He let the silence stretch a moment longer, studying the way she held herself in his space, the absence of flinch, the absence of pleading. Whatever Lorenzo had said to her the night before had settled into her bones.
“What did Lorenzo tell you before I arrived?”
Her chin lifted slightly. “He said that once Don Vittorio dies, the family will reorganize certain assets.”
She saidwhen, notif.
“You speak of his death as certain.”
She held his gaze. “It’s been treated as inevitable.”
The casual certainty of it sharpened his attention. “And your role in this reorganization?”
Her hands remained loosely clasped in front of her. “Lorenzo implied I’d be turned over to Tommaso Carbone.”
The surname landed with a different significance. Carbone. Afamily that trafficked in powder and flesh with equal indifference. They built profit from addiction and from women who disappeared into back rooms and never returned unchanged. Magnus had tolerated their existence only because their trade didn’t trespass into his ports without permission. He’d never respectedthem.
He’d seen what happened to women who crossed a Carbone threshold without power oftheir own. He’d watched them at private functions years ago, lacquered and silent, their laughter too measured, their eyes dimmed by negotiation disguised as privilege. The thought of Elia entering a Carbone household, not as a guest but as an offering, sharpened something dark and immediate insidehim.
Her voice when she spoke of Tommaso remained steady, but not untouched. The restraint cost her. He saw it in the faint tightening of her fingers and the way her throat worked once before the words settled, as though she’d forced them past something sharp.
Heat surged through him before he could stop it, biting and unwelcome. The image of her handed off like a negotiated indulgence cut through every measured instinct he possessed. Amuscle jerked in his cheek, the only outward sign of the violence threading beneath his composure.
He took one step toward her, closing the space between them. “And when Lorenzo said you’d be turned over to Carbone, what did that imply to you?”
For the first time since he’d entered the room, her composure fractured. Not outwardly enough for anyone untrained to notice, but Magnus wasn’t untrained. Her shoulders drew back too straight. Her fingers tightened until the knuckles paled. Aflicker crossed her eyes—something stark and unvarnished—before she locked it down. She inhaled once, shallow, as if bracing for an impact she’d already anticipated.
“It implied that I’d be shared,” she whispered.
The words struck cleanly, but the impact inside him was anything but clean. It hit like a blade drawn without warning, exactand intimate, carving through the disciplined calm he cultivated in every negotiation. Shared. As though she were a decanter passed around a table. As though her body were an entitlement written into succession planning.
For a fraction of a second, something violent rose in him, swift and unfiltered. Not the strategic displeasure of a rival arrangement. Not the irritation of a misaligned contract. This was personal. The image formed without his consent: her in a Carbone estate, men who trafficked in degradation speaking her name with lazy familiarity. His hand flexed at his side before he stilledit.
He didn’t explode. He let the silence harden instead, let it stretch until the air between them carried the heaviness of his reaction. When he spoke again, his voice grew quieter, more restrained than before.
“Shared,” he repeated, as if testing the obscenity of it in his own mouth.He imagined, briefly and without permission, what those men would have done. The slow circling. The assumption of access. The lazy entitlement of hands that had never been denied.
The realization struck with brutal clarity. If any man ever touched her without reverence for her choice, Magnus would dismantle him piece by piece.
Not for business.
For trespass.
The violence of that reaction surprised him less than the possessiveness threadedthrough it. He studied her carefully, one question clamoring for an answer. “Would you have complied?”
Her lips parted, then pressed together again as though she regretted whatever honesty threatened to surface. Ashadow moved through her eyes this time—pain, unmistakable and raw, chased quickly by bewilderment, as if she still couldn’t reconcile how her future had been discussed so clinically in rooms she wasn’t permitted to enter.
Beneath it all was something far more telling. Fear. Not hysteria. Not dramatics. The kind of fear that had been folded small and stored away because survival required it. When she finally spoke, her voice was steadier than the emotion behind it. “I was never given a choice.”
Something cold moved through him at that. He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t pace. His restraint was absolute.“Was that arrangement already in progress?”
“No.” She shook her head once. “It was discussed as succession planning.”
Succession planning.
He exhaled. The Donatis had intended to convert her into leverage through sexual access after Vittorio’s death. They hadn’t yet acted, but they’d intended to.“You refer to Vittorio by title,” he observed.
“That’s how I was instructed to refer to him.”
