Vittoria Santoro is more devastating in person than in photographs, and I have studied the photographs with the dedication of a woman performing her own autopsy.
Dante's hand falls from my face. Not quickly — deliberately, as if guilt is a performance he refuses to give either of us. But the moment shatters anyway, and I'm left standing in the ruins of it with my face burning and my pulse hammering against the walls of my throat.
"Vittoria." Dante's voice carries no surprise, no apology. He says his wife's name the way he'd acknowledge a change in weather. "Arianna and I were discussing a matter."
"Clearly." She steps into the study, and the room rearranges itself around her.
Green eyes moving between Dante and me with the unhurried precision of a woman cataloguing evidence. Every line of her curated. A woman who understands that appearance is the first language of power.
"And what matter requires your hand on another woman's face, honey?"
Her smile is razor-thin and patient — not jealousy, but warning. This is her house, her husband, her territory, and I have just been caught wearing the expression of a woman who was two seconds from kissing him.
"It's not what it looks like," I say, and the words taste like ash because it is exactly what it looked like, as well as every person in this room.
"I didn't ask what it looked like."
Vittoria's gaze travels down my wrinkled blouse, my travel-creased jeans, the dust still on my shoes. The assessment is thorough and devastating — the contrast between her silk and my rumpled cotton communicates everything her mouth doesn't.
"You've had a long drive, I imagine. Would you like to freshen up? We have guest rooms perfectly adequate for women who arrive unannounced."
The politeness is exquisite. Every word wrapped in courtesy and lined with venom.
I've spent months studying this woman through a screen. Late nights scrolling Vittoria's Instagram with the obsessive focus of a detective building a case against herself.
Vittoria at charity galas in emerald silk. Vittoria in the Serratore garden — my garden — cutting roses in golden hour light. Vittoria beside Dante at formal dinners, his hand on the small of her back with the casual possession of a man who does not need to grip what already belongs to him.
The worst part was discovering she is not what I wanted her to be. Not vapid. Not decorative. Her feed is curated with the strategic intelligence of a woman who wields image the way her husband wields silence.
I found it absurd — a mafia queen with a public Instagram — and then spent hours dissecting every caption. The absurdity belonged entirely to me.
"I don't need a guest room," I tell her. "I'm leaving."
"What a relief," Vittoria says warmly.
I walk out of the study with my spine straight and my hands clenched.
I should leave entirely. My car is in the drive, and every rational thought I possess points toward the front door. But my feet carry me through the side entrance and into the garden before my mind catches up.
It has been maintained. Every plant I chose, every arrangement I designed — someone kept it alive. The realization tightens my throat because it means Dante gave the order.
He let me walk away, never called, never followed, and kept my garden breathing as if I might come back.
I'm standing beneath the wisteria, fingers tracing a vine I remember as a cutting, when I hear footsteps. Not Dante's — I know his walk, deliberate and measured. These are lighter, quicker, accompanied by low, tuneless whistling that stops the moment I turn.
Nico rounds the corner and freezes. Dante’s twin brother.
The surprise on his face shifts to delight — genuine, warm, infectious. He looks exactly like Dante and nothing like Dante simultaneously. The same dark eyes, the same sharp jaw, the same frame built from angles.
But where Dante is absolute stillness, Nico is kinetic energy barely contained — dark hair pushed back with careless fingers, shirt collar open, sleeves rolled to the forearms, and a grin spreading across features that on his brother would never bend that way.
"Arianna Ferretti." He says my name like a toast. "Standing in my garden."
"It was my garden first," I say, and the ease of it catches me off guard.
As if no time has passed, as if I'm still the woman who used to find him here on spring mornings and talk for an hour about anything that wasn't the family business.
"Fair point, I just water it sometimes." He shoves his hands in his pockets. "You look good, Ari. Exhausted and furious, but good."
"Flattery isn't going to make me forget you have your brother's face."
He laughs — open and real. During the time I lived here, Nico was the relief valve I didn't know I needed. Never a chess match, never a negotiation.
"So what brings Arianna Ferretti back to the lion's den?" He tilts his head, studying me with a perceptiveness his grin works hard to disguise.
"My fiancé was taken." The words come out steadier than I expect, worn smooth from repetition over the past three days. "From his hotel room, the night before our wedding. I have security footage showing men wearing Serratore rings."
Nico's grin fades. Not all at once — it retreats in stages, the warmth cooling degree by degree until the face looking back at me is serious in a way I've rarely seen on him. "And you came here thinking Dante did it."
"I came here knowing Dante's crest was on the hand of the man who dragged Ethan through a service corridor at three in the morning."
"What did my brother say?"
"He denied it. Sat behind his desk and told me he has no interest in a man named Ethan Cole." The bitterness tastes fresh every time I replay it. "Very convincing. Very Dante."
Nico is quiet for a moment, his fingers absently tracing the edge of a leaf on the pergola vine. The restless energy that usually radiates from him has gone still, and the stillness on his frame is unsettling — too close to his brother's, too close to the face I just left in that study.
"Do you believe him?" he asks.
"I don't know what I believe. The footage is real. The ring is real. His denial is..." I press my scarred palm against my thigh. "His denial is Dante. And Dante has never had trouble lying to my face when it served him."
"Stay for dinner," he says, and the shift is so abrupt it takes me a beat to catch up. He leans against the pergola post, and the grin returns — dimmer now, but deliberate. "Just you and me, the east wing, a bottle of that Barolo you used to steal from Dante's cabinet. We can talk through it properly."
The offer is oxygen after the suffocating pressure of Dante's study and Vittoria's smile. But I'm exhausted and raw, and the dream is still pulsing beneath my skin, and I cannot sit across from Dante's face worn by another man and trust myself to keep boundaries I've spent three days pretending I still have.
"I can't, Nico. I need to figure out what comes next, and I can't do that inside these walls."
"You always could think better outside the estate." He nods slowly, the grin dimming to a quieter smile. "I remember that about you."
I turn toward the path that leads to the front drive, and his voice follows me.
"Arianna."
I stop. Nico's smile hasn't left his face, but behind his eyes, a shift — a calculation, a decision settling into place, a card he'd planned to play over wine and candlelight now laid bare beneath the open sky.
"I know where Ethan is."