The alliance was a lie.
“No.”
Serena’s voice trembled, but this time with a fierce, suppressed rage rather than fear.
“No, I won’t let you do this. I’ll warn him. I’ll call his security.”
“You will do no such thing, you stupid girl.”
Patricia’s footsteps clicked rapidly across the tile floor.
“Do you think your father hasn’t planned for that? The men guarding the lobby downstairs right now aren’t Dante’s. They’re ours. Vincent bought off the night shift captain two weeks ago. You pick up a phone to warn your husband and they will come up here and put a bullet in you, too. You are a Romano. Act like it. Grab your jewelry, put your coat on, and walk out the front door with me.”
Now, Dante stood motionless in the shadows of the hallway, a lethal icy calm washing over him.
The instinct to pull his weapon and storm the room was overwhelming, but he forced himself to stay planted. He needed to hear the rest of this. He needed to hear his wife agree to walk away and let him die.
It would make the divorce and the coming war so much easier.
But what Serena said next shattered everything Dante thought he knew.
“I said no.”
The sound of a heavy book hitting the floor echoed through the sunroom.
Dante peered through the narrow crack in the door.
Serena was standing behind a velvet armchair, her chest heaving, her dark eyes blazing with a fire Dante had never seen in her before. She wasn’t shrinking away from her mother. She was standing tall, a fierce protector guarding her territory.
“Have you lost your mind?” Patricia sneered, grabbing Serena by the arm. “You hate him. You have spent 3 years miserable in this glass cage, flinching every time the man looks at you. You lock your doors at night. You’ve complained about his coldness, his business, his life. I am offering you your freedom, Serena. Your father is giving you a way out. Tomorrow you will be a very wealthy, very young widow. Now come with me.”
Serena wrenched her arm out of her mother’s grip.
“I don’t hate him,” she choked out, a sob finally breaking through her defiant facade. “My god, Mom. I love him. I have loved him since the day I met him.”
Outside the door, Dante felt as if the floor had completely dropped out from beneath him. He gripped the doorframe to steady himself.
She loved him.
“Then why?” Patricia demanded, throwing her hands up in exasperation. “Why have you treated him like a stranger? Why did you beg me to help you get a divorce just last month?”
“Because I knew what Dad was planning,” Serena yelled, the tears now spilling freely down her pale cheeks. “I overheard Dad talking to Carlo on the patio the night before my wedding. I knew Dad was never going to honor the treaty. I knew he was just using me as a Trojan horse to get inside Dante’s inner circle, to find his weaknesses, to map out his security routines.”
Serena took a step toward her mother, her voice dropping to a desperate, ragged whisper.
“If I had played the loving wife, if I had let Dante close to me, he would have trusted me. He would have trusted our family. He would have let his guard down. I couldn’t let that happen. So, I made myself a wall.”
Dante closed his eyes as a brutal wave of realization washed over him.
The flinching, the locked doors, the silence.
It wasn’t because she was repulsed by him. It was a calculated, agonizing performance to keep him at arm’s length.
She had intentionally made him miserable to keep him paranoid, sharp, and suspicious of the Romanos. She had sacrificed her own happiness, her own marriage to act as a human shield for him.
“You ridiculous, naive child.”
Patricia laughed. A cruel, mocking sound.
“You ruined 3 years of your life for a man who runs a criminal empire. A man who is currently having his lawyer draft divorce papers to throw you out on the street. Do you think he cares about you?”
“He does care,” Serena fired back, wiping her eyes frantically. “He’s divorcing me because he thinks I’m miserable. He’s doing it to let me go. He’s a better man than Dad will ever be. And if you think I am going to walk out that door and leave him here to be slaughtered by Dad’s paid thugs, you are out of your mind. I am his wife.”
“You won’t survive the night, Serena,” Patricia warned, her tone shifting from motherly frustration to genuine menace. “If you stay in this penthouse, Vincent will assume you have chosen a side, and he does not leave loose ends. Not even with his own daughter.”
“Then I’ll die with my husband,” Serena said, her voice steadying into a chilling calm. “Get out of my house, Mother, before I call Dante right now and tell him everything.”
“The phones are jammed, you fool,” Patricia hissed, grabbing her designer handbag from the sofa. “You’ve signed your own death warrant. Don’t say I didn’t try to save you.”
Dante backed away from the door, moving swiftly and silently down the corridor, retreating into the shadows of the expansive living room as the heavy oak doors of the sunroom swung open.
He watched from the dark as Patricia Romano marched furiously toward the penthouse elevator, her heels clicking aggressively against the marble.
When the elevator doors swallowed his mother-in-law, the penthouse fell dead silent once more.
Dante looked down at the manila envelope in his hand.
The divorce papers, the symbol of his surrender.
He gripped the thick envelope with both hands and tore it brutally down the middle, then again and again until it was nothing but useless confetti.
He tossed the shredded paper into the nearest wastebasket.
