THE DON’S CAPTIVE

2

Chapter 2

The house was not what I expected.

I do not know what I expected. A warehouse, maybe. Somewhere cold and concrete and purposefully terrifying. Instead the car turned through iron gates and pulled up to something that looked like it belonged in a magazine. Stone facade, tall windows, manicured grounds lit softly from below. Beautiful in the way that things built with unlimited money and zero warmth are beautiful.

A cage with good architecture.

They walked me inside without touching me. That was deliberate. I understood it the way you understand a leash you cannot see. Two men behind me, one ahead, and Dante Romano nowhere to be found. He had gotten out of the car without a word and disappeared somewhere to the left, into a different part of the house, leaving me to be delivered like a package.

A woman was waiting in the entrance hall. Fifties, silver hair pulled back, expression like stone that had been stone for so long it had forgotten being anything else. She looked me over once.

“This way,” she said.

I followed her up a wide staircase and down a hallway that was almost aggressively silent. Thick carpet, dark wood, doors closed on both sides. She opened the last one on the right and stepped back.

The room was large. A bed with white linen, a window with heavy drapes, a bathroom through an open door. A chair by a small desk. Clean and quiet and entirely without personality.

“There are clothes in the wardrobe,” the woman said. “Someone will bring food.”

“I need a phone,” I said.

“No.”

“I need to contact my sister. She’s sick. She’ll be frightened when I don’t call.”

Something moved across the woman’s face. Not sympathy. Recognition, maybe. Something that told me she was not without the capacity for it, just well practiced at containing it.

“I will pass that information along,” she said.

“To who?”

But she was already closing the door.

I heard the lock engage. Soft, mechanical, final.

I stood in the center of the room and breathed. In through the nose, out through the mouth, the way I had learned to do in the hospital waiting rooms when the news was bad and I could not afford to fall apart. I was good at not falling apart. I had been practicing since I was sixteen.

I checked the window. Three stories up, a straight drop onto flagstone. I checked the door. Solid, no give. I checked the bathroom. One small frosted window, bolted. I was thorough and methodical and when I was done I sat on the edge of the bed and let myself think about Lucia for exactly sixty seconds. Her voice when she called me every night. The way she said my name when she was scared. The fact that she would wake up tomorrow and I would not answer.

Then I stopped thinking about it because thinking about it would not get me out of this room.

The food came an hour later. A man brought it in, set it on the desk, left without looking at me. I was hungry enough that I ate it, which I was not proud of. But survival has never been glamorous and I was not about to starve on principle.

I was at the window, watching the grounds below, when the door opened again.

I knew before I turned around.

The air in the room changed. That was the only way I could describe it later. A shift in pressure, like the moment before a storm.

Dante Romano closed the door behind him and leaned against it with his arms crossed, looking at me across the room. He had removed his jacket. His shirt was dark, sleeves rolled to the forearm. He looked less formal and somehow more dangerous for it.

“Sit down,” he said.

“I am fine standing.”

He looked at me. He did not repeat himself.

I sat down. Not because I was afraid, I told myself. Because choosing your battles was basic strategy, and I needed to be smart if I was going to find a way through this.

He crossed the room and sat in the chair by the desk, which put him between me and the door. Also deliberate. He rested one arm on the desk and looked at me the same way he had in the alley. Like a problem he was calculating.

“You saw something tonight that you were not meant to see,” he said.

“Yes.”

“You understand what that means.”

“It means you have a decision to make about me.”

Something shifted in his expression. Not surprise, exactly. More like recalibration. He had expected something different from me. Fear, maybe. Tears. Some version of a woman coming apart at the edges. I had given him none of that and he was adjusting his read of me.

“Yes,” he said. “It does.”

“Then make it,” I said. “Because sitting in this room not knowing is worse than knowing.”

He was quiet for a moment. Those dark eyes did not move from my face. I held the eye contact because looking away felt like conceding something I could not afford to concede.

“You will stay here,” he said finally. “Until I determine the appropriate next step.”

“That is not a decision. That is a delay.”

“It is the decision I have made. For now.”

“I have a sister who depends on me. She is sick. She needs her medication managed, she needs someone to call the hospital if her numbers drop, she needs”

“I know about your sister.”

The words stopped me cold. “What?”

“Lucia. Twenty years old. St. Catherine’s Medical, room 412. Pulmonary condition, managed with a combination of two medications, reviewed monthly.” He paused. “She is currently stable. Her night nurse checked on her forty minutes ago.”

I stared at him. My heart was doing something loud and irregular in my chest. “You had someone check on her.”

He said nothing.

“Why,” I said. “Why would you do that?”

He looked at me for a long moment and I got the sense he was asking himself the same question.

“Because you would not have been able to focus on anything else,” he said, like it was purely practical. Like keeping me functional was simply efficient management of an asset.

I should have felt nothing. I should have catalogued it as manipulation, as control, as one more way of making me compliant.

But Lucia was stable. Someone had checked. And I was sitting in this room not crying, which meant I could think, which meant I had a chance.

“What are the rules,” I said.

“This floor. The room. The hallway if accompanied.”

“And if I break them.”

He stood up. He was very tall from this angle. He looked down at me without any particular expression and said, “I would not recommend finding out.”

He walked to the door. He paused with his hand on the handle and I do not know what made me say it. Maybe the steadiness in my own voice surprised me into courage.

“You checked on my sister,” I said to his back. “That was not the action of someone who has already decided to kill me.”

He did not turn around.

But his hand stayed on the door handle for three full seconds before he opened it.

And in those three seconds, I learned something about Dante Romano that I was almost certain he did not want me to know.

He had not decided anything yet.

Which meant the decision was still mine to influence.

I just had to figure out how.