Arianna’s POV
The body keeps a different ledger than the mind — and the body never lies about what it enjoyed, no matter how loudly the mind protests the accounting.
I move through the estate with the careful gait of a woman cataloguing what hurts and refusing to name why. The soreness is specific, precise, mapped across my hips where Nico's fingers gripped too hard, along the inside of my thighs where his stubble scraped sensitive skin, at the base of my throat where his mouth left marks I will have to cover.
I enjoyed it. God help me, I enjoyed every devastating second of it.
The admission lives in my chest like a confession I refuse to speak aloud. I would sooner walk barefoot across the estate's gravel drive than admit to Nico Serratore that his hands did anything other than fulfill a contractual obligation.
I leave the guest room with my composure rebuilt and my body quietly betraying me with every step. The west wing corridor stretches ahead of me when a hand closes around my arm and pulls me through a doorway.
The room is dim, curtains drawn against the morning. But I know before I turn around. I know from the grip itself, the way those fingers wrap around my arm with absolute stillness rather than restless energy.
Nico's touch is always in motion, searching, demanding. This grip is patient. Certain. A hand that has held me a thousand times and remembers exactly how much pressure my body will accept.
Dante.
He stands between me and the exit, jacket discarded, shirt untucked, the meticulous armor stripped down to raw edges. Dark circles shadow his eyes, and the careful composure I have always associated with Dante Serratore has cracked into fragments I barely recognize.
My treacherous body responds before my mind can intervene. Heat blooms low in my stomach, my pulse kicks against my throat, and every nerve ending that should be exhausted from last night suddenly remembers what this man used to do to me.
The wanting I buried for two years claws its way to the surface, and I hate it.
"How was he?" The question comes out rough, scraped from somewhere deep. "My brother. How was he?"
I stare at him, caught between the absurdity of the question and the fury it ignites, even as my body leans toward him like a plant seeking sun.
"You have no right to ask me that." My voice carries an edge I do not try to soften. "You insisted on being part of this arrangement, Dante. You demanded your way into the deal. So do not stand here now acting wounded that your brother got to me first."
"He should not have." His jaw tightens, and the possessiveness in his voice is so familiar it aches. "You were mine long before you were ever his."
"I am not yours." The words come out sharper than I intend, because my body is screaming the opposite. "I stopped being yours the night you chose Vittoria. You do not get to reclaim territory you abandoned."
"Territory." He steps closer, and the proximity makes my breath catch despite every rational thought screaming at me to maintain distance. "Is that what you think you are to me?"
"That is what I am to all of you. A prize to be divided, a spoil to be shared." I step toward him, anger and desire tangling into a knot I cannot separate. "You wanted into this arrangement so badly, congratulations. You are in it. But you do not get to dictate the order in which I fulfill my obligations."
"Did you enjoy it?" The question is brutal, deliberately cruel, designed to wound because he is already bleeding. "Did he make you forget, even for a moment, that you used to make those sounds for me?"
"Get out of my way, Dante."
"Answer the question."
"I do not owe you answers." I try to move past him, but his hand catches my arm again, and the contact sends lightning racing through my veins. My body arches toward him without permission, remembering every night he pinned me against walls just like this one. "Whatever we were ended two years ago when you chose your family's alliance over me."
"Arianna." My name breaks in his mouth. "I could not sleep. I lay in my bed, in the room I share with Vittoria on the nights she bothers to occupy it, and I listened to the silence from my brother's wing. And my imagination filled that silence with sounds that nearly drove me out of my mind."
The admission costs him. I can see the price of it in the way his jaw works, the way his hands grip the back of a chair like he needs to hold onto anything that is not me.
And God help me, part of me wants to close the distance between us, wants to press my mouth against the pulse hammering in his throat.
Stop it. Stop wanting him. He destroyed you once already.
"That is the bed you built, Dante." I offer truth, the kind that cuts because it is meant to. "Literally, the marriage bed you climbed into when you chose Vittoria Santoro over the woman who begged you not to go through with it."
The memory surfaces with brutal clarity.
The night before his wedding. His study. I was wearing his shirt and nothing else, kneeling beside his chair. I offered to stand beside him through the family's disapproval, through whatever consequences followed.
I gave him everything I had, and he looked at me with those dark eyes and said the words that ended us: "It is already done."
"You made your choice," I continue, my voice cracking. "You chose duty over me. You told me you did not want children. When I asked if you would make me terminate a pregnancy, your silence answered for you. So do not stand here consumed by jealousy when you are the one who threw me away."
"I did not throw you away." His voice rises, control fracturing. "I tried to protect you from this life. I thought if I pushed you far enough, you would build something better."
"You do not get to decide what is better for me." I am shouting now, two years of buried fury finding its voice. "That is control, Dante. Not protection."
"And Nico's obsession is different?" His composure shatters completely, jealousy detonating into raw fury. "The man who kidnapped your fiancé, who blackmailed you into his bed? That is the man you let touch you?"
"At least he wanted me enough to take me." The words are cruel, designed to wound. "At least he did not hide behind duty and silence."
Dante's face twists into an expression I have never seen, and when he speaks, his voice fills the room with words that should never be spoken above a whisper inside walls that have ears.
"You want to talk about silence?" He steps toward me. "How about the silence you have been keeping for two years? The secret you carry in that scar across your palm?"
"Dante, stop."
"The night everything changed." He does not stop. The jealousy has broken something loose, and the words pour out like blood from a wound. "The night you killed a man."
The accusation fills the room, too loud, too reckless, echoing off walls that have listened to Serratore secrets for generations.
My hand connects with his face before the last syllable fades.