THE DON’S CAPTIVE

3

Chapter 3

I did not sleep.

I lay on top of the white linen and stared at the ceiling and mapped everything I knew. The layout of the hallway. The number of steps to the staircase. The way the man who brought my food had held his jacket slightly to the left, which meant he was carrying on that side. The position of the cameras I had spotted on my way up. Two in the hallway. One above the main entrance. Probably more outside that I had not been able to count in the dark.

I was not trained for this. I was a waitress who took night classes and managed her sister’s medical calendar and had never in twenty three years done a single thing worth noticing.

But I was smart. And smart was what I had.

By the time pale gray light started pushing through the gap in the drapes I had a partial picture of the house and a plan that had approximately one working piece and several large holes where the other pieces should have been. It was not a good plan. It was the only one I had.

I washed my face in the marble bathroom and changed into the clothes from the wardrobe. Dark jeans, a soft gray top, both in my size, which told me someone had looked at me carefully enough to estimate it and that information sat uneasily in my stomach. I pulled my hair back, straightened my spine and told the woman in the mirror to get it together.

She looked tired. She looked frightened underneath the tired.

She was not going to show either.

The door opened at eight.

Not the stone faced woman. Not the man who brought food.

The man in the doorway was younger than Dante, maybe late twenties, dark haired, with a jaw built from the same blueprint but a mouth that looked like it had smiled more often and more recently. He leaned against the doorframe and looked at me with open, unhurried curiosity.

“You actually slept,” he said.

“I did not sleep.”

“You look like you slept.”

“I look composed. There is a difference.”

He tilted his head. Something in his expression sharpened with interest. “Marco,” he said, extending a hand into the room without stepping through the door. “Dante’s brother.”

I looked at the hand. I shook it, because refusing felt petty and petty cost energy I did not have.

“I know who you are,” I said.

“Do you.”

“You were in the alley. Farther back. You were watching.”

A beat of silence. His easy expression did not collapse but it recalibrated, the same way Dante’s had last night. Both of them had expected something softer from me. I was beginning to find that useful.

“Breakfast,” he said, and held up the tray he had been carrying against his hip. “Dante thought you might want something better than what they sent last night.”

“Dante thought,” I repeated.

“He mentioned it.”

“He does not strike me as someone who thinks about breakfast.”

Marco smiled. It was a genuine smile, which made it more dangerous than anything his brother had offered me so far, because genuine things made you lower your guard. “He does not usually,” Marco said. “But here we are.”

He set the tray on the desk. Coffee, fruit, toast, eggs. Actual food, not the plain plate from last night. I hated that it made a difference. I hated more that whoever had ordered it knew it would.

“Am I allowed to ask questions,” I said.

Marco settled into the chair like he owned it, ankle crossed over knee, completely relaxed. “You can ask. I will answer what I can.”

“How long am I staying here.”

“Until Dante decides.”

“What is he deciding exactly.”

“Whether you are a problem or an asset.”

The word landed cold. “I am a person.”

“Yes,” Marco said, without flinching. “And in this house those categories are not mutually exclusive.” He paused. “You should eat. You did not eat enough last night.”

“How do you know what I ate last night.”

He glanced at the camera in the upper corner of the room. I had found it already. I had said nothing about it, because acknowledging it felt like a loss.

I looked at it now and felt the first real surge of anger cut through the fear. Clean, useful anger. The kind that did not make you reckless but kept you from going numb.

“He is watching me,” I said.

“He is watching everything. It is not personal.”

“It feels personal.”

“Most things do, at first.” Marco stood. He was nearly as tall as his brother, which I was noting for spatial reasons and no other reason. “Eat your breakfast. Someone will take you to the east garden for an hour this morning. Fresh air. Dante’s instructions.”

I stared at him. “He is letting me outside.”

“Supervised. And within a boundary. But yes.”

“Why.”

Marco paused at the door and looked back at me with something I could not entirely read. “Because you did not cry,” he said simply. “And he respects that more than he would like to.”

He left.

I stood in the middle of the room and thought about what Marco had just told me, which was more than he probably realized. Dante was watching. Dante had ordered better food and outdoor time. Dante, who was cold and calculated and had looked at me in that alley like I was an arithmetic problem, was making decisions about my comfort based on how I had behaved.

Which meant my behavior was currency.

I had not cried. I had not begged. I had sat across from him and held eye contact and called him out on the hesitation in his hand before he left. And instead of punishing it he had sent his brother with eggs and coffee and an hour of sunlight.

I picked up the coffee and drank it while it was hot and turned this information over carefully.

He did not want someone who broke. He had enough breakable things in his life. People who told him what he wanted to hear, who flinched when he entered a room, who performed whatever he required and vanished when he was done with them.

I was not going to be any of those things. Not because I was playing a role. Because it was simply not in me.

But if my refusal to break was the thing buying me time and space in this house, then I was going to be unbreakable in a way that was so consistent and so absolute that he would not know what to do with me.

And men who do not know what to do with something rarely throw it away.

The garden hour came. A different man took me down a back staircase and out through a side door into the cool morning air, and I walked the perimeter of the marked space without running, without testing the boundary, without doing anything that would read as a threat.

But I counted every camera.

I noted every blind spot.

And when we went back inside, I glanced up just once at the window I was almost certain was his.

The curtain moved.

He had been watching the whole time.

Good, I thought. Let him watch.

He was going to see something he had not seen in a very long time, and by the time he understood what it was, it was already going to be too late for both of us.

What I did not know then, what I could not have known standing in that garden counting his cameras and calculating my angles, was that Dante Romano had already made his decision.

He had made it the moment our eyes met in the alley.

He just had not told me yet.