THE DON’S CAPTIVE

11

Chapter 11

I did not sleep.

I sat in the chair beside Lucia’s bed and watched her chest rise and fall until the light coming through the curtains shifted from gray to gold and the house began its quiet morning routine around us. Footsteps in the hallway. The distant sound of the kitchen. A door closing somewhere below.

Normal sounds. House sounds.

From someone who had stood in this house and smiled at me and then picked up a phone and told strangers where my sister slept.

I went through every person I had encountered since arriving. The stone faced woman whose name I still did not know. The young woman who brought plates without making eye contact. Rafael. Marco. The rotating security I had counted from the garden that first morning.

Any one of them. All of them. None of them.

I was still turning it over when Lucia woke up.

She opened her eyes and looked at the ceiling and then looked at me and her expression did three things in quick succession. Relief, then confusion, then the sharp focused attention that told me her mind was entirely clear even if her body was not.

“Talk,” she said.

So I did.

Not everything. I was not ready to give her everything and she was not strong enough to receive it all at once. But enough. The alley, the house, the agreement I had made to stay. I left out the parts that lived in my chest where his name was. She would find those without my help.

She listened without interrupting, which was unusual enough that I knew she understood the weight of it.

When I finished she was quiet for a moment.

“He brought me here,” she said.

“Yes.”

“To his house. His actual house.”

“Yes.”

She looked at me with the particular expression she had been perfecting since she was twelve. The one that said she knew things I had not told her and was simply waiting for me to catch up.

“Lucia,” I said.

“I did not say anything.”

“Your face said everything.”

She almost smiled. Then it faded. “Who took me, Aria. I want to know who those men were and why they wanted me.”

“To get to me. To get to him through me.”

“Someone who knows he has you.”

“Someone who has been watching this house,” I said. “From the inside.”

Her eyes sharpened. “You think it is someone here.”

“I think someone here gave them information. The hospital layout. The staff rotation. Things you would only know if someone in this house told you.” I kept my voice even. “Dante is finding out who.”

“And when he finds out.”

I said nothing because the answer to that was not a conversation I was equipped to have with my sick sister in a borrowed room.

She read my silence correctly. She always did.

“Okay,” she said quietly. “Okay.”

I squeezed her hand. She squeezed back. We sat in the gold morning light and I was so grateful she was breathing that everything else felt manageable for exactly as long as it took Dante to appear in the doorway.

He looked at Lucia first. A brief assessment, the way he looked at everything, then his eyes came to me.

“When she is ready,” he said quietly, “I need to speak with you.”

Not now. Not in front of her. That consideration landed somewhere it was not supposed to.

“Give me ten minutes,” I said.

He nodded and was gone.

Lucia watched the empty doorway for a moment. Then she looked at me.

“He is not what I expected,” she said.

“No,” I said. “He is not.”

She was looking at my face again in that way of hers. “Are you safe, Aria. Really.”

I thought about his hands on my face in the dark. His forehead against mine. The sound his voice made when it had nowhere left to hide.

“Yes,” I said. “I am really safe.”

She held my gaze for three full seconds. Then she nodded, slow and satisfied, and settled back against the pillows.

I found Dante in the study.

He was at his desk for once, not the window. Papers in front of him, his phone face down beside them, the controlled professional version fully assembled. But when I closed the door behind me and he looked up, something in the control loosened slightly at the edges.

“How is she,” he said.

“Steady. Angry. Asking questions I cannot fully answer yet.” I sat in the chair across from him. “Tell me what you know.”

He was quiet for a moment. The kind of quiet that meant he was deciding how much to give me.

“All of it,” I said. “She is my sister. Whatever this is, it is already mine to carry. Do not manage the information.”

His jaw tightened. Then he said, “The men who took her were paid through a channel I traced back to this house within two hours of getting Lucia back. The instructions were specific. Staff rotation times, room number, which security were assigned and when they rotated.” He paused. “That information existed in exactly three places. My phone, Rafael’s phone, and a briefing I gave to two members of my household staff the night I assigned protection.”

“Who were the two staff members.”

“A man named Donati. Been with me four years.” He looked at me steadily. “And Elena.”

The name hit the air and sat there.

I stared at him. “Elena has access to your household briefings.”

“She did,” he said. “Past tense.”

“You are certain it was her.”

“Donati has been cleared. His communications are clean and his behavior consistent.” His voice was flat and precise and entirely without emotion, which I had learned meant the emotion was enormous and being contained by force. “Elena’s are not.”

I thought about Elena in the entrance hall with her silk wrapped blades. Her voice outside the dining room. They never last long. I thought about six years and the particular fury of a woman who had expected permanence and been given ambiguity instead.

“She used my sister,” I said.

“Yes.”

“To get me out of your house.”

“Or to damage something she could see forming and could not stop another way.” He held my gaze. “She did not anticipate that I would move first.”

The room was very quiet.

“What happens to her,” I said.

He looked at me and said nothing.

“Dante. What happens to her.”

“Nothing that you need to carry,” he said quietly. “That is my answer and it is the only one I have.”

I wanted to push. I looked at his face and understood that pushing would only build a wall between us and the wall was not what I needed right now.

“All right,” I said.

He looked slightly surprised. He had expected a fight.

“You handle your world,” I said. “I trust you to handle it.”

Three words. I trust you. I watched them land on him, watched him absorb them, watched something shift in the set of his shoulders that had nothing to do with the business in front of him.

He reached across the desk and his hand turned up, open, an offer rather than a demand.

I put my hand in his.

We sat like that for a moment. The morning light moving across the desk between us.

Then his phone buzzed.

He looked at the screen and his hand tightened around mine before he let go.

“There is something else,” he said. “Something I found in Elena’s communications that is not about Lucia.”

I went still.

“She was not working alone,” he said. “The person who paid her. Who directed her. Who has been watching this house and watching you since the night I brought you here.”

He turned the phone and showed me the screen.

I looked at the name on it and felt the floor tilt under me.

Because it was not a rival. It was not a stranger. It was not anyone I could have anticipated in my careful methodical mapping of every threat in this world.

It was someone from mine.

Someone who had known me before the alley.

Someone who had reasons of their own for wanting me exactly where I was.