The drive back to the estate is silent. Giuliana doesn’t speak or move. She barely even seems to breathe. She’s a statue carved from misery, and I can’t stop glancing at her, trying to read what’s happening behind those distant eyes.
My mother used to get this way near the end. Silent and still, like she’d gone somewhere else in her head where my father couldn’t reach her. Like she’d checked out of her own life because being present for it was too painful to bear.
The comparison makes my stomach churn.
We’re almost back to the estate when Giuliana finally speaks, her voice so quiet I almost miss it.
“My mother used to say that the worst kind of death isn’t physical. It’s the death of hope.”
I don’t respond. I don’t know how to respond to that level of raw honesty.
“I used to think she was talking about my father, but I think I understand what she meant now,” she continues, still staring out the window. “You haven’t killed me, Luca. But you’ve killed everything that made me want to be alive. And somehow that feels worse.”
The words knock the air from my lungs and I grip the steering wheel even tighter. Because she’s right. I haven’t just imprisoned her body. I’ve destroyed her spirit, her hope, her sense of self. Everything that made Giuliana Conti who she was before I decided she needed to pay for her father’s cowardice.
I’ve becomemyfather.
The realization hits me with the force of a freight train. Not just intellectually, like I acknowledged to her earlier, but viscerally. Bone-deep. I can see it now with horrible clarity. The parallels between what I’m doing to Giuliana and what my father did to my mother.
The systematic isolation. The control of every aspect of her life. The way I dismiss her feelings and needs as irrelevant to my larger plans. The slow erosion of her spirit until there’s nothing left but a shell going through the motions.
I’ve become the monster I swore I’d never be.
We pull through the estate gates in silence. I park in the circular drive and sit there for a moment, gritting my teeth so hard my jaw starts to ache, trying to process this revelation that changes everything and nothing simultaneously.
“Go inside,” I finally say, my voice rough. “Get some rest.”
Giuliana unbuckles her seatbelt and reaches for the door handle. But she pauses, turning back to look at me.
“Can I ask you something?” she says quietly.
No. “What?” I ask.
“Do you even remember why you hate me specifically? Or am I just a convenient target because actually going after the people who killed your cousin would be too difficult?”
The question catches me off guard. “Your father?—”
“Is a weak, pathetic man who was coerced into making a terrible choice,” she interrupts, a flash of her old fire returning. “But that wasn’t the question. I asked if you rememberwhyyou hateme. What have I personally done to earn this level of cruelty?”
Nothing. The answer is nothing, and we both know it.
“That’s what I thought,” she says when I don’t respond. “You don’t hate me at all. You just need someone to destroy because you don’t know how else to deal with your grief.”
She climbs out of the car before I can formulate a response, closing the door with controlled gentleness that’s somehow more damning than if she’d slammed it. I watch her walk into the house, her spine ramrod straight, and I’m struck by how much strength it takes to maintain that dignity when everything else has been stripped away.
She’s right. Of course she’s right. I don’t hate her. I’ve never hated her.
Yet now I’m in too deep to back out. The wedding is in three weeks. The alliance with Viktor Torrino depends on my marriage appearing stable and legitimate. I can’t suddenly call it off or let Giuliana go without raising questions I can’t afford to answer.
So I’m trapped in a revenge plot, destroying a woman who doesn’t deserve it, becoming exactly the kind of monster I’ve always hated.
All because I don’t know how to stop without admitting I was wrong from the start.
I sit in the car for another ten minutes, trying to convince myself there’s still a way forward that doesn’t end with me becoming irredeemable. But every path I can see leads to the same conclusion: I’m already too far gone.
The only question left is how much more damage I’ll do before this is over.
13
