The car smells like leather and gunpowder.
I sit in the back seat with my hands folded in my lap and the man who just killed my husband beside me. Three feet of Italian leather between us. Might as well be nothing.
My hands are still shaking from the steps of Nico's house, from the tears I let fall into this man's grip, and I've folded them together in my lap to keep him from seeing. Too late for that. He's already seen everything. The bruises. The flinching. The nod that cost a man his life.
Dante hasn't spoken since we left the estate. His breathing is even. His hands rest on his thighs — still, relaxed, the hands of a man who just pulled a trigger and moved on like it was part of his morning routine.
There's blood on his right cuff. A single drop. I stare at it because staring at his face feels like looking directly into something my eyes aren't built for yet. And because looking at that drop of blood is easier than answering the question screaming inside my skull — what have I done. What have I just done.
The city slides past the window. Streetlights painting the glass orange, then black. I count four intersections before the silence becomes worse than any answer he could give me.
"Why did you do that?"
He doesn't turn. "He took what belongs to me."
Belongs. The word should make my skin crawl. I just walked out over the body of a man who treated me like furniture. But Nico said worth. Dante says belongs.
One is a price tag. The other is something I'm not equipped to examine in a moving car with blood drying on his sleeve and my own pulse still hammering against the inside of my wrists like a trapped thing trying to get out.
"But you don't even know me." My voice sounds foreign. "I was eight years old when they made that deal. You haven't seen me since. Why would you do all of this for a name on a contract?"
Now he turns. His eyes move over my face — the bruise along my jaw, the cut on my lip, the white knuckles. He reads me. Not the way Nico read me — scanning for the softest place to land a hit. Dante reads me like a document he intends to memorize.
"I know enough."
His gaze drops to my mouth. Stays one second too long. Then he looks away and the air in the car thickens into something I can almost taste.
I press my knees together and stare at my reflection in the glass and my reflection stares back — a woman with smudged concealer and red eyes and a dead husband and absolutely no idea what comes next.
I should be grieving. I should feel something about the man on that floor. The fact that I don't — the fact that the loudest thing inside me right now isn't grief but the ghost of Dante's eyes on my mouth — tells me something about the last two years that makes my throat tighten.
The Morrante estate rises from the dark like something that grew here. Stone walls. Old money — the kind that doesn't prove itself with glass and chrome.
Guards at the gate nod but their eyes stay on me. Calculating. I know what they see. A woman passed between three names. Nobody assumes survivor first.
The car stops. Dante walks around and opens my door himself. His hand appears — open, steady. I take it because my legs have given up and because the warmth of his grip travels up my wrist and settles somewhere it has no business settling.
He doesn't let go. Walks me toward the entrance with my hand in his, his presence so solid it bends the air. Guards straighten when he passes — not with fear. With gravity.
The hallway inside is long, high-ceilinged, stone floors, dark wood.
But the house isn't what holds my attention. It's the way he moves through it — shoulders back, jaw set, every surface belonging to him and him wearing that knowledge like it was tailored for his body.
I'm walking through his air and I can feel the weight of who he is pressing against my skin and my chest is doing something it shouldn't — something warm and uncertain and terrified all at once.
He tells me a room has been prepared. I nod — too quickly, the eager nod of a woman trained to earn her space — and the questions spill out.
"Where are the linens kept? Does the kitchen need anything? I can make the bed myself…"
He stops. Turns. Something crosses his face — there and gone.
"You don't understand, honey." Low. Patient. "I have servants for that. You're not one."
He steps closer. The hallway shrinks.
"You're my wife."
The word lands on my skin and I feel it everywhere — my throat, my chest, the backs of my hands.
I've heard wife a thousand times and it always sounded like property and from his mouth it sounds like something I don't have a name for yet.
Something that makes my eyes sting again, which is humiliating, because I've cried more tonight than I have in two years and I can't seem to stop.
He reaches past me for the door handle and his chest passes close enough to my shoulder that I feel the heat of him. Cedar. Smoke. Something underneath that is just him.
My breath catches. He hears it — his hand pauses on the handle for a fraction of a second — and in that fraction my whole body goes warm in a way that has nothing to do with temperature and everything to do with the terrifying realization that I am not afraid of this man.
I should be. He just killed someone. But standing in this hallway with his heat on my shoulder and his voice still vibrating in my chest, I'm not afraid. I'm something else entirely and I don't know its name.
"Anything you need, ask Marta."
I step inside. The room is softly lit, a bed with white sheets that nobody has bled on. I turn back. He's filling the doorway, dark eyes on mine with a patience more dangerous than Nico's rage ever was. Nico's anger was a fire. This man's patience is a tide. It doesn't rush. It just doesn't stop.
"Get some sleep, Sera." A pause. His mouth shifts. "Tomorrow is our wedding."
The words detonate three seconds after he says them. By the time I open my mouth he's already walking away, footsteps unhurried on stone, and I'm standing in a room that isn't mine wearing a dead man's ring while the man one wall away plans to replace it.
My knees finally give out and I sit on the edge of the bed and press my hands over my face and breathe. Just breathe. Because an hour ago I was folding my husband's shirts and now my husband is on his dining room floor and a man I last saw when I was eight just said tomorrow is our wedding like it was weather.
I press my fingers to the place on my shoulder where his chest almost touched. The heat is still there. Faint. Specific. My eyes are burning again.
Tomorrow is our wedding. And I don't even know his middle name.