The body remembers roads the mind swears it forgot.
I drive through the countryside outside Naples with white knuckles on the wheel, and every kilometer strips away another layer of the lie I've been telling myself: that this place, this man, holds no power over me anymore.
I used to take this drive with the windows down and Dante's hand on my thigh. His thumb tracing lazy circles that made concentration impossible while he conducted business on the phone in that low, dangerous voice I loved.
The Serratore estate rises from the hills like something out of a fever dream—all iron gates and old stone. The gates swing open without me saying a word.
He knows I'm here.
Of course he does. Dante knows everything.
The gravel crunches under my tires while my hands are shaking on the wheel, heart is a fist against my ribs.
This is for Ethan. Only for Ethan.
I step out of the car, and the front door opens. Not a guard. Not a servant.
Him.
Dante Serratore stands in the doorway like he was waiting for me. Like he's been waiting for two years.
Six-foot-two of coiled violence in a charcoal suit so perfectly cut it looks like armor. Sharp jaw that could cut glass. Cheekbones that belong on a cathedral sculpture and eyes so dark they don't reflect light—they consume it.
He guides me without a word to his study that I still remember so well. The familiar leather chairs, the window overlooking the garden. The desk where he used to work while I curled in the corner with a book, or where he used to bend me over and…
No, not going there.
"Drink?" He moves to the bar cart like we're old friends catching up.
"No."
He pours two anyway, setting one in front of me on the desk. I don't touch it.
"I have security footage," I say, and my voice is steadier than I expected. "From the hotel corridor outside Ethan's room. There was Ermanno."
"I know." He doesn't flinch. Doesn't even blink. Just settles behind his desk with his fingers laced and his expression carved from marble. "I sent him."
The admission lands without ceremony. No dramatic pause, no lowered gaze, no trace of guilt softening the edges of his voice, the way he'd confirm a dinner reservation.
"You sent him." I repeat it slowly, because my brain is still processing. "You had my fiancé kidnapped."
"I had him removed." The distinction clearly matters to him. "There's a difference."
"The fuck there is…"
"I wasn't going to watch you marry a man who doesn't know the first thing about who you really are." His voice is cold. Clinical. "A man who looks at you and sees some sanitized version you've performed for him. A safe little wife for a safe little life."
"You don't get to decide that."
"And yet here we are."
He tilts his head, studying me with the focus I remember from nights when he'd read my mood before I'd finished forming it myself.
"You came here expecting me to deny it. And now that I've handed you the confirmation you wanted, you don't know what to do with it, because the fury you brought through that door isn't about your fiancé at all."
"It is about Ethan." My voice hardens around his name, and I hold it there deliberately — a shield between us, a reminder of the life I built without him. "Ethan, who is missing because of you. Ethan, who has done nothing to deserve—"
"Say his name again." Dante rises from the desk. Not fast. Slow. Deliberate. The walk of a man who has never once had to chase anything. "Go ahead. Say it as many times as you need to. Tell me about the man you chose instead."
I stand. "Ethan is…"
"Gone." He stops a foot from me. Close enough that the heat from his body reaches my skin. "And you didn't call a lawyer. You came to me, so let's stop pretending this is about him."
"It is about him."
"Then why are you shaking?"
I'm not. Definitely.
I look down at my hands. I am. Shit.
I stand up and step forward. "You think I came here because I missed you? You think I spent two years rebuilding my life from the wreckage you made…"
"Wreckage I made." His jaw tightens. "You left in the middle of the night with one bag and no note. You left, and I let you, and every day since has been…"
He stops, pulling the sentence back behind his teeth.
"Every day since has been what?" His gaze falls to my mouth, and the hunger in his eyes is so exposed I feel it settle low in the base of my spine. "Finish the damn sentence, Dante."
"Every day since has been a negotiation," he says, barely above a whisper, "between the part of me that runs this family and the part of me that would burn this entire empire to the ground if it meant you'd walk back through that door."
The air compresses until it becomes pressure against my ribs. His breathing and mine are synchronizing, falling into the old cadence that used to keep me awake, the one that made me feel like my heartbeat belonged to someone else.
"Take off his ring," he says.
"No."
He reaches for my hand and I let him. He lifts it between us and his thumb presses into my palm, into the scar from the night we both refuse to name. The contact sends a current through me so violent my breath leaves in a rush.
"You feel that," he says. His other hand finds my waist, pulls me the remaining inch, and the full contact of his body against mine after years is so devastating my vision whites at the edges. "You feel everything, you always have… That's why you ran."
"I didn’t run." My hands are on his chest now—when did that happen? "I escaped."
"You escaped so thoroughly…" His mouth is at my ear, voice vibrating against my skin, "That you're here, in my study. Trembling under my hands like you never left."
"I hate you."
"I know." His lips brush the shell of my ear. "But you still want me anyway."
It's not a question, it's a fact. And I can't deny it because my body is already betraying me—arching into him, hands fisting in his shirt, breath coming in short gasps that sound too much like need. "Dante…"
"Say it again." His mouth moves to my jaw. My throat. The spot below my ear that he knows—God, he still knows—will completely undo me. "Say my name like that again."
I shouldn't. This is wrong, Ethan is missing, and yet I'm here letting the man who took him touch me like he has the right. But when his mouth finds that spot on my neck a sound escapes me that's pure surrender.
"What a victory, Arianna." He smiles against my skin. "What a testament to how completely you moved on."
"Shut up."
"Make me."
I kiss him. Or he kisses me — the distinction dissolves, because it isn't a choice, it's a detonation. Two years of silence collapsing into a single annihilating point of contact. The sound I make is low and raw and pulled from a place I thought I'd sealed shut.
I grab his shirt with both fists and drag him into me. He lifts me onto the desk in one smooth motion—papers and pens scattering—and I wrap my legs around him, pulling him between my thighs.
His mouth finds mine and the kiss is nothing like gentle. It's teeth and desperation and forced distance imploding into this single point of contact.
I taste scotch and anger and something underneath that's just him—the flavor I've tried to forget, tried to replace, tried to pretend didn't ruin every other kiss for the rest of my life.
His hands are everywhere. My waist. My ribs. His hand slides lower—beneath fabric, beneath lace—and when his fingers find me already wet…
I wake gasping and for three disorienting seconds I don't know where I am.
I press my palms against my eyes and force air into lungs that have forgotten how breathing works.
My skin is damp. My pulse is a riot. And between my legs, an ache so sharp and specific it takes several humiliating seconds to understand that none of it was real.
Not the study. Not his hands. Not the desk beneath me or the weight of him or the sound I made when his mouth found my throat.
I sit on the edge of the bed and grip the mattress until the vertigo passes.
This is what I was afraid of. Not Dante's anger or his cruelty or the empire he commands with a silence more terrifying than any raised voice. This — the wanting.
The need that lived in my bloodstream for years and apparently never left, just burrowed deeper, hibernating beneath the ordinary life I built on top of it like a house on a fault line.
The decision I deferred last night has made itself through a dream that dismantled every wall I constructed.
I have to go to him. Not because I'm ready. Because I will never be ready, and Ethan doesn't have time for me to pretend otherwise.