Chapter 7
2187 Words
The morning did not bring light; it brought a gray, suffocating heaviness that pressed against the glass walls of the penthouse. Evelina woke up on the rug in the living room, her body stiff, her neck aching. The secure laptop sat on the floor beside her like a dormant landmine. The screen was black, but the image of her own face lying to Count Sforza was burned into her retinas.
She wasn’t just a prisoner anymore. She was leveraged against herself.
She dragged herself up, her joints popping. She felt hollowed out, scraped clean of hope. She walked to the kitchen, intending to drink water, but the elevator chime shattered the silence.
It wasn’t the soft, polite chime of a guest arrival. It was a low, industrial buzzer from the service lift.
The heavy steel doors at the far end of the suite, doors she hadn’t even noticed before, slid open with a grinding metal shriek.
Two men walked in. They were massive, wearing gray coveralls stained with grease and dust. They pushed a heavy, wheeled cart laden with wooden crates that smelled of damp earth and old basements. They didn’t look at Evelina. They looked like they moved bodies for a living, not art.
Dante followed them.
He was dressed in a charcoal sweater and dark trousers, looking rested, sharp, and infuriatingly calm. He held a tablet, his thumb scrolling casually.
“Living room,” Dante commanded the men. “Center. Do not scratch the floors.”
The men grunted and shoved the cart onto the pristine concrete.
Evelina stood by the kitchen island, hugging her arms around her chest. She felt exposed in yesterday’s wrinkled clothes.
“What is this?” she asked, her voice raspy.
Dante glanced at her. His eyes swept over her disheveled appearance with zero sympathy. “Work,” he said. “The London Collection arrived early. Shipment cleared customs at 4:00 AM.”
He walked over to the crates. He picked up a crowbar resting on the cart. With a violent, precise motion, he jammed the iron claw under the lid of the largest crate and wrenched it open. Wood splintered with a loud crack.
He didn’t look at the contents. He looked at Evelina.
“Come here.”
Evelina didn’t move. “I haven’t eaten. I haven’t changed.”
“Hunger sharpens the mind,” Dante said. “Come here.”
It was the tone he used for Sforza. The tone that said I own you.
Evelina walked toward him, her bare feet cold on the floor. She stopped five feet away.
“Look,” he said, gesturing to the crate.
Evelina peered inside. Nestled in straw and packing foam were four marble busts. Roman. Flavian dynasty, by the curl of the hair and the severe set of the jaws. They were dirty, covered in a layer of grime that spoke of decades in a damp cellar.
“They’re filthy,” she murmured, her curator’s instinct flaring despite her exhaustion.
“They are ‘fresh to market,’” Dante corrected. “Which means they have no paper trail.”
He tossed the crowbar onto the cart. The metal clang made her jump.
“This shipment contains twenty-four items,” Dante said. “Bronze coinage, four busts, two frieze fragments. The seller claims they have been in a private British family collection since 1920. That makes them legal to export.”
He wiped his hands on a rag one of the movers handed him.
“However,” Dante continued, his voice dropping lower, “I suspect the seller is lying. I suspect these pieces were dug up in Italy six months ago and smuggled through a Swiss freeport to clean the title. If I am right, buying them is a federal crime. If I am wrong, they are worth five million dollars.”
He threw the rag down. He walked up to Evelina, invading her personal space until she had to tilt her head back to meet his gaze.
“You are an expert in fraud now, Evelina,” he whispered, a cruel reminder of the night before. “You authenticated a fake for me. Now, I want you to find a fake for me.”
“You want me to prove they’re smuggled?” she asked.
“I want the truth,” Dante said. “I want you to find the link. The seller is ‘Archibald Holdings.’ A shell company. I want you to find who is behind it. I want you to tell me if I am buying art, or if I am buying a grand jury indictment.”
“I can’t do that from looking at a dirty statue,” Evelina argued. “I need provenance records. I need auction history. I need access to databases.”
“Exactly.”
Dante turned and walked to the main dining table, a slab of glass that looked like ice. He placed a laptop on it. Not the one with the blackmail video. A new one. Heavy, black, military grade.
“This terminal has Level 4 clearance,” Dante said. “It is connected to the Valenti internal server. It has access to the international auction archives, the Interpol stolen art database, and my private acquisition logs.”
He tapped the lid.
“I am giving you a window,” he said. “One hour. Sixty minutes. You will sit here. You will trace Archibald Holdings. You will verify the origin of these busts.”
Evelina looked at the laptop. It was a lifeline. Access to the outside world. Access to information.
“And if I find the truth?”
“Then you prove your utility,” Dante said. “And perhaps I’ll let you eat.”
“And if I use it to contact someone?” she asked, her heart skipping a beat. “If I email my sister? Or the police?”
Dante smiled. It was the smile of a shark in deep water.
“The keystrokes are monitored in real time by my security team downstairs,” he said softly. “If you type a single letter that isn’t a search query… if you open an email client… if you try to log into your social media… the connection severs instantly.”
He leaned in close, his breath warm on her cheek.
“And then I bring Chloe here,” he whispered. “Not to live. To watch.”
The threat was so visceral, so specific, that Evelina felt her knees buckle.
“Sit,” Dante commanded.
Evelina sat. The chair was hard. The laptop hummed with potential energy.
“The clock starts now,” Dante said. He checked his watch. “You have until 8:15 AM. Find the dirt, Evelina. Prove to me that you are worth the trouble I went through to acquire you.”
He turned and walked toward his study, the door clicking shut behind him.
Evelina was alone with the crates, the movers who stood like silent gargoyles in the corner, and the open laptop.
She stared at the screen.
Sixty minutes.
She could do the job. She could trace the shell company. She was good at this.
But as her fingers hovered over the keyboard, a different thought sparked in the back of her mind. A dangerous, treasonous thought.
He had given her Level 4 clearance. He had given her access to his private acquisition logs.
He thought she was broken. He thought the blackmail video had cowed her into submission. He thought she would be too terrified to look left or right.
He was wrong.
Evelina typed in the search bar. She didn’t type ‘Archibald Holdings.’
She typed: Thorne.
Her father’s name. Her family name. She needed to know the scope of the debt. She needed to know what else he had on them.
The screen is populated with files. Loan agreements. Interest calculations. The deed to the shop.
But there was another file. A sub folder linked to her father’s debt, but tagged with a different code.
Project OLYMPUS.
She frowned. What did her father’s dusty antique shop have to do with something called Olympus?
She glanced at the movers. They were bored, looking at their phones. They weren’t watching her screen.
She clicked the file.
It was password protected.
Damn it.
She checked the time. 52 minutes left.
She went back to the search bar. She typed Archibald. She had to do the work. She had to show progress. She pulled up the shell company’s registration documents. British Virgin Islands. Standard obfuscation.
She Alt Tabbed back to the Valenti server.
She needed a back door. She wasn’t a hacker, but she knew how archivists thought. They categorized things. They grouped them.
She searched for collateral.
A list appeared. Hundreds of names. Businesses seized. Assets liquidated.
She found Evelina Thorne.
Her file wasn’t listed under “Human Resources” or “Staff.”
It was listed under “High Value Assets / Leverage.”
She clicked it.
The file opened. It wasn’t just the contract. It was a dossier. Photos of her at the museum. Photos of her walking into the hospital. Photos of Chloe.
And a memo, dated two weeks ago.
Subject: Acquisition Strategy. Target: E. Thorne. Note: Subject is resilient. Financial pressure is insufficient. Leverage required: Sister. Isolate subject. Create dependency.
Evelina read the words, her breath catching in her throat.
Create dependency.
He hadn’t just reacted to her father’s debt. He had planned this. He had watched her. He had decided he wanted her, and then he had engineered the trap to catch her.
She felt sick. It wasn’t business. It was a hunt.
She scrolled down. There was a cross reference link at the bottom of her file.
See also: The Thorne Contingency.
She clicked it.
A warning box popped up. RESTRICTED ACCESS. LEVEL 5 CLEARANCE REQUIRED.
She tried to bypass it. The screen flickered.
A red banner flashed across the top of the monitor.
UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS ATTEMPT DETECTED.
Evelina froze. Her heart stopped.
He knows.
The door to the study didn’t just open; it flew open.
Dante was there. He had crossed the distance between the rooms before the echo of the door hitting the wall had faded.
He didn’t look calm anymore. He looked lethal.
He reached the table in three strides. He slammed the laptop shut, narrowly missing her fingers.
“I gave you a task,” he roared, his voice shaking the glass walls. “I gave you an order!”
Evelina scrambled back, her chair tipping over. She fell to the floor, scrambling away from him on her hands and knees.
“I was looking for the provenance!” she lied, her voice high and frantic. “I clicked the wrong folder! It was an accident!”
Dante grabbed her arm and hauled her up. He dragged her toward him, his fingers bruising her skin.
“Do not lie to me!” he shouted. “You searched for yourself! You searched for the contingency!”
He shook her.
“You think you are clever? You think you can dig through my mind?”
He pulled her face close to his. His eyes were wild.
“You want to know what the contingency is?” he hissed. “You want to know what happens if you fail?”
He dragged her toward the window, pressing her face against the cold glass, forcing her to look down at the street sixty stories below.
“That is the contingency,” he whispered against her ear. “Gravity. If you fight me, Evelina… if you dig too deep… I will let you fall. And I will not catch you.”
He released her. She slumped against the glass, sobbing for breath.
Dante stood back, adjusting his cuffs, the mask of control sliding back into place, though his chest was heaving.
“The hour is over,” he said coldly. “You failed the test. You did not find the fraud. You found my patience instead.”
He pointed to the crates.
“Get them out of here,” he commanded the movers. “Put them in the vault. She can clean them with a toothbrush.”
He looked at Evelina one last time.
“No food today,” he decreed. “Hunger will teach you focus.”
He turned and walked back to his study.
Evelina slid down the glass wall until she hit the floor. She wrapped her arms around her knees.
She had found a secret. The Thorne Contingency. Project Olympus.
He was terrified of her seeing it. He had reacted with violence, with panic.
Why?
Because it wasn’t just a debt. It was something bigger.
And for the first time since she signed the contract, Evelina realized something that cut through the fear.
He wasn’t just keeping her. He was hiding something from her.
And if he was hiding it… that meant she had power she didn’t understand yet.
She wiped the tears from her face. Her stomach growled, sharp and painful.
Let him starve me, she thought, staring at the closed study door. I’ll eat the truth instead.
- Writer
