"Don't follow me." I turned and walked toward the guest quarters, my legs moving on autopilot while my mind fractured into a thousand sharp pieces. "I can't look at you right now."
I heard him inhale as if to speak, then stop. The silence that followed felt like a held breath.
I locked myself in a guest room and sat on the edge of the bed in absolute darkness.
The ceiling above me was blank white plaster, unmarked by anything approaching comfort. I'd been staring at it for hours, watching the sky shift from black to dark gray to the first hints of pale blue outside the shuttered windows.
My mother was dead. Had been dead for fifteen years. I'd been seven years old when Lorenzo had her killed, and I hadn't even known enough to grieve.
The Bennetts had never told me. Had they known? Had Lorenzo paid them for their silence too? Had they looked at me every day and carried the knowledge that my mother was dead, that I'd been orphaned, that the man who'd orchestrated it all had bought my childhood like it was nothing?
The rage that had fueled my confrontation with Dante had burned itself out somewhere around three in the morning. What remained was something worse—a hollow grief that felt ancient and fresh at the same time.
I'd spent my whole life obeying. Following rules. Accepting the world as it was presented to me. Even when I'd started to claim power, I'd done it within the structure that men like Dante and Lorenzo had built for me. I'd learned their game. I'd become good at it.
But I'd never questioned the board itself.
Now I saw it clearly. The manipulation. The ownership. The way they'd all treated me like a piece to be moved rather than a person to be known. Dante had at least been honest about his obsession. Lorenzohad wrapped his in the language of family. Duty. Belonging. Making me believe I'd finally come home when he'd only been preparing me for slaughter.
I sat up, my reflection ghostly in the window glass. The woman looking back at me was unrecognizable. Harder. Colder. Something had shifted in her while she stared at the ceiling, something that felt irreversible.
That part of me was dead.
But so was the girl who'd thought that claiming power within the structure was enough. That had been naive. That had been another cage, just dressed up in different clothes.
Real power—the kind that mattered—came from outside the system entirely.
Lorenzo Altieri had orchestrated the death of my mother. Had orchestrated my engagement to a cartel prince and planned to murder me to start a war. And he'd done it all believing I would never be anything more than his tool.
He'd miscalculated.
Dante had stopped him before the execution, but not before the crime. Not before the original sin that had started this entire nightmare cascade. And then Dante had kept the truth from me, deciding I wasn't strong enough to carry it.
Both of them had failed to understand the same thing: I was the only person in this entire organization who had nothing left to lose.
They had empires to protect. They had operations to maintain. They had reputations and networks and carefully constructed alliances that could crumble if they moved wrong.
I had only justice.
And justice didn't require permission.
I stood and pulled on the clothes from the guest room closet—those generic, but well-tailored pieces that Dante had provided my first few days here. The attention had felt like care once; now it felt like control.
The penthouse was quiet as I moved through the halls of the residential level. The guards nodded as I passed, used to my presence, used to my authority. I was Dante's wife. The Don's bride. I had access to everything.
I headed to the intelligence room.
Marcos would be arriving in an hour to begin the morning briefing. I had exactly sixty minutes to pull what I needed—everything we had on Lorenzo's operations, his associates, his weaknesses. I'd spent weeks helping Dante build this intelligence network. I knew its architecture better than anyone.
It was time to use what I'd learned.
Not for Dante. Not for his empire or his protection or his obsession.
For myself.
But there was something else too. Something I hadn't wanted to acknowledge until this moment.
I needed to know if I could survive without him.
