Every trap I've ever walked into smelled like a good idea at the time.
The dining room is one I've never seen — tucked into the east wing like a secret the estate keeps from its own hallways. Small, candlelit, the table set for two with the kind of care that belongs to a seduction, not a conversation.
Nico pulls my chair out with a flourish that irritates me more than it should, because I didn't agree to dinner, I agreed to the information. And the fact that it comes wrapped in linen napkins and a bottle of Barolo from Dante's private collection makes my teeth ache with the effort of not saying so.
"You're annoyed," Nico observes, settling across from me and filling my glass with the practiced ease of a man who has turned charm into a second language.
"I'm waiting," I corrected him.
"There really isn't any difference. Not with you."
He leans back, wineglass cradled loosely in his fingers, and the candlelight catches the angles of his face — Dante's face, rearranged into expressions his brother would never permit.
"You always did annoyance and impatience at the same frequency. Used to drive Dante insane."
"I didn't come here to talk about Dante."
"No. But that's where the story starts." He takes a slow sip, and the playfulness settles into a weight I haven't seen him carry before. "The night he brought you home… Do you remember what you were wearing?"
The question catches me sideways. "What does that have to do with Ethan?"
"Green dress," he says, as if I hadn't spoken. "Silk, I think. You were laughing at a joke Dante made — and Dante doesn't make jokes, so whatever he said, you were being generous."
His voice drops from the gravity of what he's pulling up.
"I was standing in the kitchen doorway, and I felt my entire chest rearrange itself around a woman I hadn't spoken a single word to."
I set my glass down without drinking. "Nico."
"Let me finish." He holds up a hand, gentle but firm. "You need to hear this, and I need to say it, and neither of us is going to enjoy it."
He tells me about the mornings. How he'd see me in the garden, and he'd invent reasons to walk past — a tool he didn't need, a question for the gardener who wasn't there. How he'd slow his pace to hold the sound of my voice a few seconds longer.
"You talked to the jasmine," he says, and the tenderness is real and I don't want it to be. "Full conversations, encouraging it to climb. I thought you were losing your mind until the thing actually reached the top of the wall."
Each detail lands with the precision of a blade slid between ribs — not because the memories are painful, but because they are mine. And he has been holding them without my knowledge or consent.
The garden I believed was my sanctuary. He was there the whole time, cataloguing, building a version of me inside his chest that I never agreed to inhabit.
"The night you left," he continues, stripped of charm now. "I looked out my window and saw you crossing the courtyard with one bag. And I wanted to run after you so badly I gripped the windowsill until my knuckles split."
"Why didn't you?"
"Because you weren't leaving me, you were leaving him. And I had no right to make your exit about what I wanted." He meets my eyes. "That was the only noble thing I've ever done, and it nearly killed me."
The warmth of what we had — the easy friendship, the laughter, the afternoons where he made me feel like a person instead of a possession — curdles as the truth reshapes it.
Every joke, every manufactured encounter by the hedge was a man circling what he wanted with the patience of a predator who understood that rushing would ruin everything.
"Enough." The word comes out sharp enough to slice the candlelit air between us. "I don't care about the green dress or the garden or the months you spent memorizing my routine. I need to know where Ethan is. Now. Not after you've finished narrating the Serratore brothers' tragedy."
The playfulness drains from his face. What replaces it is rawer and harder — the scaffolding beneath the charm he's been hiding behind for as long as I've known him.
"Dante didn't take him, indeed." Nico says. "I did."
My wineglass stops halfway to my mouth. The candlelight is suddenly too warm, the walls suddenly too close.
"What did you say?"
"I took Ethan." He doesn't flinch.
The confession comes with the terrible clarity of words rehearsed until they've lost their edges.
"I watched you build a life with a man who will never understand the first real thing about you, and the thought of you marrying him drove me to do a thing I won't apologize for."
The fury arrives first, white-hot, flooding through my chest. Then disbelief.
And beneath both — betrayal, deep and specific, because I came to this estate convinced Dante was the villain, and the answer was sitting across from me pouring my favorite wine and confessing love.
"Release him." My voice is a controlled demolition. "Tonight. You pick up your phone and Ethan walks free."
"It's not that simple."
"Make it simple."
He sets his glass down and folds his hands on the table. The man looking back at me is neither the charming twin nor the wounded romantic — he is a Serratore, and the family name fits him with a precision I never wanted to see.
"One month," he says. "Thirty days at this estate. In my bed."
The words land between us like a grenade with the pin already pulled. "You are insane."
"I know you feel it too, Ari. I'm not asking for love. I'm not delusional enough to think I can manufacture that in a month." He holds my gaze with a steadiness that makes my pulse hammer. "I'm asking for time. Thirty days to prove that what I'm offering is more than anything my brother ever gave you."
He leans forward, and the candlelight turns his eyes into Dante's eyes, and my hands grip the edge of the table until my knuckles blanch.
"At the end of thirty days, Ethan goes free. Unharmed. You have my word."