Chapter 7 Dante
DANTE
The days blur together after the night of the wedding.
I move through them on instinct alone. Meetings, briefings delivered over the phone with barely any attention paid to what’s being discussed, all while my mind stays anchored to that night.
To Elena’s face after she hit me and the look in her eyes when I told her what would happen if she disobeyed me.
I tell myself it was a control tactic meant to keep her in line, not cruelty. But… even that half-truth doesn’t sit well inside my gut.
My men have been tearing through New York from the moment we returned, chasing every whisper of Giovanni Vitale’s name like they’re hot on a scent trail.
I’ve ordered it done quietly but thoroughly, no mistakes or unnecessary bodies left along the way because I can’t afford a turf dispute from halfway across the globe.
Elena has always been close to her father, loyal in a way that borders on foolish sometimes. It’s exactly what has convinced me that he stayed near her, hiding in plain sight, trusting that proximity to his daughter and grandson would protect him after they all fled to the States.
It’s the kind of arrogance I’ve seen from him before, but strangely, every report that comes back to me ends the same way. With absolutely nothing.
No sightings, no bank activity, not even a shell corporation to hide his assets and keep him and his daughter afloat in the years since they’ve been away from Sicily. I’ve had apartments searched, storage units turned over and cleared, even old contacts questioned and dismissed one by one.
It’s as if Giovanni Vitale has vanished completely, leaving behind nothing but cold leads and wasted time.
Each failure tightens the anger more viciously in my chest. Frustration claws at me with each dead end.
It’s not just the uncertainty of not finding him that’s bothering me.
It’s also the knowledge that Elena is sitting under my roof, hating me with every breath she takes while I come back empty-handed again and again with nothing to show for bringing her back here.
Sleep offers no relief.
Every time I close my eyes, all I see is her son’s face and those gray-green eyes looking up at me during the wedding with fear and something disturbingly close to recognition reflecting back at me. And Elena… always Elena… haunts me all the same.
I replay the moment she struck me, the sound of it echoing in my ears even now, days later. I replay the way she flinched when I threatened what mattered most to her and tried desperately to beg for me to take it back and how the sound of the door slamming behind me felt cruel even to my own ears.
I tell myself she forced my hand. That she made me do it by running, and lying, and hiding our child from me. But the truth is much uglier than that. I didn’t just punish her to assert control. I punished her because I was hurt.
Deeply.
Some part of me still remembers what it was like to touch her without anger in my chest. To want her without guilt and resentment coiled around my heart. To imagine a future that didn’t end in graves and vendettas.
But that man has long been dead. I killed him the night Matteo died and I found my father hanging from our family estate’s banister.
Yet no matter what I do, their ghosts refuse to stay buried.
Living in that house afterward had driven me near insane, ending in my coming to our summer villa for reprieve and staying at the residence permanently.
With each failed report about Giovanni Vitale, it feels like another insult added to injury. Another reminder that I am losing ground with the war inside my own head. I need answers. Some kind of resolution, something concrete to justify everything I’ve done.
Because if I don’t find her father soon, then all I’ve done is trap a woman I once loved and her child… our child… here for nothing.
That is a failure I don’t know how to reconcile.
Even with this hatred still burning in my heart.
That night when yet another lead collapses, I finally break.
My feet carry me through the villa without conscious thought, down familiar corridors I’ve walked a thousand times, until warm light spills from the library entryway.
When I push the doors open further and peek inside, I see her there.
Elena sits curled into one of the leather chairs by the window, bent over a book in her lap.
Luca sleeps curled against her chest, his small body limp, his head tucked beneath her chin.
One of her arms cradles him automatically while the other rests along the spine of the book as she reads quietly to him.
Her hair has slipped loose from the clip holding it back, spilling over her shoulder and catching the lamplight until it looks almost golden brown.
For a moment, I can’t breathe.
This image, this exact one, has haunted my dreams for years. Not in fragments or vague impressions but in aching, precise detail. Elena bathed in warm lamplight with a child asleep in her lap, both of them curled up next to a fireplace as they read together.
It’s a fantasy I always knew I could never have, pieces of a life too soft for my world, too gentle for someone like me to want.
A domestic stillness that doesn’t belong to men raised on violence.
Yet the deepest parts of me have always wanted it anyway—a family not built from obligation or fear but from something much more tender.
I stand there longer than I mean to, unmoving in the doorway.
She hasn’t noticed me yet. Her fingers brush absently through Luca’s hair the way only a mother does. Her mouth curves faintly at something on the page, softening her features in a way I haven’t seen in years.
Then she looks up and the moment instantly shatters.
The words come out before I can stop them, flat and cold. “It’s late. You should be in bed.”
I don’t even mean it, let alone want to say it.
Her expression falters immediately, the softness draining from her face. Her hand curls protectively around Luca’s head, instinctively tucking him closer to her body as if I might snatch him from her arms and steal him away.
“I wanted to finish reading him this bedtime story,” she says quietly.
Something in my chest tightens at that. My hand closes around the doorframe, fingers digging into the wood. “You couldn’t do that upstairs?”
The question sounds more like an accusation, even to my own ears. Anger flashes in her eyes then, hurt sharpened by resentment. This has become a familiar pattern we’ve fallen into over the last few days.
“Not when you’re always demanding I sleep in your bed while my son sleeps in another room,” she snaps back, her voice low so she won’t wake him.
Our son, I nearly say.
The words surge up fast, pressing hard against the back of my teeth.
It takes more effort to force them back down and swallow them before they fracture what little control I have left than to actually respond to her properly.
Forcing her to own up to the deception would change everything between us.
It would turn suspicion into implication, and that’s not something she can get away with pushing off if I continue to press her for the truth.
No matter what she says, a simple DNA test will prove everything.
Biology doesn’t care about guilt or grief or what ‘should have been’.
It doesn’t spare feelings and it certainly doesn’t create coincidences like this.
Children don’t emerge bearing the exact echo of another man’s face and wind up being someone else’s.
That’s just simply not possible. No matter how desperately Elena clings to this lie or how many times she repeats it to herself like a prayer, it doesn’t change the truth staring back at the both of us.
Luca is mine.
I grind my teeth, my hand slipping from the doorframe to curl into a fist at my side. The restraint I’ve been clinging to for days finally begins to fray. The shift happens so fast, I barely register it happening.
“Where is your father?” I bite out.
She blinks at me, genuine confusion flickering across her face at the sudden aggression in my tone before it hardens into a guarded expression. “I don’t know.”
“You’re still lying,” I say coldly. “He didn’t disappear without help, Elena. You and I both know that. He’s not that resourceful.”
The softness she’d had for Luca moments ago vanishes, replaced by the same stubborn defiance that has always infuriated me. “I’ve told you everything I know. I don’t know how many more times I have to say that to get it through that thick skull of yours.”
“You’ve told me nothing,” I snap.
“Because I don’t know anything,” she fires back.
The argument spirals me out of control almost immediately.
It’s not just this moment, it’s everything else piling on top of it.
Exhaustion gnaws at me from my sleepless nights, hollowing me out from the inside out as it coaxes the frustration that’s been riding just beneath my skin for days.
Every dead lead, every wasted hour, every memory of her leaving me behind when I needed her the most stacks up until something inside me wavers dangerously.
I don’t even realize I’ve crossed the threshold of the library until I’m standing right in front of her and her eyes widen.
In the same instant, my hand clamps around her wrist and I yank her forward.
Not enough to hurt her, but it’s abrupt and forceful, driven by frustration rather than reason.
She gasps softly and the book slips from her hand, thudding to the floor as she instinctively tightens her one remaining arm around Luca to keep him from rolling off her lap.
He wakes immediately with a small, startled sound as his body jerks. His eyes fly open in sudden panic. He looks between us, confused and disoriented, sensing the danger in the air even if he doesn’t understand it.
I should stop.
I should step back.