When she’s gone, I sink against the doorframe and try to process what just happened.
She knows everything. Everything we’ve shared is gone in the space of one overheard conversation.
And the worst part is that I can’t even claim she’s wrong about me.
Every accusation she leveled was accurate. Every word of condemnation was deserved. Iama monster. Ididplan her death. Ihavebeen lying to her about her father while secretly planning his execution.
The only thing she’s wrong about is my love for her.
But how do I prove that when all the evidence suggests otherwise? How do I convince her that my feelings are real when everything else has been a lie?
I don’t know. And standing here in the wreckage of the best thing that’s happened to me in years, I’m terrified I’ll never figure it out.
21
GIULIANA
I can’t breathe.
The hallway stretches before me like a tunnel, the walls pressing in from both sides, and I need tomove. I need to get away from Luca’s voice still calling my name behind me. I need to escape the words still echoing in my skull.
The plan was always to kill her first, make Antonio watch his daughter die, then execute him.
My feet carry me without conscious thought, muscle memory guiding me through corridors I’ve walked a hundred times. Past paintings I don’t see and windows that reflect a ghost I don’t recognize.
I reach my old rooms and slam the door behind me so hard a picture frame rattles on the wall. My hands shake as I turn the lock, but it’s not enough. It’s nowhere near enough.
I drag the dresser toward the door, my muscles screaming with the effort, adrenaline giving me strength I didn’t know I possessed. The heavy wood scrapes across the floor with a soundlike nails on a chalkboard, but I don’t care. I need a barrier between me and him. Between me and the man who?—
The man who was going to kill me.
The thought hits again, fresh and devastating, and I have to brace myself against the dresser to stay upright.
He was going tokillme.
Every tender moment. Every whispered promise. Every time he held me in the darkness and made me believe I was safe, all of it was alie. All of it was just him playing a role, manipulating me into compliance, breaking down my defenses so I’d be easier to eliminate when the time came.
And I fell for it.
I fell for every calculated touch, every practiced word of affection, every moment of vulnerability that was probably just as fake as everything else. I let myself believe that the monster who kidnapped me was transforming into someone better. Someone worthy of love.
God, I’m sostupid.
The chair scrapes across the floor next, adding to my barricade. Then the nightstand. Anything I can move gets piled against that door because I can’t—Iwon’t—let him near me while I’m like this. While I’m breaking apart.
My stomach lurches violently, and I barely make it to the bathroom before I’m on my knees retching into the toilet. Nothing comes up but bile and water, my body trying to purge the poison of Luca’s betrayal even though it’s already too deep inside me to expel.
The sobs come with the heaving, wracking my body until I’m shaking so hard I can’t tell where one ends and the other begins.
He was going to kill me.
The words keep circling through my mind like a vulture, picking at the corpse of everything I thought we had.
I think about the other night when I was lying in his arms after we made love, his fingers tracing lazy patterns on my hip while we talked about the clinic he promised to help me build. The surgical specialization. The future where I could pursue my dreams.
Was he laughing inside while he made those promises? Was he calculating how long he’d need to maintain the charade before he could dispose of me?
My stomach heaves again, but there’s nothing left.
