My lovely betrayal

Chapter 3: The Ring

I didn't sleep.

The velvet box sat on the nightstand beside a bed I hadn't touched, its contents burning through the dark like a second heartbeat. Mira's ring. The one she'd worn on her right hand since our mother died—a thin silver band with three tiny emeralds, too modest to be worth stealing, too sentimental to ever remove. She'd called it her talisman. Her good luck.

It hadn't brought her much luck in the end.

I paced the length of the guest room—his guest room, his gilded cage with its silk curtains and antique furniture and a view of the lake that would have been romantic under any other circumstances. My bare feet made no sound on the Persian rug. My mind made plenty.

The note. Ask him about the night she died. He was there.

He was there. Dante Marchetti had been with my sister the night she vanished. He'd admitted as much in the study, in that quiet voice that had cracked something open inside me. He'd said he'd tried to protect her. He'd said someone on my side had sold her out.

And I'd seen the photograph. Mira, alive, smiling, drinking coffee on his balcony six months after her death certificate said otherwise.

None of it made sense. All of it made me want to put my fist through a wall.

I stopped pacing and stared at my reflection in the dark window. The woman who stared back looked like me—same dark hair, same stubborn jaw, same eyes that had been called interesting one too many times—but she also looked like a stranger. A stranger who'd spent two years building a cathedral of rage around a single truth, only to watch the foundation crack in the space of a single evening.

I hated him for it. I hated him for not being the monster I needed him to be.

And I hated myself for the way my skin still tingled where his fingers had gripped my chin.

At three in the morning, I gave up on the pretense of rest. I pulled on a pair of black trousers and a silk camisole from the wardrobe someone had stocked with my measurements—a detail that should have terrified me and somehow didn't—and padded out into the hallway.

The villa was different at night. The frescoes looked older, the shadows deeper, the silence heavier. My footsteps echoed on the marble as I traced the route back toward the study, retracing the path I'd walked hours earlier when everything I believed was still intact.

The study door was open.

I stopped in the doorway. Dante sat in the leather chair behind his desk, shirtsleeves rolled to his elbows, top buttons undone, hair falling across his forehead in a way that made him look younger and infinitely more dangerous. A single lamp burned beside him, casting half his face in gold and the other half in shadow. He was reading—actually reading, a worn paperback with a cracked spine, his brow furrowed in concentration.

He didn't look up.

"You're supposed to be sleeping," he said, turning a page. "I went to considerable trouble to make that room comfortable."

"I don't sleep in enemy territory."

That made him glance up. His gray eyes found mine across the dim room, and something flickered in them—amusement, or exhaustion, or both.

"If I were your enemy, Lena, you'd be dead already. Sit down."

"I'll stand."

"Suit yourself." He closed the book and set it aside, leaning back in his chair with the loose-limbed ease of a man who'd never felt fear in his own home. "Though if you're going to interrogate me, you might as well be comfortable. You'll last longer."

I didn't move. "The ring. Where did you get it?"

"Mira gave it to me." He said it simply, without flourish, as if the words weren't a grenade. "The night before she disappeared. She said it was the only thing she had left of your mother, and she wanted someone to hold onto it in case something went wrong. I told her nothing would go wrong." His jaw tightened. "I was wrong."

The confession hit me harder than I expected. I'd been braced for lies, for deflection, for the verbal chess match he seemed to enjoy so much. Not this. Not raw, unguarded truth delivered in the hollow hours of the night.

"Why should I believe you?"

"You shouldn't." He stood, crossing to a sideboard where a silver coffee service had been laid out, untouched. "You're a spy. Skepticism is your religion. But I'm going to tell you anyway, because you deserve to know, and because I'm tired of carrying this alone."

He poured two cups of coffee, black, and held one out to me. I didn't take it.

He sighed. "Stubborn woman. Fine. Listen or don't listen. That's your choice."

I crossed my arms. "Talk."

"Mira came to me eighteen months ago with information that could have brought down half the intelligence agencies in Europe." He took a sip of his coffee, grimaced at the temperature, and set it aside. "She'd discovered a mole inside your organization—someone high up, someone who'd been selling agents' identities to the highest bidder for years. She needed protection. She needed resources. And she needed someone who operated outside the system she could no longer trust."

"So she went to a crime lord."

"She went to the only person your agency would never suspect." He met my eyes. "And she went to me because I owed her a debt. Five years ago, your sister saved my nephew's life during an operation in Istanbul. She didn't know who the boy was. She just saw a child in danger and acted. I never forgot that."

I remembered that operation. Mira had mentioned it once, offhand, the way she mentioned everything that mattered—casually, like heroism was just another Tuesday.

"The night she died," Dante continued, and the words came slower now, dragged from somewhere deep, "we had arranged to move her to a safehouse in Switzerland. New identity, new papers, a clean break. I was supposed to escort her personally. But someone got there first."

"Who?"

"I don't know." The admission seemed to cost him. "By the time my men arrived, the safehouse was in flames. Three bodies inside. One of them was identified as Mira. The other two were my security detail. Whoever did it made it look like a gas leak. It took me six months to confirm it was arson."

I felt the floor shift beneath me. Three bodies. I'd read the report a hundred times—the official report, the one that listed Mira as killed in action during a routine mission in Brussels. Not a safehouse in Switzerland. Not a fire. Not alongside two of Dante Marchetti's men.

"The report said Brussels," I whispered. "The report said she was shot."

"The report was a lie." He stepped closer, and this time I didn't back away. "Your agency covered it up. Either because they were embarrassed that she'd gone to me, or because the mole she was hunting is still inside and didn't want anyone looking too closely. I've spent eighteen months trying to find out which. And then you showed up in Prague, with her eyes and her stubbornness and her absolute refusal to die, and I thought—maybe the universe finally sent me an ally."

The word hung between us. Ally. Not possession. Not prey. Not even lover, though the way he was looking at me made that last one feel inevitable.

"I'm not your ally," I said, but my voice had lost its edge.

"No," he agreed. "Not yet. But you're not my enemy either. And in my world, that's practically a marriage proposal."

I surprised myself by laughing. It was a hollow, exhausted sound, but it was real. The first real thing I'd felt since I watched Mira's coffin lowered into the ground two years ago.

"I don't know what to believe," I admitted, and the honesty felt like bleeding.

"I know." He reached out, slowly, giving me time to flinch, and when I didn't, he tucked a strand of hair behind my ear with a gentleness that made my chest ache. "That's why you're still standing here instead of trying to kill me. Some part of you knows I'm telling the truth."

"Or some part of me is just too tired to aim."

His mouth curved. "There she is. The stubborn spy I've been hearing so much about."

I stepped back, breaking the contact, because if I let him touch me again I was going to do something stupid. Like believe him. Like trust him. Like kiss him.

"I need proof," I said. "Not photographs. Not rings. Something concrete. Names, dates, evidence I can verify."

"I have it." He moved back to his desk and opened a drawer, pulling out a thick file bound with black ribbon. "Everything I've gathered on the mole, the fire, and the people who wanted your sister dead. It's yours—on one condition."

"Of course there's a condition."

"You don't run." He held the file just out of reach, his gaze steady. "You're in danger the moment you leave this property. Your agency thinks you're still undercover, but the mole knows you're here. The mole knows what you're looking for. The moment you step outside my protection, you're a target. So you stay here, you read this, and you let me help you."

"Let you help me." I tested the words like they were poison. "You mean let you control me."

"I mean let me keep you alive." He held out the file. "The choice is yours. It always has been."

I stared at the file. I stared at him. And then, because I was tired and confused and stubborn enough to hate how much I wanted to say yes, I took it.

"Fine," I said. "But don't mistake cooperation for trust."

"I wouldn't dream of it." He gestured toward the chair across from his desk. "Now sit. Read. And when you're ready to start hunting the real killer—the one who took your sister from both of us—you let me know."

I sat. I opened the file. And somewhere between the first page and the third, the tears I'd been holding back for two years finally fell, silent and hot and unstoppable, while Dante Marchetti pretended not to notice and poured me another cup of coffee I still didn't drink.