I wake to daylight exposing the wreckage we made. The wardrobe doors hang crooked on their hinges. The desk sits at an angle it was never designed to occupy, its contents scattered across the floor like debris from an explosion. Plant soil grinds into the carpet near the window, a terracotta pot shattered beside the baseboard.
Dante is beside me, propped against the headboard with the watchful stillness of a man who has been lying there for hours. Waiting. His dark eyes track my face as consciousness settles, and I feel the shift before he speaks—the atmospheric change in the room, the way his body carries a different kind of tension.
Not desire. Purpose.
"Good morning," I murmur, stretching against sheets that smell like him, like us.
He does not return the greeting. His fingers find my wrist, his thumb pressing against the scar that runs across my palm. The touch is deliberate, weighted with intention.
"You still clutch this in your sleep," he says quietly. "After all this time."
I pull my hand back. "Old habits."
"It is not a habit." His voice carries the careful precision of a man who has rehearsed what comes next. "It is a wound you have never let heal. Because I never let you."
The words land strangely, and I sit up against the headboard, pulling the sheet around my body. "What are you talking about?"
"That night." He turns to face me fully, and I see the exhaustion beneath his composure—the dark circles, the tension in his jaw. He has been lying here for hours, building toward this moment. "The meeting that went wrong. We have never spoken about it properly, and I have let you carry something that was never yours to carry."
My stomach clenches. "Dante, stop."
"The man who died." He continues as if I haven't spoken, each word a stone dropped into still water. "The gun in your hands."
"I said stop." I sit up, pulling the sheet around my body like armor, but he does not stop. He never stops when he has decided something needs to happen.
"His name was Emilio Sforza."
The name lands in the center of my chest and detonates. Sforza. The family waging war against the Serratores. The escalating violence that has consumed the past two years. The attack on the estate that brought me back into this world.
"The patriarch of the Sforza dynasty," Dante continues, his eyes never leaving my face. "The man you believe you killed was the head of the family now trying to burn mine to the ground."
I cannot breathe. The weight of it descends on my chest with the crushing pressure of water closing over my head. Every piece of violence, every retaliation, every body dropped in the crossfire—all of it potentially traceable to a single gunshot in a room where I stood with a weapon in my shaking hands.
"That is not possible." My voice comes out strangled, unfamiliar. "You never told me who he was. You never said anything about the Sforzas."
"Because knowing would have destroyed you." He shifts toward me, and I flinch back against the headboard. "You were already drowning in guilt. Adding his name, his family, the consequences—it would have broken you completely."
"So you let me carry it blind instead." The fury builds beneath my ribs, hot and sharp. "You let me believe I murdered a man without even knowing why he had to die."
"Arianna." His hand reaches for my face, and I jerk away. "Your bullet did not kill him."
The words do not register. I stare at him, waiting for the rest of the sentence, waiting for the qualifier that will make it make sense.
"You fired," he says quietly. "The recoil in your wrists, the gun kicking back, the sound—all of that was real. But you missed. Your bullet hit the wall six inches to the left of his head."
"That is not possible." I am shaking now, tremors running through my shoulders and down my arms. "I saw him fall. I watched him die."
"I fired in the same second." His voice carries the flat, unsparing honesty of a man who has had two years to examine his own monstrousness. "The report of my gun masked yours. The bullets arrived together. He fell to my bullet, Arianna. Not yours. We had different guns."
The room tilts. I grip the sheets to anchor myself, but nothing feels solid anymore.
"You let me believe I was a murderer." The words tear out of me, ragged and raw. "For two years, Dante. Two years of nightmares and running and the therapy I could not seek because the crime was unspeakable. Two years of building an entire life on top of a guilt that did not belong to me."
"I know."
"Why?" The question emerges as a sound beneath language, guttural and desperate. "Why would you do that to someone you claimed to love?"
He does not flinch. He does not look away. He meets my eyes with the steady gaze of a man who has long since stopped protecting himself from his own ugliness.
"Because I thought your guilt would overrule your reluctance to accept my marriage to Vittoria." Each word is precise, surgical, delivered without excuse or softening. "If you believed you were bound to me by blood, you would stay. You would accept being second. You would need me too much to leave."
I hit him.
I strike his chest, his shoulders, his arms, and the blows are not strategic or composed. They are the uncontrolled release of two years of guilt and nightmares and the miles I ran to outpace a dead man's face.
He does not block. He does not deflect. He does not catch my wrists and pin them down the way he has pinned everything else in his life. He absorbs every blow with the stillness of a man who knows he earned each one.
The tears come against my will—furious, hot, torn from my body rather than shed. I am crying and hitting him and the sounds I make are not words but grief and rage woven together into a frequency I have never produced before.
"You made me hate myself." The accusation arrives between sobs. "You watched me spiral and suffer and you said nothing because it served you. Because keeping me broken kept me close."
"Yes," he says simply.
The admission shatters something inside me that I did not know was still intact.
I pull on clothes without looking—his shirt, my jeans, whatever my hands find first. He does not try to stop me. He sits on the bed with my handprints blooming red across his chest and watches me dress with an expression I cannot read and do not want to understand.
I shove past him and move through the estate with blind, desperate momentum. The corridors blur around me. The guards watch me pass with expressions that suggest they have been instructed to let me go. Every door opens. Every path clears.
The walls themselves seem to step aside as I run.