Dante read the message three times before his mind accepted that the words had once carried his name.
Do not confuse one night with importance. The money is for your silence. Disappear before morning.
Women like you always know the price.
The office around him seemed to lose its edges. The glass walls, the skyline, the polished desk, the muted gray carpet: everything blurred into something distant and useless. He could still hear Clara's voice from the call, but it reached him as if through deep water.
— Dante? Say something.
He could not.
For five years, he had built a version of that morning out of pride and fragments. Livia gone. Money missing from the bedside table. Valentina's soft voice saying she had warned him. His own anger, raw from vulnerability, needing somewhere to go. I
