25.
After 1 week of the marriage.....
Dante’s private execution chamber was buried beneath the estate five stories below ground, behind three biometric doors, and guarded by silence itself.
Only three people had ever been brought here.
Two left in pieces. One was about to wish he hadn’t been born.
Isolde sat in the far corner of the steel-paneled room, chained by the ankle to the wall, dressed in thin white linen.
Her hands trembled in her lap, but her eyes—swollen and wide didn’t look away.
She had made that mistake before. Dante had warned her “Close your eyes, and I’ll punish someone else for your cowardice.”
So she watched. As he entered.
Dressed in a black button-down soaked at the cuffs with crimson stains that hadn’t yet dried.
The man dragged behind him was barely conscious.
His face had been beaten so badly the bone beneath his left eye had cracked outward.
His mouth was filled with blood and missing teeth. A metal collar had been welded shut around his neck.
Alex followed silently, wheeling in a cart of surgical tools.
Dante dropped the man at the center of the room like trash.
“This is Matteo,” he said calmly, glancing toward Isolde without emotion. “He worked under my Sicilian branch. Sold information to Interpol in exchange for sanctuary.”
He picked up a long, slender steel skewer from the tray and twirled it like a conductor’s baton.
“I warned him, of course. And yet here we are.”
Isolde opened her mouth to plead, but Dante held up a finger.
“Do not waste your breath.”
Then he pressed the skewer between Matteo’s ribs.
The man spasmed, choking on his own cry. Dante’s eyes glinted with clinical detachment.
“One rib punctured. One lung partially collapsed.” He pulled the metal free. Slowly.
A wet, sucking sound followed.
Then came the hammer. Not swift. Not fatal.
Just hard enough to crack one kneecap.
Matteo howled. Isolde flinched, but didn’t close her eyes.
She couldn’t. She had seen Dante smile while skinning a man’s back.
She had seen him stroke her hair and whisper love songs while covered in arterial spray.
This—this was how he ruled. Fear wasn’t enough.
He wanted faith in pain.
Dante set the hammer down and reached for a scalpel next.
Then crouched beside the man and whispered “Do you know what my father taught me?”
Matteo sobbed, unable to respond.
Dante smiled faintly “He taught me that betrayal should leave a scar on the world. A reminder. Not just a death—but a warning.”
He cut into Matteo’s chest not to kill, but to carve. The letters “INFAME” Traitor.
Blood ran down the man’s stomach in rivers.
Dante turned to Isolde as he worked, voice calm.
“You see, dove, in my world, love and fear are the same knife. You either hold the blade, or bleed beneath it.”
She shook her head, tears brimming. “Why am I here?”
He met her gaze. And said the words she would never forget “Because someday, if you betray me too…I want you to remember what happens to those I once trusted.”
Later, the floor slicked red and silent, Dante dragged Matteo’s twitching body to the drain in the center of the room.
Still alive.
He looked to Alex. “Send him back to the Sicilians in pieces. An ear for each capo. A finger for each rat. Leave his heart at the embassy.”
Alex nodded, already wrapping plastic over his shoes.
Dante walked to Isolde, the scent of blood strong in his wake.
He knelt before her. Cradled her cheek with his gloved hand, now stained with gore “I don’t expect your loyalty,” he whispered. “Not yet.”
She trembled beneath his touch “I expect your fear.” He leaned forward and kissed her softly—on the forehead, then the mouth.
It was gentle. Which made it worse.
Because she tasted blood on his lips.
That night, she lay in the stone-walled bath chamber, the water cold around her.
The servants had drawn her a bath without asking.
Because they knew what followed a cleansing like that.
Dante had ordered her dressed in white again. Hair braided. Collared.
She was to appear before him like his purity rebuilt, a girl carved from ash.
The mirror above the tub was cracked.
She stared at herself.
The blood that had spattered her jaw. The sweat at her hairline. The trembling in her lips.
She didn’t cry. She didn’t scream.
But something inside her quietly broke.
Not because of what she saw.
But because part of her now understood Dante’s power.
And worse— Some part of her had stopped wanting to escape it.