THE DON’S CAPTIVE

6

Chapter 6

Elena did not leave.

That was the first thing I learned about her. She did not take hints. She did not read rooms. Or rather, she read them perfectly and simply chose not to care about what she found there.

She stayed for dinner.

I knew because Rafael told me, quietly, while I was standing at the window of my room watching the last of the light drain out of the sky. He said it the way someone delivers information they know is going to land badly and wants credit for the warning.

“You do not have to come down,” he added.

“Yes I do,” I said.

He looked at me.

“If I stay up here she wins the first round,” I said. “I am not doing that.”

Something in Rafael’s face shifted. Not quite respect. The early edge of it.

I changed into the best of the clothes in the wardrobe, a deep green top that fit well and dark trousers, and I pulled my hair down and looked at the woman in the bathroom mirror and said out loud, “Do not let her see anything.”

The woman in the mirror looked like she meant it.

The dining room was long and lit low, candles on the table, which felt like Elena’s doing. She was already seated when I came in, on Dante’s left, leaning toward him with her hand resting near his on the table. Close enough to suggest ownership without technically claiming it. She was good at that kind of precision.

Dante was at the head of the table. Marco was there too, and two other men I had not been introduced to. Everyone looked up when I walked in.

Dante looked up last.

His eyes moved over me once, top to bottom, and came back to my face. He said nothing. He pulled out the chair on his right with one hand.

I sat down.

Elena’s smile did not waver but her eyes went flat.

The dinner was theater. Everyone at that table understood it and played their part. The two men I did not know talked business in the vague, coded way of people who never spoke plainly in company. Marco watched everything with the alert amusement of someone at a tennis match. Elena performed warmth for the table and aimed the gaps between it at me like small, precise cuts.

She asked where I was from. She asked what I did for work, with a particular softening of her voice on the word work that turned it into something diminishing. She asked how I was finding the house, as a guest, the pause before guest loaded with everything she did not say outright.

I answered everything cleanly. Directly. No apology in my voice, no reaching for her approval, no flinching at the subtext. I watched her recalibrate after each answer, searching for a different angle, and I felt something cold and focused settle into my chest.

She was used to winning. She was very good at it.

But she had never met someone with nothing left to lose.

It was after the second course that Dante’s hand found my knee under the table.

I went completely still.

His eyes were on Marco, who was talking, and his face showed nothing. His hand was warm and heavy and entirely deliberate through the fabric of my trousers. Not moving. Just there. A statement rather than a question.

I did not move either.

My heart was doing something loud and complicated in my chest and I concentrated on keeping my breathing even and my face neutral while his thumb shifted, the smallest movement, pressing slightly into the inside of my knee.

Across the table Elena was watching my face.

I looked at her directly and reached for my wine glass and took a slow sip and held her gaze over the rim.

Her jaw tightened. Just slightly.

Dante’s hand stayed where it was until the plates were cleared.

After dinner Elena caught me in the hallway outside the dining room. She had engineered it, I realized. A moment alone, ten seconds between the dining room and the main hall when no one else was in earshot.

“You are clever,” she said softly. “I will give you that.”

“Thank you.”

“It will not be enough.” She smiled and it did not reach anywhere near her eyes. “I have known Dante for six years. I know how this works. He finds something that interests him, he keeps it close until the interest fades, and then it is gone. Quietly. Completely.” She tilted her head. “How long do you think your particular novelty lasts.”

I looked at her for a moment.

“Long enough,” I said.

I walked away before she could answer.

My hands were shaking by the time I reached the staircase. Not from fear. From the effort of containment. Six years. She had known him six years and she was still here, still performing, still trying. That told me something about Dante and something about her and none of it was entirely comfortable.

I was at the top of the stairs when I heard him behind me.

“Aria.”

I turned.

He was at the bottom of the staircase, one hand on the newel post, looking up at me. The low light caught the angles of his face and he looked, for a moment, less armored than usual. Like the dinner had cost him something too.

“You handled that well,” he said.

“I handled it the only way I know how,” I said. “Is she staying tonight.”

A pause. “No.”

Something in my chest loosened without my permission. I hated that. I hated it enough that it came out in my voice. “You should tell her that. Clearly.”

His eyes sharpened. “Is that a suggestion.”

“It is an observation. She does not understand unclear.”

He was quiet for a moment. Then he came up the stairs and I held my ground because stepping back felt like the wrong move and I was done making wrong moves. He stopped on the step below mine, which still put him taller, but less so. Close enough that I could see the detail of his eyes, dark brown, not black as I had thought in the alley.

“She is not your concern,” he said quietly.

“She made herself my concern at dinner.”

“And you dealt with it.”

“With your help,” I said. “Your hand on my knee was not subtle.”

“It was not meant to be.”

The words sat between us, direct and undeflected. My heart was doing the loud thing again. His eyes moved from mine to my mouth and back, a brief shift, almost involuntary, and I felt it like a change in pressure.

“Why,” I said. My voice came out lower than I intended.

He reached up and pushed a piece of hair back from my face, slow and deliberate, his fingers brushing my jaw and then my neck and resting there, warm and steady against my pulse.

He could feel it. He could feel exactly what he was doing to me and we both knew it.

“Because she needed to understand something,” he said.

“What.”

His thumb traced along my jaw and his eyes did not leave mine and the air between us was so charged I felt it on my skin.

“That you are mine,” he said softly. “And what is mine is not available for her games.”

I should have said something sharp. Something that pushed back, that reminded him I was not a possession, that named what was happening here for the complicated and dangerous thing it was.

Instead I stood on that staircase with his hand warm against my neck and my pulse loud under his thumb and said absolutely nothing.

He stepped back. He let his hand fall. He looked at me for one more moment, something burning low and controlled behind his eyes, and then he turned and walked back down the stairs.

I stood there and listened to his footsteps cross the entrance hall and a door close somewhere below.

Then I walked to my room and sat on the edge of the bed and pressed both hands flat against my thighs and admitted something to myself for the first time.

I was in serious trouble.

Not because of Elena. Not because of this house or what he knew about Lucia or the agreement I had made to survive.

Because of the way my pulse was still beating hard against the memory of his hand.

And because when he said you are mine, every rational thought I had went quiet.

Every single one.

I pressed my fingers to my neck where his hand had been and stared at the ceiling and understood that the plan I had made at 3am, the careful, strategic, controlled plan, had just developed a significant problem.

The problem was sitting at the bottom of the staircase somewhere below me.

And he had absolutely no idea what he had just started.

Or maybe he did.

Maybe that was exactly the point.