At 3 a.m., I found myself in the darkened bedroom, watching her sleep. Her chest rose and fell steadily, her face soft in the darkness, unburdened by the weight of blood and choices and consequences.
She'd been nearly murdered today. And instead of cowering, instead of demanding I lock her away, she'd stood beside me. She'd moved with my men, trusted my protection, and then she'd come back to me like I hadn't just burned an entire criminal operation to ash.
This was the woman who could destroy me.
And I'd never felt safer in my entire life.
I reached out slowly and touched her hair, careful not to wake her. Tomorrow I would hunt down Sal Renavetti and extract every name, every plan, every threat to her life.
But tonight, I would sit here in the darkness and accept the truth I'd been running from since the moment I first saw her at that gala.
She wasn't a leverage point anymore. She wasn't a strategic asset or a way to destabilize her father's empire.
She was mine.
Not because I'd taken her. Not because I'd married her or protected her or spilled blood in her name.
But because she'd chosen it. And now I would spend the rest of my life making sure no one ever tried to take that choice away from her again.
CHAPTER 16
Julietta
The weeks following the Castellano attack had been a blur of consolidation and proof.
Another meeting. Another victory.
I left the conference room with Rothstein's grudging respect and the satisfaction of knowing I'd just restructured the entire distribution network in under twenty minutes. The men filed out in clusters, their whispers following me down the corridor.
The Don's wife just moved the needle. She's more than decoration. She's operational.
Let them whisper. Let them realize I wasn't just Dante's prize—I was his equal.
I found myself in the study with the Medusa painting, and I sat in the darkness with just the city lights filtering through the windows. My hands were finally steady. My heart had stopped racingfrom the meeting's adrenaline. But something else was building inside me—something that felt like power taking root.
That night, I sat on the edge of the bathtub in our suite with the notebook I'd been keeping hidden since my first week here—the one filled with security rotations, personnel movements, everything I'd learned about Dante's operation. What had started as intelligence gathering had become something else. A record of my transformation.
I wrote in the darkness, the pen moving without conscious thought:
Three months ago, I was a girl in a dress watching a man's head explode at her own engagement party. Two months ago, I woke in the dark not knowing where I was or who I'd become. One month ago, I married a man who'd taken me by force and called it salvation.
Today, I moved the needle. Not as a piece in someone else's game, but as a player constructing my own board.
I don't recognize myself in the mirror anymore. The soft edges have calcified into angles. The obedience has calcified into strategy. My father raised me to be a bargaining chip. My mother raised me to be gentle. But Dante—
Dante has shown me what it looks like to own your own life.
And I want to own mine so completely that nobody can ever take it from me again.
I stopped writing. My hand was shaking.
It wasn't fear. It was anticipation.
Dante was asleep when I slipped into bed, his back to the window, his breathing deep and even. Even unconscious, he radiated something feral—a tension that never fully released, as if his body was perpetually ready for violence.
I'd been sleeping beside him for weeks now, and each night felt like standing at the edge of a cliff wondering if I'd fall or fly.
I lay facing him in the darkness, studying the curve of his shoulder, the line of his jaw, the way his eyelashes looked almost soft against his cheekbone. In sleep, he looked almost human. Almost safe.
