The blood left her face.
I watched it happen—the slow drain of color, from warm to pale to something approaching translucent, her freckles standing out against white skin like stars against a winter sky. Her eyes flooded with a terror so raw, so unprocessed, that it hit me in the chest like a physical blow.
She tried to pull her hands back.
The instinct was immediate—retreat, escape, the flight response she'd carried her entire life, the reflexive withdrawal from anything that might hurt her. Her fingers tried to slide from mine, her shoulders curling inward, her whole body contracting like something trying to make itself small enough to disappear.
I didn't let go.
Not roughly. Not with force. Just steadily. My fingers around hers, firm and warm and present, an anchor she could pullagainst but not break free from. The same way I held her during a spanking. The same way I held her when she cried. The way I would hold her for the rest of my life, if she'd let me.
"I don't believe him," I said. “Not for a moment.”
The words fell into the silence between us.
"Whatever happened—whatever he did to you—I need you to tell me."
Her chin was trembling. Her eyes were full—tears gathering along her lower lashes, threatening to spill, held in place by nothing but the stubborn will of a woman who'd spent her life refusing to break in front of the men who broke her.
"Because I want to know exactly what I'm going to destroy him for."
The first tear fell.
It slid down her cheek—a single, silent track of salt water that caught the library lamplight and shone like something precious. Then another. Then another.
Her hands stopped pulling. Her fingers curled around mine instead—tight, desperate, the grip of a woman reaching for something she'd been told didn't exist. Safety. Belief. A man on his knees asking for her truth instead of demanding her silence.
"He—" she started. Stopped. Her throat worked. Her eyes searched my face—looking for the trap, for the catch, for the moment when the tenderness would curdle into something sharp. Years of training, screaming at her to be careful.
"Take your time," I said. "I'm not going anywhere."
She pressed her forehead against mine. The same gesture I'd used with her—in bed, in the study, in every moment when words failed and only proximity could speak. I felt her breath against my lips. Felt the trembling move through her body like a current, and felt the exact moment when something inside her shifted.
Not a collapse. A decision.
She was going to tell me.
I held her hands. I held her gaze. I held the space she needed—quiet, steady, unshakeable—because that was what I'd promised her. In a contract signed in lamplight. In a marriage sealed with a kiss she hadn't expected. In every small, deliberate act of care I'd offered since the day she'd walked into my life wearing a dress she kept tugging at and a smile that didn't reach her eyes.
"I was sixteen," she whispered.
And I listened.
Chapter 14
Gemma
Iwassixteen.
The words hung in the library air like smoke. Dante's hands were warm around mine. Steady. Waiting. And for the first time since it happened, I opened my mouth and let the rest of it out.
It came in pieces at first. Broken, sharp-edged, the kind you handle carefully because they'll cut you if you go too fast.
"You have to understand what it was like." My voice sounded strange. Thin. Like someone had stretched it over too much distance. "Being the youngest. Being—nobody."
I told him about the Moretti household. About my father's eyes sliding past me at dinner like I was a piece of furniture he'd forgotten he owned. About my brothers—Carlo and the others—being groomed for power while I was groomed for nothing.
My mother was dead. Had been since I was eight. And whatever softness had existed in that house—whatever warmth, whatever tenderness—went into the ground with her.
