The sound of it, soft, familiar, intimate, does something treacherous to my chest.
He raises a brow at me.
I glare at him.
Then, because apparently this is the night my pride keeps getting strangled, I mutter, “Thank you, Caterina.”
She smiles gently and leaves.
Giovanni gestures to the dessert. “Eat.”
“I’m not hungry.”
His mouth curves faintly. “You eat when you’re stressed.”
I hate that he knows that about me, hate that I opened so much… too much of myself to this man who doesn’t hesitate now to use it against me.
And so yes, it’s with a thick chunk of self-loathing that I take a bite anyway.
And fuck, it’s exquisite. Damn him.
He sips his coffee, unhurried, watching me with the patience of a man who has already won. Who knows which buttons to push without compunction.
“Since I don’t think you heard me the first time,” he says calmly, “I’ll outline what happens next.”
My stomach tightens.
“You will leave with me tomorrow,” he continues. “A private flight. No manifests. No advance notice. You will be under constant security.”
“I won’t be imprisoned?—”
“You will be protected,” he cuts in. “There is a difference.”
“To you,” I snap.
“You will return to Dragoni territory,” he goes on, completely unfazed by the storm he’s setting off inside me. “Not New York. Not yet. Somewhere quieter. Somewhere I can control.”
The word control lands like a slap, sharp and humiliating.
“I’ve already relocated my senior security team,” he continues, as if we’re discussing shipping routes instead of my life. “Bellandi has been under surveillance for months. His people are restless, but they’re not stupid. They will test me.”
“And I’m the test,” I say bitterly, the truth scraping my throat raw as I say it out loud.
“Yes,” he replies without hesitation, without apology. “Which is precisely why you will not be accessible.”
I push my chair back slightly, my pulse hammering hard enough that I can feel it in my ears. “You’re talking about my life like it’s a logistics problem,” I say, my voice shaking despite my effort to keep it steady.
“In my world,” Giovanni answers quietly, “that’s exactly what it is.”
The walls don’t move, but the room feels smaller all the same. Psychologically, with a hint of cruelty, as if every word he speaks tightens something invisible around my ribs, compressing the air from my lungs inch by inch.
“So you’re uprooting me again,” I whisper. “Deciding where I get to exist.”
“I already have,” Giovanni says evenly, with the maddening calm of a man who planned this long before I ever caught up. “You’re only just realising it.”
The trap is closing.
I feel it in the precision of his language, in the way every sentence has been constructed to leave no space for negotiation, every step already mapped, every possible resistance already neutralised.
