Irresistible Distance

Chapter Five: The Wound Christy Left Behind

Valentina barely slept.

The hours between midnight and dawn stretched with the cruelty of a night that refused to offer any reprieve.

She lay on her back, staring at the ceiling, while the night replayed itself in her mind with merciless accuracy of the day's drama: the kitchen, the low amber light, and the way Dante’s eyes had found hers across the room, just seeing her, but studying her.

She understood what it was. A man who possessed immense power demonstrating it, testing the newest trophy in his environment.

Isabella had been right about that much, at least.

Just as the grey suggestion of dawn bled into the sky, a soft knock sounded against the door, three exact beats.

Valentina swung her legs off the bed, smoothed her silk nightgown out of habit, and opened the door.

Isabella stood there. She was wearing black sharp stilettos, a sleek pencil dress, and hair pulled into a bun so tight it emphasized the clean, cold line of her jaw. She looked at Valentina bare-faced and mussed with eyes that differentiated her as a rival and arrived at a comfortable conclusion.

“Good morning,” Isabella said, her voice smooth and entirely insincere.

“What do you want?” Valentina asked.

“May I come in?”

“No.”

Isabella didn't take offense; she simply leaned against the doorframe. “You looked upset last night. You practically ran out of the kitchen.”

“I was tired,” Valentina lied. “What is your problem?”

Isabella’s smile didn't reach her eyes. “My problem, Valentina, is women who mistake temporary attention for importance. Dante Rossetti does not belong to anyone. He never has. And he will not begin with you.”

“I never suggested he would.”

Isabella stepped closer, her heels clicking on the marble. “You’re inexperienced. Naïve. The kind of girl who reads meaning into eye contact and calls it a connection. The trembling virgin bride with the sad eyes and the tragic family history the quiet desperation of someone who has never been chosen first.”

Valentina felt the air leave her lungs. “How do you…”

“Do you genuinely think a man like Dante takes a wife without his inner circle knowing everything first?” Isabella’s voice was pleasant, almost gentle, which made it all the more cruel.

“Your stepfather’s debt, your mother’s priorities, your little sketchbook full of dresses... even Enzo Moreau.”

Valentina felt a hard blow to her chest.

“Your life is a file,” Isabella said. “And do you know what Dante concluded? That you’re useful. You’re a contract. A piece moved across a board because your stepfather was too weak to manage his own consequences. You were the cheapest available solution.”

The words sank through Valentina’s composure one by one, finding the places that were already soft and pressing into them with expert accuracy.

She stood in the doorway, held herself very still, kept her face as neutral as she could manage, and felt each one land regardless.

Isabella straightened. She smoothed the front of her dress with one hand. The conversation was apparently over.

“Stay in your room when you’re not needed,” she said, turning toward the corridor. “Smile during the appropriate occasions. Sign whatever is put in front of you.” Her voice was smooth and conclusive. “That is the full scope of your function here.”

She paused at the end of the corridor without turning back. “The sooner you understand that, the more comfortable this arrangement will be for everyone involved. Including you.”

Her heels clicked twice against the marble. And then she was gone.

Valentina closed the door. The soft click of the door sounded, in the silence that followed, like something being sealed. She stood with her hand on the handle for a moment, her eyes on the middle distance, and then she crossed the room on shaky legs and sat down on the edge of the bed.

The words were still there, sitting in the center of her chest and intending to stay there.

She pressed her palms against her thighs and looked at the window. The city was fully light now, the grey pre-dawn having resolved into a pale morning that gave everything a washed-out, overexposed quality. The city was going about its business, as always.

The specific quality of the pain she was feeling was familiar. That was the worst part of it not that it was new, but that it wasn't. It had the worn, recognizable feelings of something she had felt before, many times, in many rooms, at the hands of people who had known exactly where to press.

It felt like Christy.

The thought arrived quietly, and with it came the memory completely unwilling to be redirected, the way those particular memories always were.

She had been twenty-one. She had been carrying two paper cups of coffee and a small white box of almond pastries from the bakery three streets from Enzo’s apartment the specific ones he had mentioned once, casually, in passing.

The kind of detail she had stored automatically because she paid attention to the people she cared about. She had been smiling on the pavement outside his building. She remembered that with the particular clarity reserved for moments that turn out to be the last of something the last moment of not knowing, kept in perfect detail by a mind that understood its importance before the rest of her did.

She had climbed the steps toward the entrance. She had seen Christy’s car. She had stood very still on the pavement and told herself the first three explanations that came to her: A coincidence. A mutual friend. A wrong street.

Then she had seen them through the window. Enzo and Christy.

Standing too close, in the way of people who were already in love and crazy about each other. Laughing in the specific register of people sharing something private. And then Christy had reached up with the unhesitating ease of a woman entirely certain of her welcome and cupped his face in both hands and kissed him.

Not a peck, or anything I mean the way you kiss someone who is already yours.

Valentina had stood on the pavement in the cold with the coffee growing cold in her hands and watched Enzo kiss her back. She had watched him bring his hands to Christy’s waist claiming her like his. She had watched him lean into it.

She hadn't moved for a long time. She hadn’t confronted them. Hadn’t gone inside, hadn’t called his phone, hadn’t done any of the things that would have been reasonable or expected. She had simply turned around and walked home with the pastries still in her hands, the coffee now entirely cold, the pavement wet beneath her feet from rain that she forgot was even raining.

The next morning, while having breakfast Christy had come down to breakfast wearing Enzo’s hoodie. She had sat across the table from Valentina and smiled. That particular smile was sweet on the surface, evil underneath, the smile of a person who wanted you to know they had won and wanted you to know they knew you knew it.

“He chose me,” she had said. Just those three words, over orange juice, as though they were a neutral observation about the weather. No apology. No acknowledgment of the eight months she spent with him. No recognition that something had been taken from someone who had done nothing to deserve losing it. Just simple, bald ownership, delivered with the confidence of someone who had never in their life been told that wanting something wasn’t a good reason for taking it.

Because in Christy’s world, it always had been. And everyone around her had always agreed.

Valentina opened her eyes. The memory dissolved back into the pale morning, but the feeling it left behind didn't dissolve with it. She sat on the edge of the bed in the penthouse suite and breathed carefully, recognizing, with a weariness that went deeper than tiredness, that Isabella and Christy were essentially the same creature wearing different clothes. Women who knew how to identify what you valued and make you feel foolish for valuing it. Women who smiled while doing it.

She pressed the back of her hand to her cheek and found it wet. She hadn’t noticed the tears. That was always how it happened with her the feelings built pressure quietly, underground, until they found the path of least resistance. By the time she noticed them, they had already been moving for a while.

She didn’t want Dante. She was clear on that. She was certain of it.

Wasn’t she?

She pressed both palms against her eyes, trying to force the thoughts away. The knock that came then was nothing like Isabella’s annoying triple knock.

It was hard. Single knock. The knock of someone who was not asking for permission.

The door opened before she could respond. Dante stepped into the room.

He was dressed in dark trousers, a charcoal shirt with the sleeves pushed to his elbows, and his dark hair settled back into its usual order. He looked like a man who had slept without difficulty and begun his morning without complication, which she found specifically, unreasonably irritating.

His eyes found her face immediately. And then dropped to her cheeks, where the salt of the tears still lingered.

Something in his jaw changed. A tightening natural but immediate, the way metal sounds when it shifts under tension.

“Who made you cry?”

It wasn’t a question. It was the opening line of an investigation straightforward and carrying beneath it a specific, controlled quality that she recognized now as the particular tone his voice took when something had moved him into a category beyond ordinary irritation.

Valentina opened her mouth to speak.

Before Valentina could answer, the silence of the penthouse was shattered. A single, enormous gunshot exploded through the lower floors. Simultaneously, the lights died, plunging the room into the dulled, grey light of morning.

Valentina froze, but Dante didn't.

He moved with an absolute lack of hesitation. His hand clamped onto her arm, pulling her away from the window, his body moving to act as a shield between her and the door.

In the sudden gloom, she looked at his face. It had changed completely. The man who had been annoyed by a vase was gone. In his place was someone older, colder, and entirely purposeful.

The expression of a man stepping into a war he had been waiting for all along.