The guest room lock clicks into place with a sound that means nothing.
I know it's symbolic. Gianna, the housekeeper with careful eyes and careful hands, showed me to this room with the practiced neutrality of a woman who has witnessed worse than a kidnapper's houseguest. She didn't ask questions. She didn't offer comfort. She simply opened the door, pointed to the fresh towels, and disappeared.
Now I stand with my back against the locked door and run through escape options.
The estate is walled—twelve feet of stone topped with iron spikes that look decorative from a distance and become very practical up close. Guards patrol in rotating shifts. Cameras cover every entrance, every exit, every blind spot that isn't actually blind.
I could leave physically. Nico hasn't taken my car keys. They're still in my pocket, metal teeth pressing against my thigh like a reminder that the cage door isn't locked.
But leaving means abandoning Ethan.
Accept my terms by morning, or spend the rest of your life wondering what happened to him.
The words loop through my mind on repeat, a recording I can't stop playing.
Nobody leaves the Serratore estate until they are allowed to leave. Not because the doors are locked, but because the consequences of walking through them are worse than staying. I learned that lesson years ago, and the knowledge sits in my bones like marrow.
I lie on the bed fully clothed. The sheets are Egyptian cotton, and every thread of comfort feels like mockery.
Sleep doesn't come. Every time I close my eyes, the dream from the hotel room lurks at the edges—Dante's hands, Dante's mouth, the desk beneath my back. I refuse to let him find me again, even in my own subconscious.
The ceiling offers no answers. The silence offers no peace. I get up, cross to the window, and push it open. Below me, the garden spreads in silver and shadow, moonlight turning every leaf into a blade.
Before I can talk myself out of it, I slip off my shoes and climb through the window.
***
The night air carries jasmine so thick it feels like breathing through memory.
I walk barefoot through paths I know by heart, grass cool beneath my soles. The wisteria cascades overhead in pale curtains. The roses I planted along the eastern wall have grown wild, thorns catching moonlight like warnings.
I reach the gazebo at the garden's far end and find I'm not alone.
Luca Ferrante sits on the bench with a bottle of whiskey, no glass, drinking with the steady rhythm of a man who does this often. Broad-shouldered, light brown hair falling across his forehead, a face more rugged than handsome—broken nose, strong brow, a mouth that rests serious but shifts entirely when he speaks.
He's in a plain shirt and work boots. No suit, no pretense. He looks like the only honest thing inside these walls.
He glances up when my shadow crosses the gazebo steps and offers me the bottle without preamble.
"Couldn't sleep either," he says. Not a question.
I take the bottle and sit beside him on the bench. The whiskey burns going down, and I welcome the heat.
"Insomnia seems to be a house specialty," I reply, passing the bottle back.
"One of many." He takes a drink, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. "Heard you had dinner with Nico."
"News travels fast."
"Small estate. Lots of ears." His hazel eyes find mine in the darkness, and the concern in them is so genuine it makes my chest ache. "You want to tell me what happened, or should I guess?"
I laugh, and the sound comes out brittle. "He made me an offer."
"What kind of offer?"
"The kind that involves thirty days in his bed and my fiancé's life as collateral."
Luca's expression tightens, jaw going hard beneath the scruff. He takes another drink before he speaks, and when he does, his voice carries the weight of something he's been holding for a long time.
"Everybody in this house knows that the bastard has been in love with you since the night Dante brought you home."
The word lands like a stone dropped into still water. Everybody. Which means the guards know. The staff knows. Vittoria knows.
Dante knows.
"And nobody thought to mention it?" I ask, though the bitterness tastes familiar.
"What would mentioning it have changed?" Luca's shoulder lifts in a shrug that holds no dismissal, only exhaustion. "You were Dante's. Nico's feelings were his problem, not yours."
I want to be surprised, but the truth is uglier than that. I felt it too—the pull, the current that ran between us in quiet moments when Dante wasn't watching.
I buried it so deep I convinced myself it didn't exist, because wanting one Serratore brother was already destroying me. Wanting two would have been my complete undoing.
I pull my knees up to my chest, making myself smaller on the bench. "What do you think I should do?"
He doesn't answer directly. Instead, he stares at the bottle in his hands like it holds scripture.
"My father left debts when he died," he says quietly. "The kind you don't pay off with money. I was fifteen when the Serratores absorbed me. Never chose this life, spent fifteen years serving men who own me because the alternative was watching my mother lose everything."
My chest tightens at the image of a fifteen-year-old boy standing in this very estate, learning that his life no longer belonged to him. I had eighteen months in this gilded prison and thought I understood captivity. Luca has had fifteen years, and he's still here, still serving, still finding ways to be kind in a house that rewards cruelty.
And yet he somehow managed to become Dante’s best friend.
He looks at me, and his compassion is quiet and specific—not comparing our situations, just acknowledging shared geography. "I know what it means to make choices inside a cage."
The confession settles between us, intimate and painful. I tip my head back and ask the question to the stars more than to him.
"Why me? Why does this world keep pulling me back no matter how far I run?"
Luca is quiet for a long moment. When I look at him, he's watching me with an expression I can't quite read—tender and careful and dangerously close to something that shouldn't exist between us.
"You should look in a mirror sometime," he says simply.
The words touch a raw nerve—genuine warmth from a man I trust, aimed at a woman who belongs, at least in theory, to his best friend's brother.
I need to redirect. I need to restore the safe ground we've been standing on before it crumbles beneath both of us.
"I know a girl you'd like," I say, forcing lightness into my voice. "My friend Sofia. Warm, fierce, protective. The kind of woman who holds strangers' hands through the worst moments of their lives."
Luca takes a slow drink. The moonlight catches the angle of his jaw, the serious set of his mouth.
"I already like someone," he says.
"Yeah?" I turn toward him, grateful for the shift. "What's she like?"
He doesn't look away. His eyes hold mine with an intensity that makes my breath catch, and when he speaks, each word lands with terrible precision.
"Dark hair. Waves that fall past her shoulders. A scar across her left palm that she got the night everything changed." His voice drops lower, rougher. "The kind of laugh that makes a man forget which family owns his life."
The description settles over me like a second skin, and recognition dawns with the slow horror of watching a car crash in real time.
He's describing me.