THE DON’S CAPTIVE

4

Chapter 4

He came to my room that night without knocking.

I was at the desk, working through a mental list of everything I knew and everything I still needed to find out, when the door opened and Dante Romano walked in like the room was already his. Which, technically, it was. That did not make it less infuriating.

I turned in the chair and looked at him and said nothing.

He was still in his shirt from earlier, sleeves still rolled, jacket gone. There was something different in his face tonight. Not softer. Just closer to the surface. Like whatever layer he kept between himself and the rest of the world had thinned slightly at the edges.

He looked at me for a moment. Then he looked at the desk.

“You have been sitting here for three hours,” he said.

“You have been watching me for three hours,” I said.

“Yes.”

At least he did not pretend otherwise. I had to give him that.

He crossed the room and stood at the window, hands in his pockets, looking out at the grounds below. The same grounds I had walked that morning while he watched from above. I studied his profile in the low light. The hard line of his jaw. The way he carried absolute stillness like other men carried tension.

“You did not try anything today,” he said.

“I noticed the blind spots,” I said. “All four of them. But there are twelve men on rotation outside and the gate takes a code and a key card. So no. I did not try anything.”

He turned from the window and looked at me. “You counted my men.”

“I counted everything. It is what I do when I am frightened and cannot afford to show it.”

Something moved across his face. Gone before I could name it.

“Most people in your position would have tried anyway,” he said. “Fear makes people stupid.”

“Fear makes people dead,” I said. “I prefer the alternative.”

He was quiet for a moment. He moved to the foot of the bed and sat on the edge of it, which put us at eye level across eight feet of space. The proximity was deliberate and we both knew it. Testing something. I kept my spine straight and my face neutral and gave him nothing to read.

“I need to know something,” he said.

“That makes two of us.”

“Did you tell anyone where you were going last night. Before the alley. Was there anyone who knew your route.”

“No. I live alone except for when Lucia is home from the hospital. I did not call anyone. No one knew.”

“No boyfriend. No friend you check in with.”

Something about the way he said boyfriend sat in the air between us differently than the rest of the sentence. I noted it and filed it and kept my expression clean.

“No,” I said.

He nodded slowly. Not relief, exactly. Resolution. Like he had been holding a calculation open and this closed it.

“Then you are not immediately missed,” he said. “Which gives us time.”

“Time for what.”

“To determine what happens next.”

“You keep saying that,” I said. “You keep not saying what it means.”

He looked at me steadily. “It means I am deciding whether to trust you.”

The word hit me sideways. Trust. From him. In this context. I almost laughed. Almost.

“You are deciding whether to trust me,” I repeated slowly. “I am the one locked in a room.”

“You are the one who witnessed something that could dismantle everything I have spent twelve years building,” he said, and his voice did not change but the weight behind it did. “So yes. I am deciding whether to trust you. Because the alternative is significantly less pleasant for both of us.”

The room went very quiet.

I understood what the alternative was. I had understood it since the alley. I had simply been refusing to look directly at it because looking directly at something that frightened you was a luxury I could not afford. Not yet.

“What does trust look like,” I said. “In practical terms. What do you actually want from me.”

He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and looked at me with those unreadable dark eyes. “Your silence. Permanently. Your word, backed by something I can rely on.”

“And what backs it. What guarantee do you think you have from me.”

“Your sister.”

Two words. Flat, precise, surgical.

I went very still.

“Not a threat,” he said, before I could speak. “A reality. As long as she requires the level of care she currently receives, she is dependent on systems and institutions that money influences. I have that money. Her condition has been stable for six weeks. I am told that is the longest stretch in two years.” He paused. “That stability is something I can continue. Or not.”

My hands were flat on the desk. I was aware of them only because I was concentrating on keeping them flat.

“You are telling me,” I said carefully, “that you are already paying for her treatment.”

“I am telling you that her treatment costs have been managed since the morning after you arrived here.”

I stared at him. “Why.”

“Because you needed to be able to think clearly. And you could not do that if she was suffering.”

“That is not an answer,” I said. “That is a reason. I asked you why.”

He held my gaze for a long moment and something in the stillness of his face shifted. The thinnest c***k. Like pressure behind stone finding the one place the stone was not entirely solid.

“Because you did not beg me,” he said quietly. “In the alley, in this room, not once. And I have not encountered that before.”

I did not know what to do with that. So I put it away and dealt with what was in front of me.

“If I give you my word,” I said. “If I agree to silence, permanent and unconditional. What does my life look like.”

“More comfortable than this room.”

“That is a low bar.”

His mouth moved. Almost. “You would remain here for a period. You would have more freedom within the property. We would establish what an arrangement looks like over time.”

“An arrangement,” I said. “I am an arrangement now.”

“You are a variable I am choosing to manage carefully,” he said. “That is more than most people get.”

He stood up. He straightened his shirt, one small automatic gesture, the only thing I had ever seen him do that looked like a habit rather than a choice. He walked to the door.

“Think about it,” he said.

“You are giving me a choice.”

He paused at the door. Did not turn around. “I am giving you the appearance of one. Think carefully about the difference.”

He left.

I sat in the chair and breathed and thought about what he had said and what he had not said, and the one thing that kept rising above everything else, the thing I could not push back down no matter how hard I tried, was not the threat wrapped in silk, not the arrangement, not the careful management of my very existence.

It was the way his voice had changed when he said because you did not beg me.

Like it had cost him something to say it.

Like he had not meant to say it at all.

I pressed my fingers to my mouth and stared at the closed door and understood, with a cold sliding certainty, that Dante Romano was not entirely in control of this situation.

And neither, God help me, was I.