POSSESSED BY CIRO

Chapter 6

~~Oriana~~

Eight minutes.

I stared at that screen and felt my whole body go cold.

Eight minutes before everything I had ever loved got blown to pieces because of me. Because I had the most terrible luck of walking down the wrong alley on the wrong night in this rotten city.

My throat tightened.

I pressed my lips together hard, refusing to cry in front of these men. I had already given Ciro enough satisfaction for one night. I wasn’t about to give his little puppets any more.

But Cassie’s face on that screen wouldn’t leave my head. Blindfolded, trembling, a gun pressed to her forehead like she was nothing. Like her life meant nothing.

And Matron. God, Matron.

I thought of her hands first – always her hands. Rough and warm, always smelling faintly of the soup she had permanently on the stove. She used to press them to my forehead whenever I was sick, checking my temperature before she even said a word. She had raised me without being asked to. She had never once made me feel like a burden.

And that orphanage was about to become rubble because of me.

7:03.

Move, Oriana.

“Get me a car.” My voice came out harder than I felt.

The officer who had handed me the phone scrambled immediately, and I didn’t wait for him to finish whatever he was saying. I walked straight out of the station and back into the night air.

I stood on the pavement, breathing through my nose, watching a couple stroll past on the other side of the canal without a care in the world.

Normal people. Having a normal night.

Must really be nice.

A black car rolled up before I had even fully decided I was getting in. I got in anyway. The driver didn’t say a word. He already knew where we were going.

Of course he did.

I looked down at the phone again. 5:41. The numbers kept bleeding into each other.

I wanted to be clear about something. I didn’t go back because of fear. I mean, yes, I was afraid – duh I’m human and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But fear alone wasn’t what moved my feet.

It was simpler than that.

Cassie and Matron were the only real family I had ever known in my twenty five years of life. The orphanage was the only home I had ever had and knew. And I was not about to let a man like Ciro Conti reduce all of that to ash just to prove a point.

I could fight him later. And I would fight him.

But not tonight.

The gates of Sept Tour came into view, and I felt my stomach sink the way it always did when you were walking toward something you couldn’t undo.

The guards stepped aside.

The doors opened.

And there he was. Standing in the entrance like he had never moved from that spot, like he had simply waited with all the patience in the world because he already knew how this was going to end.

One hand in his pocket. A glass in the other.

Dressed in black from his collar to his shoes like the concept of color had personally offended him.

Those eyes found mine before I had even fully stepped through the door.

And God, I hated him for how unbothered he looked.

I crossed the hall and stopped right in front of him, tilting my head up because the man was unreasonably tall and I refused to address his chest.

I held the phone up between us, screen facing him.

2:19 still ticking.

“Stop it,” I said. “The bomb, the gun, all of it. Right now.”

He looked at the screen. Then at me.

Something passed across his face so quickly I couldn’t name it before it was gone.

“And in return?” he asked quietly.

I held his gaze and said it plainly, “I’ll sign the contract.”

He didn’t gloat. Didn’t do that terrible smile. He just reached into his jacket, said something low into his phone in Italian, and slid it back into his pocket.

The clock on my screen went dark.

I breathed.

Just once. Short and quiet, but I breathed.

“Cassie,” I said immediately.

“She’s being released as we speak.

She’ll be at your hotel within the hour.” He tilted his head slightly, watching me the way you watch something you’ve been waiting on for a long time. “You came back faster than I expected.”

“I didn’t come back for you,” I said flatly. “Let’s be very clear about that.”

“I know.”

He said it so simply, so quietly, that it caught me off guard. No arrogance in it. Just those two words sitting there in the air between us.

I didn’t know what to do with that, so I did nothing.

He turned and walked toward the staircase and I stood there for a moment watching him go, hating the fact that I had to follow, hating even more that my feet were already moving before I had consciously decided to.

The study was exactly the kind of room that suited him –dark wood, heavy curtains, a single lamp burning low on the desk. The contract was already laid out, because naturally he had never doubted I was coming back.

I stood over the desk and read every single word.

He sat across the room in an armchair and let me.

He didn’t rush me, didn’t hover, didn’t say anything at all. He just waited, one ankle crossed over his knee, watching me with that unreadable expression.

I took my time because I was a lawyer before I was anything else and I would not sign something I hadn’t read. Line by line, clause by clause. Some of it was straightforward. Some of it made my blood pressure climb. But none of it surprised me. This was exactly the kind of man who would have a marriage contract ready before the woman had even agreed.

I got to the last page.

Picked up the pen.

My hand didn’t shake. I was genuinely surprised by that.

The sound of the pen on paper felt very final.

I set it down and straightened up and looked across the room at him.

“I have one condition,” I said.

He raised a brow.

“Cassandra and Matron are off limits. The orphanage is off limits. Nothing touches them, ever. That’s not negotiable.”

He looked at me for a long moment.

“Agreed,” he said.

“I mean it, Ciro.”

“So do I.”

There was no performance in it. No smirk, no raised glass, nothing. Just a steady look that, against every instinct I had, felt like something solid.

I turned away from him and looked out the window at Venice spread out below - the water catching the lights, the old buildings standing exactly where they had stood for centuries, completely indifferent to the mess happening inside this mansion.

I had just signed a contract to marry a man I had met approximately forty eight hours ago. A man who had kidn*pped me, drugged me, threatened everything I loved, and then had the audacity to look unbothered about all of it.

I, Oriana Vitale, who had spent years building a career fighting people like him.

Me.

A quiet, humorless laugh almost escaped me but I swallowed it.

Footsteps behind me, slow and unhurried. He stopped close enough that I could feel the shift in the air around me.

“Your room has been prepared.” His voice was lower now, the sharpness from earlier filed down to something almost– almost human.

“You’ll have everything you need.”

“I want to speak to Cassie tonight. Personally.”

“Arrangements will be made.”

I nodded, staring at the water.

“Oriana.”

I went still. It was the first time he had used my actual name. Not kitty, not doll, not wife. My name.

I turned slightly, not fully.

“You made the right choice,” he said.

I looked at him properly then, at that infuriatingly composed face, and I felt something flicker in my chest that I immediately stamped out.

“Don’t,” I said quietly.

“Don’t what?”

“Pretend this was a choice.”

He said nothing.

I walked past him toward the door, and this time he didn’t stop me.

Nica was waiting in the passageway, hovering like she had been anxious and trying not to show it. Her face flooded with relief when she saw me.

“Mistress, I-”

“It’s Oriana,” I said, not unkindly.

“Just Oriana.”

She blinked, then nodded quickly, leading me down the hall toward my room.

I let her.

I was too tired to argue about names tonight.

The room was the same one I had woken up in that morning, except now there was a fresh set of clothes laid out, a warm meal on the side table that I hadn’t asked for, and a single red rose in a glass vase on the windowsill.

I stood in the middle of the room for a moment, looking at all of it.

Then I sat on the edge of the bed, put my face in my hands, and finally, privately, let myself fall apart -just for a few minutes.

Tomorrow I would be sharp again.

Tomorrow I would start figuring out how to navigate this nightmare without losing myself completely.

But tonight?

Tonight, I was just a girl who had walked back into the lion’s den for the people she loved.

And I was exhausted.