The woman in the mirror is someone I am beginning not to recognize.
Steam clings to the bathroom glass, and I wipe a clear streak through it, studying the reflection that stares back. The mark on my collarbone from Nico's mouth has faded to purple, and the shadows under my eyes speak of nights that blur together.
I look like a woman losing track of which role she is playing.
I wrap a towel around my body and step into the bedroom. Nico is still in bed, propped against the headboard, watching me with that lazy smile that makes my stomach tighten in ways I resent. His hair is sleep-mussed. He looks younger like this, disarmed.
I remind myself that disarmed is not the same as harmless.
"You're still here," I say, keeping my voice neutral.
"Someone stole all the covers." His smile widens. "Thought I'd wait for an apology."
Despite myself, I feel the corner of my mouth twitch. "Bold accusation from a man who radiates heat like a furnace. I was sweating."
"Interesting." He shifts against the headboard, the sheet pooling at his waist, and I hate that my eyes track the movement. "You didn't seem to mind the heat last night."
"Last night I was delirious." I cross to the bed and sit on the edge, letting him see the hint of a smile I am only half fighting. "Temporary insanity. It won't hold up in court."
His hand finds my thigh, warm and familiar, and his thumb traces a lazy circle against my skin through the towel. "I have witnesses. Luca heard you from two rooms away."
"Luca did not—" I stop, heat crawling up my neck. "You're lying."
"Am I?" His grin turns wicked, and he tugs me closer until I am half-sprawled across his chest, the towel riding dangerously high. "I distinctly remember you screaming my name loud enough to—"
"I do not scream."
"You absolutely scream." He brushes hair from my face, and the tenderness beneath the teasing makes my chest ache. "It's my favorite sound in this entire goddamn house."
I should pull away. I should remember why I am here, remember that this ease between us is a lie built on coercion. But his fingers are in my hair now, and his dark eyes have gone soft, and for one treacherous moment I let myself sink into the warmth of him.
"Stay," he murmurs against my temple. "Just another hour. I'll make it worth your while."
"You're insatiable."
"Only for you." He tips my chin up, and his mouth hovers over mine, close enough that I feel his breath. "Say yes, Arianna. Give me one more hour before the world comes crashing back in."
The words pierce the haze. The real world is crashing back in.
Ethan is trapped somewhere while I lie here flirting with the man who put him there.
I pull back. The warmth drains from my body like water through a sieve.
"I want to see Ethan."
His hand stills against my skin.
"Arianna..."
"Five minutes. That's all I'm asking." My nails dig into my palms beneath the towel. "I need to know he's alive. I need to see him."
The softness in his face flickers. I watch him weigh my request, watch the calculation happen behind his eyes. He is always calculating. They all are.
"I can't do that."
"Can't or won't?"
"Does it matter?"
"It matters to me." I turn to face him fully. "I've been here for two weeks. I've held up my end of this arrangement. I've been in your bed, at your table, playing whatever part you needed me to play. When do I get something in return?"
"You get Ethan back at the end of thirty days. That was the deal."
"The deal was also that I wasn't doing this for a corpse."
His jaw tightens. "He's not a corpse."
"Prove it."
We stare at each other. The morning light catches the angles of his face, and I hate how handsome he is, hate how my body has learned to respond to his proximity even while my mind screams that he is the reason I am here at all.
"You don't trust me," he says quietly.
"You kidnapped my fiancé to force me into your bed. Trust wasn't part of the package."
The words land harder than I intended. I watch something shift in his expression, not quite hurt but close. I file the reaction away as useful information.
"I thought—" He stops, running a hand through his hair. "These past weeks, I thought we were building something real."
"We're building whatever you decide to let us build." I stand, clutching the towel. "That's how captivity works, Nico. The prisoner doesn't get to set the terms."
"You're not a prisoner."
"Then let us leave."
The silence that follows is a living thing. I watch his face, searching for a crack, a flinch, any sign that my words have landed somewhere soft. His jaw works once, twice. His fingers curl against the sheets where moments ago they were tangled in my hair.
The playful man who teased me about stolen covers has vanished entirely, replaced by someone harder, someone who wears his brother's face with an expression Dante would recognize.
I can hear my own heartbeat in the quiet, can hear the distant sound of gardeners working somewhere beyond the window, can hear the house settling around us like it is holding its breath.
He is not going to answer. He is going to let the silence speak for him, let the absence of words be its own kind of confirmation.
"That's what I thought." I move toward my clothes on the floor. "Dante would never keep me in the dark like this."
The name lands between us like a grenade. Nico goes very still. "What did you just say?"
"I said Dante would never—"
"I heard what you said." He rises from the bed, and the sudden absence of his warmth makes the room feel larger. "You're lying in my bed, asking me for something, and you throw Dante at me?"
"I'm not throwing anything. I'm stating a fact."
"You're comparing me to my brother." He pulls on clothes with sharp, angry movements. "The brother who married another. That's your standard for better treatment?"
"At least I knew where I stood with him."
"And where do you stand with me, Arianna?" He rounds on me, and the hurt beneath his anger is visible now, raw and bleeding. "After the way you touched me last night? Where do you stand?"
I hold his gaze and force myself not to flinch.
"I stand exactly where you put me. In your bed until you decide I've paid enough for my fiancé's freedom." I pull on my jeans, my shirt, armor against the vulnerability of the towel. "Don't mistake compliance for affection. Don't confuse what my body does with what I actually feel."
The words are crueler than I mean them to be. I watch them hit, watch Nico absorb the blow with the particular stillness of a man who has just had something important broken.
"You felt nothing," he says flatly. "Is that what you are saying?"
I should lie. I should commit to the cruelty, make myself into something cold and unreachable. It would be easier.
But I am tired, and he is looking at me with those dark eyes, and the truth slips out before I can stop it.
"I felt things I had no right to feel. That's the problem." I button my shirt with unsteady fingers. "I can't afford to feel them. Not when Ethan is God knows where, not when every day I spend here is a day I'm betraying the man I was supposed to marry."
"So you push me away."
"So I try to remember why I'm here."
He stares at me for a long moment. Then something in his expression hardens, closes off, a door slamming shut behind his eyes.
"Fine," he says quietly. "You want to remember why you're here? You want to feel like a prisoner instead of a—" He cuts himself off, shaking his head. "I'll make it easier for you."
"What does that mean?"
Nico does not answer. He walks to the door, opens it, and disappears into the corridor without looking back.