The only honest thing I ever built inside these walls deserves to die with everything else.
The garden house rises behind the pergola—a greenhouse of glass and iron where I stored tools and seedlings during the eighteen months I spent creating beauty inside ugliness.
I do not pause at the door. I move through it like a woman walking into a burning building with no intention of walking out.
The first plant comes out of its pot with a tearing sound that matches the one inside my chest. Soil scatters across the stone floor, dark and rich, the earth I knelt in while Dante watched from his study window.
I overturn trays of seedlings I nursed from cuttings, watching months of careful growth scatter like the life I thought I was building.
"I gave you everything." The words rip from my throat, aimed at no one, aimed at the ghost of every promise he ever made. "Every goddamn piece of myself, Dante. I knelt beside your fucking chair and begged you to choose me."
The jasmine comes next—the jasmine I planted along the south wall, the jasmine I talked to like a madwoman until it learned to climb. I tear it from the trellis with bare hands, and the stems slice my palms open.
New cuts cross the old scar, blood welling bright against skin, and I do not stop because the pain outside finally matches the devastation inside.
"You married her anyway." A terracotta pot shatters against the floor, shards exploding across the stone. "You stood in a church and promised yourself to Vittoria fucking Santoro, and then you chained me with a murder that never existed so I would stay shackled to you like some pathetic, broken thing."
The wisteria cuttings I raised from nothing are ripped from their containers and thrown into the wreckage. My voice breaks on the next scream, raw and guttural.
"Two years." I grab another pot and hurl it against the workbench. "Two goddamn years of nightmares and guilt and hating myself for what I thought I did, and it was all a fucking lie."
The greenhouse that I once kept immaculate—tools hung on hooks, pots organized by size, seedlings labeled in my own handwriting—transforms into carnage beneath my bleeding hands. I tear down everything I can reach, screaming until my throat burns.
The destruction ends when there is nothing left to destroy.
I stand in the wreckage—soil ground into my knees, cuts weeping across both palms, broken ceramic and torn roots covering the floor like the aftermath of a private apocalypse.
My breathing comes in ragged gasps. The hollow silence that follows is not relief. It is the ringing emptiness of a woman who has run out of things to break and must now face what remains.
I walk out of the greenhouse and keep walking.
Not toward the main house. Not toward my guest room. Not toward any of the doors that lead deeper into this estate. I walk toward the front gates with the blind momentum of a woman who has finally stopped calculating the cost of leaving.
The gravel crunches beneath my feet—the same sound from the day I arrived, the same cypress-lined drive, the same path I drove when I came back for Ethan. Soldiers watch me pass and do not move.
The gates rise ahead. I reach them, push through, and step onto the road outside the estate for the first time in weeks.
The air tastes different out here. Wider. Unowned.
I walk along the narrow country road without direction, without a plan, without a phone or keys or any of the practical scaffolding that holds a normal life together. I am a woman covered in soil and blood and the ruins of every lie I have ever believed, walking away from the only world that wants me, with nowhere to go.
The vehicle appears from behind—a black car moving too fast for this road. I hear it before I see it, and the part of me trained by eighteen months inside Dante's world registers the threat before my conscious mind catches up. The speed. The angle. The way the car decelerates not to pass but to intercept.
Doors open. Men emerge—not Serratore men. I do not recognize the faces, the build, the insignia on their jackets. They move with coordinated precision, and the encounter is fast and professional.
I fight because fighting is what I do when the world tries to put me somewhere I did not choose. My fist connects with a jaw, my elbow finds a sternum, but they are trained and numerous and my body is exhausted from the greenhouse and the night with Dante and the weeks of accumulated damage.
A hand covers my mouth. A hood descends. I am placed in the car, and the door closes, and the estate disappears behind me.
The drive is disorienting—turns I cannot track, a duration I cannot measure. When the hood is removed, I am standing in an unfamiliar space. A villa, a compound, somewhere that radiates wealth and authority but belongs to no family I recognize.
The men who took me are deferential—not to me, but to someone I cannot see. They do not bind me. They do not threaten. They escort me through a marble hallway and into a room furnished with the understated taste of someone who has money and does not need to prove it.
Then they leave me there.
I hear footsteps, measured and unhurried. The door opens behind me, and a voice speaks my name.
A voice I have heard across pillows and breakfast tables and quiet Sunday afternoons.
I turn.
He stands in the doorway. The sandy brown hair I have run my fingers through a hundred times. The blue eyes that used to radiate warmth now carry a cold focus I have never seen.
"Ethan..."