"What is it?" I asked.
He didn't answer immediately. Just kept reading, his fingers drumming once against the table—a tell I'd learned meant he was calculating odds.
"Dante."
"Your father's made a move." He set the phone down carefully, like it might detonate. "He's hired Corsica. They're professional trackers. They've already mapped three of my safehouses."
The pasta turned to ash in my mouth.
Corsica. I'd heard the name whispered at the compound. Not with fear exactly, but with the kind of respect reserved for professionals who didn't miss. People who operated in the spaces between law and consequence.
"How long do we have?" My voice sounded steadier than my hands felt.
"A week. Maybe less." He closed the laptop. "You need to leave the city. I have a property upstate—a vineyard estate that's registered under a shell corporation six layers deep. No connection to me on paper. No external cameras. Completely off the grid. I'll move security personnel—"
"No."
He was already pulling out his phone, already making calculations. The speed of it, the automatic pivot into protection mode, made something crack open in my chest.
"Julietta, this isn't negotiable—"
"I said no." I stood up. The chair scraped backward with a sound that echoed. "You said I wasn't a pawn. You said I had a choice. And now you're telling me to hide in a basement while my father hunts me?"
"I'm telling you to survive." His voice dropped into that dangerous register—the one that made everyone in the compound move faster. "Corsica doesn't leave survivors who are easy to find."
"Then I won't be easy to find because I'll be helping you find them first."
He stood too, and the space between us became charged with something that tasted like copper and electricity. "Absolutely not."
"You need someone who knows my father's patterns. Someone who can predict where he'll strike next. Someone who understands the psychology of his moves." I stepped closer. "That's me, Dante. That's always been me. I've been watching him since I was eighteen years old, learning how he thinks, how he plans, how he—"
"I don't care what you've learned." He grabbed my wrist, not rough, but firm enough that I felt the intensity of his conviction through his grip. "I care that you stay alive. There's a difference."
"Is there?" I twisted my hand, testing the hold. He could have tightened it. Instead, he let go, stepping back like I'd burned him. "Because from where I'm standing, you're doing exactly what Lorenzo did. Telling me where I can be. What I can do. Treating me like I'm too fragile to handle the reality of my own survival."
"You're not fragile. That's not—" He ran his hand through his hair, a gesture of frustration I'd never seen from him before. It made him look younger. Angrier. More human. "Christ, Julietta. You're the opposite of fragile. That's the problem."
"What problem?"
"The problem is that if I let you into the field, if I let you anywhere near this, Corsica will use you as leverage. They'll study you, find your weaknesses, exploit them. And I—" He stopped himself, jaw clenching. "I can't protect you if you're visible."
The thing he didn't say hung between us like a blade.
I can't lose you.
Not because I was useful. Not because I was leverage or a strategic asset or any of the things I'd been my entire life. But because somewhere between the bathroom and the basement and the strategy meetings, I'd become something he actually needed.
The realization made me furious and terrified and something else I couldn't name.
"I'm not asking for your permission to be visible," I said quietly. "I'm telling you I won't hide. Not again. I've spent my entire life in basements, Dante. Literal ones and metaphorical ones. Waiting for someone to tell me what to do, where to go, who to become. And I'm done."
"Being alive isn't—"
"I know it's not freedom." I moved past him, toward the windows. The city sprawled below us, all light and shadow and movement. "Being alive is complicated and messy and sometimes it means making choices that terrify you. But it has to be my choice. And if you take that away from me, if you lock me in a basement to 'protect' me, you become him. You become every person who's ever tried to cage me because they thought they knew what was best."
I heard him move behind me. Felt the air shift as he closed the distance. For a moment, I thought he'd grab me again, force the issue the way his training would suggest. Instead, he just stood there, breathing.
"You're going to get yourself killed," he said finally.
