In a place like this, kindness was never simple.
It didn’t come without reason, without weight, without something attached to it.
And that made it dangerous.
Ciro’s voice softened, low enough to stay between us while still carrying meaning.
“You’re not as unlikable as you think, Elena.”
I held his gaze for a moment longer, searching for something—mockery, calculation, anything I could use to dismiss him.
There was none.
So I looked away first.
Back to the counter.
Back to the untouched ingredients.
Back to the role I had already decided I wouldn’t play.
And yet... his words lingered.
When I finally looked at him again, the effect was worse up close.
Ciro didn’t look like someone who should unsettle me.
He didn’t carry Renzo’s sharp, volatile cruelty, nor Vincenzo’s suffocating, immovable authority.
His face was composed, the kind of calm that should have been easy to read.
But his tone...
Too measured.
It brushed against something in me I didn’t want touched.
My stomach tightened.
He wasn’t mocking me.
He was... watching out for me.
The realization sat wrong in my chest.
“Elena,” he said quietly, “I understand why you’re angry.”
He held my gaze.
“You’re his wife, yet you’re being asked to serve him and another woman like this... anyone in your position would take that as an insult.”
A brief pause followed.
“But Vincenzo doesn’t see you the way you expect to be seen,” he continued, his tone even.
“To him, you’re not a wife in the traditional sense. Not in the way that earns respect in a room like this.”
His words landed one after the other.
