“Good morning, my love.”
“Is it?”She crossed the room and stopped a safe distance from the desk.“We’re going to find that out.”
I gestured to the chair opposite.She didn’t sit.“You’re angry.”
She laughed once—small and humorless.“That’s one word for it.”
Silence is a knife.The longer you hold it steady, the more it meant.I waited until the blade found its angle.
“Tell me about Lily.”
My breath moved, deliberate.Lily.A girl who stuck her nose where it didn’t belong.
“Catrina talks too much.”
“She talked just enough.I asked for the truth.”
The old instinct rose—deflect, redirect, bury the truth under bigger truths until the room forgets what it asked for.Mia’s eyes didn’t move from mine.“You ordered her death?”
“Yes.”
She didn’t flinch outwardly, but something in her posture shifted—the smallest recoil of a person bracing after the impact arrived.She stepped closer to the desk, palms pressed lightly to its edge, as if she needed the coolness of the wood to keep her from catching fire.
“Why?”No screaming, no theatrics—just the question pulled down to the bone.
“Because she could have destroyed you.Not with malice, perhaps, but with carelessness.She had a mouth that didn’t understand the price.She liked the way danger made her feel.She asked questions where she didn’t need to.”
Mia’s jaw tightened.“She was my friend.”
“She was only using you for a high.”
Her eyes flashed.“So you had her fucking killed?To keep me safe, right?Because only you can do that.”
“I removed a threat,” I answered.“Exactly what I promised to do for you when that contract was signed between our families.”
She shook her head and took a half-step back, as if distance could free the wordpromisedfrom the blood stuck to it.“You promised me nothing.You promised yourself ownership.”
She glanced past me, to the maps on the wall, to the decanter, to the scar in the desk my father had left with a ring when rage got the better of him.Then back to me.“When?”
“Night of the charity gala at the museum.You wore black.Your friend was talking to two men who kept asking questions about you and your family name.What business you did… one slip and the Moretti’s would all be in prison.So I did what I had to do.”
Mia’s face didn’t change.But her hands curled against the desk.“And you call that love?”
“It kept you and your family from ending up in prison or worse.Many of our enemies were in attendance.I call it the decision that traded two, maybe more coffins for one.”
She swallowed once, hard enough that the small motion drew my eyes to her throat.“Tell me something else.Would you tell me if there were others?”
“There aren’t.”
I stood then, slowly, as if the chair might make a sound that would ruin the one still moment we had between us.I didn’t come around the desk.I didn’t close the space.I learned early how to make distance feel like respect instead of calculation, and right now I wanted to mean it.
“My father taught me that love is a leash.That the man who holds it wins.That owning is safer than wanting, and wanting is safer than needing, and needing is a death sentence.He kept my mother like a doll and called it love.She smiled in frames and learned to be grateful.”
Mia’s eyes flicked to the corner of the room where my mother’s photograph hung, small and almost hidden, the only softness in a space built for command.I rarely looked at it.This morning, I had.
“I told myself I wouldn’t rule the way he did the day I saw you.”
Silence stayed there for two minutes.Neither of us said a word.
