"Then why haven't you told her?" the other man pressed.
"Because telling her about Elena is one thing. But there's something else." A pause. Tension in Dante's voice I'd never heard. "What else did you find?"
"You're not going to like it." The other man—Marcos, I thought—sounded grim. "The intel from Sinaloa came through. Lorenzo's communications with the Suarez family weren't just about the wedding."
"Spit it out, Marcos."
"He was planning to kill her. Two weeks after the wedding. Stage it as an accident, blame the Suarez cartel. Start a war while consolidating the distribution routes the marriage was supposed to secure—without the liability of having his daughter embedded in enemy territory."
Silence. Long and terrible.
"You're certain." Dante's voice was flat. Deadly.
"Encrypted messages. Financial transfers for the hit. Timeline mapped out. He had it planned down to the funeral arrangements." Marcos paused. "You saved her life when you took her, Dante. Whether you knew it or not."
Another silence. Then Dante's voice, barely audible: "She can never know I didn't realize. That I took her for myself, not for her safety. That I got lucky."
"You think she'd care about your motives?"
"I think," Dante said slowly, "that she deserves to believe someone saw her as worth saving. Not as... this." His voice turned bitter. "An obsession that accidentally became a rescue."
Silence stretched.
"And the other intel? About Sinaloa?"
"Confirmed," Dante said flatly. "Two weeks after the wedding. Lorenzo planned to stage her death, blame it on the Suarez family. Start a war while he consolidated power."
The room tilted.
My father. My father had planned—
"The entire underworld is hunting her."
I staggered backward, my hand finding the wall to steady myself. My breath came in short, sharp pulls. The penthouse suddenly felt too small, the air too thin. I could taste copper in my mouth. Could feel the phantom weight of my father's hand on my head when I was a child, his voice explaining logistics of business as if I were a ledger to be balanced.
You belong to the family now, Julietta. Your purpose will be made clear.
My purpose.
I pressed my palms against my eyes and tried to stop the spinning. Tried to separate the threads of this nightmare. My father wanted medead. Not metaphorically. Not in the distant future. He'd had a date circled. A location chosen. He'd been counting down the days until he could justify my death to the world.
And Dante—
Dante had taken me. Locked me in this pristine cage. Watched me through cameras like I was an animal in a zoo.
But Dante had also stopped it.
I walked to the window, my reflection ghostly in the glass. The city sprawled below me, indifferent to the fact that I was supposed to be dead in fourteen days. That there was a price on my head. That every criminal organization in the underworld was sifting through intelligence, chasing leads, closing in.
My father hadn't just betrayed me. He'd made me a corpse with a countdown timer.
And the man who'd kidnapped me was the only thing standing between me and a grave.
The realization made me want to scream.
I moved back to the bed and sat on the edge, my mind fragmenting into a thousand sharp pieces. I thought about the way Dante had looked at me in the bathroom doorway. The barely restrained hunger. The way he'd saidwhenI kiss you, notif.
Was that possession or protection?
