“Dante,” I try quietly.
He spins toward me and the look in his eyes makes me take a step back. They’re wild. Empty. Completely unhinged.
“What?” The word comes out harsh.
“We need to plan. We need to figure out how to get him back.”
“You think I don’t know that?” He’s shaking now, his hands clenched into fists. “You think I haven’t been running every scenario through my head?”
“Then talk to me. We can?—”
“This is my fault.” He slams his fist into the wall hard enough to put a hole through the plaster. “I should have seen Viktor’s betrayal sooner. Should have investigated him the moment I had suspicions. Should have protected Luca better.”
“Dante—”
“I brought you here. Promised you’d be safe. Swore my protection meant something.” His voice is cold. Flat. “And I let a traitor work under my nose for fifteen years while he planned this. While he positioned himself to take my son.”
The guilt in his voice cuts through my own panic because it’s the same guilt eating me alive.
“It’s not just your fault,” I hear myself say.
He goes still. “What?”
And the confession I’ve been holding spills out before I can stop it.
“I should have told you about Viktor sooner. I did tell you, but not soon enough.” My voice is shaking. “I noticed things weeks before I said anything. The way he watched me during the memory sessions. The questions he asked about what I remembered. How he always seemed to be nearby.”
“You told me days ago?—”
“But I felt something was wrong before that. Weeks before.” Tears are streaming down my face now. “I felt uncomfortable around him almost from the beginning but I didn’t say anything because I was scared.”
Dante’s expression goes dangerously still.
“Scared of what?”
“That you’d think I was paranoid. That you’d send us away if I caused problems between you and your second-in-command.” My voice cracks. It’s all information I’ve told him before, but it just feels so much heavier now and I can’t stop internalizing theblame. “So I stayed quiet. I noticed and I felt weird and I said nothing for weeks. And now Viktor has Luca because I was too afraid to speak up when it mattered.”
The silence that follows is crushing.
Dante just stares at me with those grey eyes gone completely arctic. Cold. Empty. Void of anything recognizable.
I wait for him to agree. To confirm what I already know. That my silence led to this. That I failed our son.
Instead his voice comes out flat and final.
“We get him back. Then we deal with everything else.”
No absolution. No comfort. No reassurance that it’s not my fault.
Just cold pragmatism and a refusal to acknowledge anything beyond the immediate crisis.
He walks past me without another word, and I’m left standing in his destroyed office feeling like I’ve been hollowed out.
The next several hours blur together.
Marco brings maps of the cathedral. Dante outlines positions for his men. They discuss entry points and extraction routes and backup plans.
I sit in the corner of the war room and try to follow along but the words don’t stick. All I can think about is Luca.
