The worst skills are the ones you can't unlearn.
I drop Sofia at her hotel with promises I won't keep—promises to eat, to sleep, to take care of myself. By the time her silhouette disappears through the lobby doors, I've already turned the car back toward the Grand Hotel Vesuvio.
The security camera in Ethan's apartment building blinks behind my eyelids like a morse code I can't stop translating: Look. Look. Look.
So I'm looking.
The hotel lobby is nearly empty at this hour. Beside the corridor leading to the back offices, a security guard sits behind a small desk, scrolling his phone with the glazed focus of a man counting minutes until his shift ends.
Early twenties. Uniform a size too large in the shoulders, cinched with a belt that's been punched with an extra hole. Name tag says Diego. Bored. Underpaid.
I know what he wants before I reach him.
Not money — men like this don't respond to bribes from women. He wants to matter. He wants a woman in distress to look at him the way people look at men with authority and tell him that he, specifically, is the only one who can save her.
Dante taught me this. Not directly — he never delivered lectures on manipulation. But years inside his world is an education in reading people like a diagram: where the soft parts are, where to press, where to cut.
I hate that I'm good at this. I hate that the tremor I let creep into my lower lip is calibrated to the millimeter.
"I'm sorry to bother you…" I say, and my voice catches on ‘sorry’ in a way that makes his phone vanish into his pocket. "I know I shouldn't be asking, but I don't know where else to go."
He straightens. The slouch evaporates. "What's wrong? Are you okay?"
"My fiancé was taken from this hotel two nights ago. Room 412. The police came, filed their reports, and told me to wait." I pause, let the silence carry. "I've been waiting while nobody is looking for him."
"I heard about that," he says, leaning forward. "The trashed room on the fourth floor… The cops were here for like an hour."
"An hour." I let the word sit between us. "They gave his disappearance an hour."
His jaw tightens with borrowed indignation. "That's not right."
"It isn't." I step closer, drop my voice to a whisper. "I need to see the security footage from that night. The corridor outside his room. Please… you're the only person who can help me."
The performance takes less than three minutes.
He leads me to the security office — a closet-sized room crammed with monitors and the faint hum of hard drives — and pulls a chair out with the solemnity of a man who believes he's doing heroic work.
"I could get in trouble for this," he says, already pulling up the footage archive.
"I won't tell anyone. I just need to see."
He queues the recording. Fourth-floor corridor, camera covering the elevator bank and the hallway leading to room 412.
"Take your time," he says, and closes the door behind him.
I scan at double speed. Ethan arriving late afternoon, garment bag slung over his shoulder. He's smiling—God, he's smiling—probably thinking about tomorrow, about me, about the rest of our carefully planned life.
I watch him walk to room 412. Watch the door close behind him.
Then: nothing.
Hours of empty corridor. The timestamp crawls. Housekeeping at 10 PM. A drunk guest stumbling past at midnight. Long stretches of stillness broken only by the blue emergency lighting that makes everything look underwater.
2:47 AM. A figure appears at the far end of the corridor and my finger lifts off fast-forward as I lean closer to the screen.
Black clothing, face angled away from the camera with deliberate precision. Professional. Trained. The figure reaches room 412, and the door opens without resistance — a keycard, duplicated or stolen, not forced.
Four minutes inside that room, and then the door opens again. The figure exits with Ethan beside him — arm slung over the man's shoulders, head lolling forward, feet dragging in the loose, boneless shuffle of someone who's had far too much to drink.
The man adjusts his grip around Ethan's waist and steers him down the corridor with the unhurried ease of a friend walking a groom back to bed after a bachelor party that went too far. Anyone passing would glance once and look away.
Nothing to see. Nothing worth remembering. Just another bachelor party casualty.
My hands are shaking so badly the mouse jerks.
A second figure appears near the service elevator. Taller. Broader. Holding the door open with one hand, waiting. Then he shifts his weight, and for just a second—a fraction of a moment—his profile catches the light.
My breath stops, because I know that silhouette.
I rewind. Watch again. Pause on the frame where his face is partially visible.
The image is grainy, washed in that forensic blue that turns everyone into ghosts. But some things you don't forget. Some things are burned into your memory so deep that two years can't erase them.
The nose—broken once, never set quite right. The scar through the left eyebrow, a thin white line that disappears into his hairline. The particular way he stands—weight on his back foot, shoulders squared, like he's perpetually ready for a fight.
His left hand is visible for a single frame — a ring on the pinky finger, heavy silver, bearing a crest I can't fully resolve at this resolution. I don't need to. I've seen that ring on a hundred hands.
Every Serratore soldier wears one — the family crest stamped in silver, worn on the left pinky like a brand.
Ermanno. One of Dante's enforcers.
The one who drove me to galas and stood outside doors during meetings I wasn't supposed to hear. The man who once watched me for three hours at a restaurant because Dante was running late and didn't want me "unattended."
The man who told me, the night I left, that if I ever came back, he'd make sure I got to Dante safely.
If you ever come back.
The screen glows in the dark room, and the truth descends with the suffocating weight of a verdict.
He didn't let me go. He reached into the life I built without him and tore it apart.
I pick up my phone, his number is still there — filed under a single initial, D. Because two years ago I couldn't bring myself to delete it.
I told myself it was practical. Emergency access. Loose ends. The truth is that erasing those digits felt like a final amputation, and some part of me refused to complete the surgery.
My thumb hovers over the call button.
One tap. One tap, and two years of rebuilding collapse into rubble.
I put the phone down.
Not tonight. If I call him now — shaking, furious, raw — he'll hear every fracture in my voice. And Dante has always known how to weaponize the places where I break.
I walk out and thank the guard who watches me leave with the earnest concern of a man who believes he's changed the course of a life tonight. At reception I book a room, because I cannot sleep in the wreckage of Ethan's last night or a suite that reminds me of the bride that never was.
I lock the room door, set the phone on the nightstand screen-down, and lie back on the bed fully clothed. My shoes are still on. My hands have not stopped trembling since the footage.
Morning. In the morning, when the shaking stops.
When I can speak without the rage cracking every syllable. When I can face him without my body betraying every wall I've built since the night I walked away.
I close my eyes. But sleep, when it comes, brings no mercy — because even as exhaustion drags me under, I already know what the morning demands.
There is only one road that leads to Ethan, and it runs straight through the iron gates of the Serratore estate. Straight to Dante's door.