stretching long across the floor as I walk to the counter where her bag rests. The ultrasound photo lies beside it. I pick it up and stare at the black-and-white blur.
The baby doesn’t even resemble a person yet—just a tiny, curled shape, a smudge of possibility. A strange, almost fragile thing.
And still,something fierce coils in my chest, sharp and immediate. A possessive instinct I didn’t know I was capable of feeling.
“You will be mine,” I murmur to the image, quiet but certain. “I will raise you as my own. I will guard you. Cherish you. Because your mother matters to me more than anything in this world… and so do you.”
I never spent much time imagining children. In my world, an heir is a strategy, a legacy. A continuation of power.
But this wasn’t planned.And somehow it feels less like an accident and more like fate reshaping itself around us.
“Not how I imagined any of this,” I say under my breath, my voice swallowed by the room’s stillness. “But you will be a Davacalli. And you will carry my name.”
Madness. All of it. From the moment I asked her to marry me to the moment she whispered yes. I haven’t had a chance to breathe, to process, to think about the avalanche we just set off.
But now—standing here with her sleeping in my bed and her child’s first form trembling in my hand—it all settles into place.
She said yes.
Not because she loves me.Not yet.
But because sheis fighting to survive. Because she refuses to bow. And now it’s my turn to show her what a real man is made of—what it means to be claimed, guarded, protected without question.
I take out my phone, ultrasound still between my fingers, and step onto the balcony. The cold night air hits me hard, grounding me. The city stretches beneath me, indifferent, unaware of the war that has just been declared.
I dial the number I need.
He answers on the first ring.
“The passports will be done within the next hour or two,” he says immediately, skipping any greeting. “The jet is fueled and ready to pick her parents up.”
I don’t speak. Not yet. My eyes are fixed on the swollen little shape in my hand.
“Boss?” he prompts.
I blink hard,forcing my mind back into the present. “We need to send a message to Giacomo.”
Silence stretches on the other end. Then, slowly: “A message? I thought we were only helping the girl escape.”
“Change of plans.”
Another pause—longer this time, heavy with suspicion. “What change?”
