Chapter 4 – Ultimatum[ Part 2]
1721 Words
Dante’s gaze doesn’t flinch. “He offered you.”
The words hang there, heavy and obscene.
“My agent would never—”
“He wasn’t your agent,” Dante snaps. “He was a small‑time operator with a drinking problem and a sixty‑page gambling ledger. You were nineteen. Hungry. Desperate. You trusted the wrong man. He didn’t sell your songs, Luna. He sold you.”
My knees lock.
Memories flash: Jimmy waving contracts at my face in our cramped studio. Me hunched over a notebook, writing my first EP track while he muttered, “Let me handle the boring stuff. You just sing. You wanna be famous or not?” The way he’d pat my shoulder and say, “You’ll thank me when you’re rich.”
I thought he was talking about percentages.
“What does this have to do with you?” I whisper.
“Everything.” He glances at the certificate in my hand. “He signed an agreement handing control of your career and person to that man in Naples. Before it was filed, I found out. I bought him out. Ten times what you were worth on paper.”
My head snaps up. “Bought who out?”
“You,” he says simply.
The word rings in my skull.
“I didn’t know,” I say. It sounds lame even to my own ears.
“Of course you didn’t.” Some of the ice in his gaze melts, just for a heartbeat. “He made sure you wouldn’t. Do you remember what I said when I put that pen in your hand?”
The hotel room resurfaces—threadbare carpet, a bed that squeaked every time we breathed. Dante behind me, arms around my waist, chin on my shoulder, papers spread on the pillow. His voice low in my ear: *It’s just for protection, little star. If anyone tries to screw you, I want it on record they have to go through me first.*
“I thought you were talking about bad contracts,” I say, throat tight. “Not… not this.”
“I was talking about all of it,” he says. “The fastest way to make sure your control shifted from a trafficker to someone with at least a shred of conscience was a legal bond the court couldn’t ignore. Marriage. With clauses.”
“So you married me to win a d**k‑measuring contest with a loan shark,” I say. “Romantic.”
His eyes flash. “I married you to keep you alive.”
“You left me,” I shoot back. “If you cared that much, maybe don’t vanish the second my first album drops.”
His jaw tics. “If I stayed, he would have known exactly who to use to get leverage on me. Do you think I wanted you anywhere near my surname when half my uncles are in prison?”
“So you just watched?” I say. “From a distance? For seven years?”
He doesn’t look away. “I couldn’t move until your name was worth enough to protect,” he says. “Until you were too big to disappear quietly if he tried.”
The admission knocks something loose in my chest I don’t want to name.
“So what now?” I ask. “You show up seven years later, swing your money around, kiss me like you have a right, and drag me back to your castle to be your pet wife?”
His eyes go darker. “It’s not a castle.”
“Sorry. Fortress. Lair. Murder villa. Pick your poison.”
He exhales, a long, slow drag of air. “This isn’t a joke, Luna.”
“Nothing about this is funny,” I snap.
One of his men murmurs into an earpiece near the door. The stadium’s distant roar has dulled; the show is truly over now, the crowd spilling out into the night. Out there, I’m a goddess. In here, I’m a girl in a hallway finding out she was almost sold like a guitar.
“Your ex‑manager is gone,” Dante says. “He took his payout and crawled into whatever hole breeds men like him. The man he sold you to did not forget you. Your little name‑drop stunt in *Bleed for Me* reminded him you exist.”
My blood runs cold. “Name‑drop—”
“You think he doesn’t listen when the woman he almost bought sings some distorted version of her lover’s name on global radio?” Dante shakes his head. “He’s been asking questions. If I let go now, he’ll take his original contract and every lawyer on his payroll to a judge and claim you were stolen from him.”
“And what?” I say hoarsely. “The judge gives me to him with a bow on top?”
“Maybe not,” Dante says. “But while your label scrambles to protect itself, while your fans argue online about whether you’re telling the truth, while the cops shrug and say ‘it’s complicated,’ men like him don’t wait. They take.”
For a moment, I can’t feel my legs.
“This is insane,” I whisper. “This is not my life. I’m not—I’m not some trafficked girl off the street. I’m—”
“You’re exactly the kind of prize a man like that loves,” Dante says, quiet and cruelly honest. “Beautiful. Young. Famous. If he owns you, he owns headlines. He owns leverage. He owns the satisfaction of knowing he took something from me.”
The way he says it—*he took something from me*—makes my stomach lurch.
“I’m not a trophy in your pissing contest,” I say.
“No,” he agrees. “You’re the only thing that ever made me care who won.”
The words hang between us, startling and raw.
Before I can respond, footsteps pound down the hall.
“Luna!”
Rafael’s voice.
He barrels around the corner, curls a mess, shirt half‑buttoned, eyes wild. Two of Dante’s men step in front of him. Rafael shoves one back with more force than I’d expect from a guy who spends most of his life in a studio.
“Move,” he snarls. “Touch me again, and I’ll sue you personally, cabrón. Luna!”
“I’m fine!” I call, automatically, even though ‘fine’ left the building an hour ago.
Rafael’s gaze snaps to me. He takes in my smeared lipstick, my bare legs, Dante looming in front of me.
His face goes from alarm to murder.
“You,” he says to Dante. “Of course it’s you.”
Dante regards him like an interesting insect. “Cruz.”
“You two know each other?” I demand.
“Producers talk,” Rafael says tightly, never taking his eyes off Dante. “Especially when some silent investor starts blocking deals and buying up pieces of the industry.”
His look says the rest: *I’ve been fighting this man’s shadow for years and didn’t realize it was attached to your ghost.*
“You tried to negotiate me out?” I ask.
Rafael’s jaw flexes. “Later. We’ll talk later. Right now we’re leaving.”
He reaches for my hand.
Dante shifts, not fast, just… decisive. One second Rafael’s fingers are a breath away from mine. The next Dante’s body is between us, a barrier in an expensive shirt.
“Step back,” Rafael growls.
“No,” Dante says.
The temperature in the hallway spikes.
“Luna doesn’t belong to you,” Rafael spits.
“Legally,” Dante says, calm and deadly, “she does.”
I shove my way between them, planting a palm on each of their chests. Two different kinds of heat burn under my hands.
“Stop,” I snap. “Both of you. I’m not a bone for you dogs to fight over.”
Rafael’s chest heaves under my fingers. “He has no right—”
“Neither do you,” Dante cuts in. “And yet here you are.”
Rafael bristles. “You disappear and break her, then you crawl out of whatever hole you’ve been in and pull this mafia‑prince bullshit—”
“Careful, Cruz,” Dante says softly.
“Or what?” Rafael sneers. “You’ll throw money at me? Threaten my studio? I don’t scare as easily as your label puppets.”
Dante’s eyes go flat. “No,” he says. “I’ll put a bullet in your leg the next time you drag her onto a public street without real protection.”
“I said stop!” I shout.
The echo of my voice hits the cinderblock walls and comes back to us.
For a second, both men actually listen.
I step back, folding my arms tight across my chest to keep them from shaking.
“This is my life,” I say. “My career. My body. Not your chessboard. Not your battleground. Not your compensation for daddy issues.”
Rafael tears his gaze off Dante long enough to look at me. “Luna, listen—”
“No, you listen,” I say. “What are my options? Hide in Madrid until the internet replaces me with the next girl, or go play house in a murder villa in Sicily?”
“You don’t have to pick either,” he insists. “We get a real lawyer. We go public on your terms. Tell your side first, before—”
“And what do I do while we wait for the courts and the PR teams and the comment sections?” I ask. “Pray he doesn’t send someone through my hotel window? Hope my fans don’t decide I’m a liar?”
“You don’t have to go with him,” Rafael says, voice low. “Please don’t go with him.”
I look up at Dante.
“What do you want?” I ask. “In plain English. No riddles. No martyr act.”
He studied me for a long beat.
“One year,” he says. “You come to Sicily as my wife.
- Writer
