THE DON’S CAPTIVE

10

Chapter 10

Four words.

We have the girl.

I stared at the screen until it dimmed and then I lay completely still in the dark with Dante’s arm heavy across my waist and my heart slamming so hard I was certain he could feel it.

Lucia.

They had Lucia.

The men he had put on her door, the security he had arranged, the hospital staff who had been told it was routine. All of it bypassed. All of it not enough. And Dante was asleep beside me with no idea that while we had been lying here in the dark his phone had delivered the worst four words of my life.

I moved his arm.

He woke instantly. Not groggy, not slow. Eyes open and sharp in under a second, which told me he slept the way soldiers did, always half listening for the thing that changed.

“Your phone,” I said. My voice was hollow. I could hear it.

He read my face first. Then he reached for the phone.

I watched him read the message. I watched the change move through him. Not panic. Dante Romano did not panic. What happened was more frightening than panic. He went absolutely, utterly still, and the temperature of the room seemed to drop, and when he looked at me his eyes were not the eyes of the man who had held me an hour ago.

They were the eyes from the alley.

“Get dressed,” he said.

I was already moving.

He was on the phone before his shirt was buttoned, speaking in low rapid sentences, moving through the room with a focus so complete I felt invisible in it. Not because he did not care. Because caring was currently being channeled into something that did not have room for softness.

I understood. I matched it. I dressed and pulled my hair back and sat on the edge of the bed and waited and did not cry because crying was not going to find my sister.

He ended the call and looked at me.

“She was taken from the hospital forty minutes ago,” he said. “Two men. They knew the layout. They knew the staff rotation.” A pause. “They had inside information.”

“From who.”

“I am going to find out.”

“Dante.” I stood up. “Is she alive.”

“The message is a leverage play. They want something from me. That means she is alive and she stays alive until they get it or decide I am not going to give it.” He held my gaze. “She is alive, Aria.”

I nodded. One sharp nod. I held everything together by focusing on that single fact and putting everything else in a box I would open later when my sister was safe.

“What do they want,” I said.

He was quiet for one second too long.

“Me,” I said. “They want me.”

His jaw tightened.

“I am the leverage,” I said. “I was always the leverage. I witnessed something, you kept me here, now someone is using her to get me out of your house.”

“That is not what is going to happen.”

“I know it is not,” I said. “Because I am not going anywhere without Lucia. So tell me what we are doing.”

He stared at me. That recalibration again, the same one from the first night, except this time I watched something in his face move past assessment into something that looked very much like the thing neither of us had named yet.

“You are not a part of this,” he said carefully.

“She is my sister.”

“Which is exactly why you are staying here.”

“Dante.”

“Aria.” He crossed the room and took my face in his hands and tilted it up to his and the look on his face was so exposed and so fierce at the same time that it stopped every argument in my throat. “I need you here. I need you safe and inside this house so that I can do what needs to be done without one part of my attention on you. Do you understand what I am telling you.”

I searched his face.

“You cannot think clearly if you are worried about me,” I said slowly.

“I cannot think at all,” he said. Low and raw and entirely unguarded. “You have done something to my ability to think clearly and I need it back for the next few hours. So I need you here. I need you safe. And I need your word.”

He needed my word. The same word he had asked for in that room days ago, which had bought me coffee and a garden hour and eventually everything else.

I put my hands over his where they held my face.

“Get her back,” I said. “That is all I want. Get her back and come home.”

Something moved through his expression at the word home. He pressed his forehead to mine for exactly three seconds. Then he let me go and walked out and took the room’s temperature with him.

The next five hours were the longest of my life.

Marco stayed with me. He did not pretend everything was fine. He did not offer empty reassurances. He sat across from me in the library and drank coffee and answered the questions I asked and did not answer the ones he couldn’t, and that honesty was the thing that kept me from coming apart.

At 4am he told me they had a location.

At 5am he told me they were moving.

I sat in the library and stared at the door and tried not to think about the alley, about a gun in a dark hand, about what Dante Romano was capable of when someone touched what was his.

The door opened at half past six.

Dante walked in. He had changed his shirt. His face was closed and precise and he was already back inside the armor, all of it back in place.

Two steps behind him, wrapped in a hospital blanket, pale and wide eyed and so alive it nearly destroyed me entirely, was Lucia.

I was across the room before I knew I was moving. She caught me or I caught her and we held on in the middle of the library floor and I buried my face in her hair and shook, just once, one single uncontrolled tremor that I allowed myself before I pulled it back.

“I am okay,” she said against my shoulder. “Aria. I am okay.”

I pulled back and looked at her face and checked her the way I always had, the systematic scan of her color and her breathing and her eyes, making sure she was telling me the truth.

She was. Frightened and exhausted but unharmed.

I turned and looked at Dante across the room.

He was watching us with an expression that was almost painful in its openness. Like he had forgotten, for one unguarded moment, to put the walls back up.

I mouthed thank you.

He said nothing. He looked away.

But his throat moved.

Lucia was settled into a room by mid morning, properly this time, with security that I now understood was not routine. She slept almost immediately, the deep total sleep of someone whose adrenaline had finally crashed.

I sat beside her bed until her breathing evened out. Then I went looking for Dante.

I found him in his study. Standing at the window with a glass in his hand, looking out at the grounds in the early light.

He heard me come in. He did not turn around.

“She is asleep,” I said.

“Good.”

I crossed the room and stood beside him at the window. We looked out at the same grounds together and the silence between us was full of everything that had happened in the last twelve hours.

“You brought her here,” I said. “To the house.”

“It is the safest place I have.”

I turned and looked at his profile. “You brought her here because of me.”

He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “Yes.”

I took the glass from his hand and set it on the windowsill and turned to face him and put both hands flat on his chest. His eyes came down to mine.

“I know what you are,” I said quietly. “I know what you do. I know what last night cost you to let happen and what tonight cost you to fix. I am not asking you to be different from what you are.”

His hands came to my waist.

“I am asking you,” I said, “to stop pretending that what is happening between us is something you can manage and contain and close a door on whenever it becomes inconvenient.”

His grip on my waist tightened.

“Because you cannot,” I said. “And we both know it.”

He looked at me for a long moment. Then he pulled me in and his mouth came down on mine and he kissed me with everything he had not said and would probably never say in words, thorough and certain and entirely without apology.

When he pulled back his forehead came to rest against mine and his eyes were closed.

“You are going to be the end of me,” he said quietly.

“No,” I said. “I am going to be the beginning of something else.”

He opened his eyes. He looked at me. And for the first time since the alley, since the car, since every charged and guarded moment in every room of this house, Dante Romano looked at me like he actually believed that was possible.

That was the moment I understood that I had stopped trying to find a way out.

What I had not figured out yet was that someone inside this house had helped take Lucia.

Someone who had been watching us from the beginning.

Someone who was still here.