TWISTED

CAPTIVE I

CHAPTER FOUR

The war doesn’t end with a ceasefire. It ends with silence—the kind that follows slaughter. Lorenzo’s men are scattered, his empire reduced to ash and whispers. I don’t see the body, but I don’t need to. In this world, absence is proof enough.

When the dust settles, I am still in V’s hands.

No ransom is demanded. No negotiations. No exchange of power. My existence is not currency anymore; it’s possession. He doesn’t parade me as his trophy. He doesn’t call me wife, or widow, or anything that ties me to Lorenzo’s crumbling shadow. Instead, he does the most terrifying thing imaginable—he makes me part of his routine.

The suite changes. No longer a cage disguised as hospitality, it becomes something worse: a permanent room. My clothes are replaced, my phone confiscated, my name sharpened into a command when it leaves his mouth. Bella is no longer the bargaining chip between two men. Bella is his, carved out of war and silence.

I test the edges of my captivity at first—late-night pacing, withheld answers, flashes of defiance. But V doesn’t break with anger. He breaks with patience. Every rebellion meets a wall of calm discipline that erodes me grain by grain, until I find myself craving the structure I claim to hate.

One night, he sits across from me, the desk between us stacked with maps and ledgers of the war already won. His eyes are steady, unreadable.

“Do you understand now?” he asks.

My throat tightens. “That you won?”

He shakes his head slowly. “That you were never meant for him. Lorenzo wanted an heir. The gangs wanted leverage. But me?” His gaze pins me in place. “I wanted you. And I don’t let go of what’s mine.”

It should feel like a prison sentence. Instead, it feels like inevitability. The war ended, but my war never does—not with him, not with myself.

TWO WEEKS LATER

The first week, I don’t speak.

V doesn’t seem to care. He carries on as if silence is just another game, one he’s already practiced to perfection. He reads at the table, works at his desk, leaves me notes instead of questions. Sometimes I catch him watching me, but never for long—like I’m a painting he already owns, worth glancing at but not worth gawking over.

That stings more than I want to admit.

The second week, I test him. I throw a glass against the wall, slam doors, pace the length of the room until the floor creaks with complaint. Each time, he waits. He never raises his voice. He never strikes. He waits until the storm burns itself out, and then he simply asks, “Done?”

It infuriates me—his patience, his refusal to play the villain I want him to be.

By the third week, I’ve convinced myself I’ll escape. I memorize the guard rotations, the weight of the lock on my door, the way the windows open just far enough to let in the night air. But when I finally try, slipping down the hallway barefoot, I find him already waiting at the end. Hands in his pockets, calm as ever.

“You’re predictable,” he says. Not cruel. Not mocking. Just certain. And that certainty slices deeper than anger.

I spit at his feet. “You can’t keep me.”

He steps forward, close enough that I can feel the measured weight of his presence. His hand doesn’t touch me, but it hovers at the side of my throat like a shadow. “Bella,” he says softly, “I already do.”

The worst part? I hate the shiver that runs through me when he says it.

So I keep resisting. I slam into his walls, over and over, even as cracks form in my own resolve. Every refusal, every sharp word, every glare across the dinner table feels like a lifeline—proof that I still belong to myself. But the nights are the hardest. In the silence, I remember his voice on the phone, the calm in his eyes, the weight of being chosen not as leverage, but as his prize.

And somewhere in the back of my mind, a thought I can’t kill takes root: maybe losing was always inevitable.

The days bleed into each other, measured not by clocks but by the rhythm of resistance.

Every morning, V leaves the door to my room unlocked. It’s not generosity; it’s provocation. He wants me to test it, to run, to prove him right again. And I do, almost daily—slipping into hallways, searching for cracks in the fortress he’s built around me. But he’s always there, a step ahead, catching me not with force, but with inevitability.

“Try harder,” he says once, when I collapse against the locked gate at the back of the estate, lungs burning, skin slick with sweat. He doesn’t drag me back. He just waits, patient as stone, until I stagger to my feet and walk back inside on my own.

That patience is worse than chains.

At meals, I don’t eat if he’s watching. At night, I sleep on top of the covers, too stubborn to pull them over me no matter how cold it gets. I try to vanish into silence, but he’s learned to weaponize it. Sometimes, he joins me in the quiet—sitting in the chair across the room, reading or just existing, until my anger knots into confusion. Sometimes he breaks it with questions I refuse to answer:

“Do you miss him?”

“What do you dream about?”

“How long will you keep pretending you’re not curious?”

I never give him the satisfaction. But the longer this goes on, the more dangerous the silence between us feels.

The nights are the worst. I lie awake, staring at the painted sky on my ceiling, and think about Lorenzo—about loyalty, about love, about how quickly both dissolve in the fire of war. And then, unbidden, I think of V: his voice low and steady, his eyes sharp enough to see through me. I hate that he occupies the same mental space as grief. I hate that sometimes, when I imagine escape, I imagine him following.

One evening, after I shove away the plate he’s set in front of me, he doesn’t push back. He just leans closer, his voice calm enough to set my teeth on edge.

“You’re not starving yourself to spite me,” he says. “You’re starving yourself because you want me to make you stop.”

I freeze, fury and shame colliding in my chest.

“I won’t,” he continues, standing. “When you break, Bella, it’ll be because you chose to.”

The door clicks shut behind him, and I realize he’s right about one thing: the war might be over, but mine is only beginning.