The drive takes three hours. The dream keeps surfacing — his voice, his hands, the devastating weight of him — until I turn the radio loud enough to drown it beneath static and noise.
The gates appear through the cypress corridor, and the guards are new. Two men I've never seen, standing with the squared posture of soldiers who take their post seriously.
Neither one reaches for the gate controls.
"Private property," the taller one says, his hand resting on the gate rail with practiced indifference. "Turn around."
I stare at him through the open window, and for a moment I am the woman I've been — a caterer from Naples who says ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and doesn't make demands of men carrying weapons beneath their jackets.
That woman would apologize. That woman would explain herself.
That woman doesn't get through this gate.
I kill the engine. Let the silence settle. When I speak, my voice drops to a register I haven't used since I walked these grounds — low, unhurried, stripped of every ‘please’ I've learned to offer the civilian world.
"Radio Dante Serratore. Tell him Arianna Ferretti is at his gate. And if you make me say it twice, I promise you won't enjoy learning how he handles men who waste my time."
He studies me for a long beat before his hand moves to the radio.
Thirty seconds later the gates swing open, and the gravel crunches beneath my tires.
The foyer looks the same. Marble floors, the painting of the Amalfi coast I once told Dante I loved, fresh flowers on the entry table that someone still arranges daily. Everything is preserved, as if time froze when I left.
Or as if my absence didn't matter enough to change a single vase.
A woman I've never seen — mid-forties, dark hair pinned back — steps from the hallway with her hands clasped. "Miss Ferretti, if you'll follow me, I can take you to…"
"I know where his study is."
The words come out with a command that doesn't belong to me. It belongs to the woman I was inside these walls, the one who owned its corridors. The housekeeper steps back without argument, and I hate how naturally the old posture fits.
The study door is open, Dante sits behind the desk. Dark suit, dark eyes, the coiled stillness that makes the air feel thinner.
He doesn't stand when I enter.
"Coffee?" he asks, and the casualness of it — the sheer audacity — makes my molars press together so hard my jaw aches.
"No."
"Then to what do I owe the pleasure, Arianna?"
"You took him." I lay it flat, without preamble. "Ethan. My fiancé. I have security footage from the hotel corridor — two men, wearing a Serratore ring. Your crest, your soldiers. So don't sit there and offer me coffee. You took him."
His expression doesn't shift as he leans back with his fingers laced and regards me with the measured patience of a man being accused of a crime he finds beneath him.
"I didn't take your fiancé."
"Bullshit."
"I have no interest in a man named Ethan Cole." Each word placed with the precision of a surgeon setting bone. "I don't know him, I don't care about him."
"Then explain the ring. Explain why a man wearing your goddamn family crest was dragging Ethan through a service corridor at three in the morning."
"Anyone can buy a ring, Arianna."
"Not that ring." I lean forward, and the fury I've compressed for three days sharpens my voice. "I lived in this house for eighteen months, I know what that crest looks like, I know how your men carry themselves. That was Serratore."
He studies me, and I catalogue against my will how devastatingly unchanged he is.
The sharp jaw, eyes so dark they swallow lamplight. The way his hands rest on the desk with coiled stillness. Two years apart have not softened him. If anything, they have honed whatever it is about Dante that makes a room feel like it is shrinking.
"You drove three hours to accuse me," he says quietly. "You could have called."
I don't answer. I should have called. A phone call is distance, control, the ability to hang up when his voice does the thing it always does to the base of my spine.
I drove three hours because a phone call would have been smarter, and the part of me that makes smart decisions about Dante died somewhere on the road between Naples and these gates.
I wanted to see him.
The admission lives in my chest like a coal I refuse to blow on, but it's there, glowing, and the dream is still warm beneath my skin.
"The police are useless and you are not," I say instead, skipping past his question like it never existed. "That doesn't mean I trust you. It means I'm out of options."
He studies me for a long beat. Then he rises, and the motion is so fluid it barely disturbs the air — around the desk, slow, deliberate, with the unhurried certainty of a man who has never once had to chase anything.
As if he heard the thought I didn't speak.
As if the wanting I'm holding behind my teeth has its own frequency and he's tuned to it the way he's always been tuned to it.
As if he’s reading the signals my body broadcasts while my mouth says the opposite.
He stops directly in front of my chair, close enough that I have to tilt my head up, and the angle puts his desk in my peripheral vision.
The same desk, the same surface, and the dream crashes through me with such visceral clarity that I feel the phantom edge of it pressed against my back. Feel his weight, feel my own legs wrapped around him, his hands…
My throat tightens. He can't possibly know what I dreamed.
But the way he's looking down at me — the way his gaze moves across my face with slow, deliberate hunger — tells me he doesn't need to know. He's remembering his own version.
His hand rises slowly, giving me time, opportunity to pull away that I don't use.
"I missed you," he says.
His fingers brush my jaw and tilt my face toward his. The touch is featherlight and devastating — his thumb tracing the curve of my cheekbone with the careful reverence of a man handling a thing he broke and never learned how to repair.
The air compresses as his eyes drop to my mouth, and I feel myself leaning forward with a gravity my mind is screaming at my body to resist.
When the study door opens, a woman stands in the doorway — dark auburn hair swept into an immaculate twist, silk blouse, tailored trousers, green eyes moving between us with the clinical precision of a woman cataloguing evidence she will use later.
Vittoria. His wife.
Her gaze lands on Dante's hand, still touching my face, and a smile curves her mouth.
Not warm. Not angry. Measured, the way a chess player smiles when the board confirms a suspicion.
"Darling," she says, addressing Dante without looking away from me. "I didn't realize we had company."