Chapter 13 #2
I flip through the documents again, reading over the details.
Vittoria Falco. Daughter of a mid-level diplomat, orphaned young, raised in elite boarding schools under the watchful eye of so-called guardians who, from what I can tell, didn’t guard much of anything.
Then Enzo came into the picture. Young, ambitious, already playing the part of the golden son.
He courted her publicly, but privately? He isolated her.
Controlled her. It’s all there, hidden between the lines.
A pattern of grooming so insidious it makes my skin crawl.
I know this because I know the kind of sick father he had. The type of man who warps everything he touches. Of course, that depravity ran in the family. Psychotic tendencies, the need to own, to bend and break—Enzo was cut from the same diseased cloth.
It explains why she still talks about him like he walks on air. Like his name alone doesn’t leave a bitter taste in her mouth. Like him tearing through hell and earth to get her back doesn’t shake her to her core.
How could I not see this?
“Jesus Christ.” I exhale sharply, tossing the file onto my desk. Rafa is leaning against the wall, arms crossed and watching me with that look—the one that says he’s waiting for me to make sense of it all.
“She never had a chance,” I say, dragging a hand down my face.
Rafa snorts. “Most people don’t when they get tangled up with men like Enzo.”
“She wasn’t just tangled up. He built her world from the ground up, made sure she had no one but him.” I tap the file. “This isn’t just manipulation. It’s ownership.”
Rafa pushes off the wall and takes a seat across from me. “So what does that mean for us?”
Us. He means me. He means this thing I refuse to name, the way I’ve been keeping her close, watching her too carefully and the way I can’t seem to let her go. I don’t answer. Not yet. Because the real question isn’t what this means for us—it’s what I’m willing to do about it.
I reach for Vittoria’s phone again. We took it the same day we took her.
Since the hack on Enzo’s house and personal line—and her kidnapping—he’s been careful, saying little, but something tells me he’s waiting for the right moment to strike.
I scroll through their messages, looking for anything I might’ve missed.
Then I see it. The messages my hacker was able to recover.
The last message.
I stare at the screen, reading her words, feeling them settle in my chest like a slow, spreading burn. The conversation is short, but it says everything.
Vittoria: Sergio just did it. I’ll be out soon. I’ll find out what I can.
Enzo’s reply is just as damning.
Enzo: Good. Delete this before you sleep. When the time comes, you know what to do.
I exhale slowly, jaw tight. My thumb hovers over the screen, the weight of those words pressing down like a vice.
She wasn’t just a prisoner in my house. She was a goddamn spy.
From the start.
I close my eyes briefly, jaw locking. I set the phone down, then stare at nothing. “She was supposed to betray me.”
Silence. Rafa curses under his breath. “You sure?”
I push the phone across the desk. He picks it up, reads, and I watch as the realization hits him.
“Damn.” He shakes his head. “That’s a hell of a twist.”
I didn’t see it coming.
And yet, I should have.
The pieces fit too well. The questions she asked, the way she moved through my house, her curiosity about things she had no business knowing. I wanted to believe it was desperation, that she was just trying to survive, but this? This is something else.
Betrayal isn’t new to me. I was raised in it, shaped by it, taught from a young age that trust is just another weakness waiting to be exploited. But for some reason, this one cuts differently.
I stand abruptly and push away from my desk.
Rafa says, watching me carefully. “Why do I feel like you’re gonna break something? Probably her neck.”
“Get her for me.”
Rafa hesitates. “Dario—”
“Now.”
He doesn’t argue. He never does.
Minutes later, she stands in the center of my office with hands clenched at her sides. She looks at me, then at her phone still on my desk. Smart girl. She knows.
I pick up the device and hold it up between us. “You want to explain this?”
She doesn’t answer right away but also doesn’t deny it. And that tells me more than words ever could.
“Dario, I—”
I move before she can finish, closing the space between us in a second. My hand grips her throat, not tight enough to cut off her breath, but enough to make sure she knows exactly how close she is to getting her life snuffed out of her.
“Do not lie to me.” My voice is calm and controlled, but my blood is anything but. It’s boiling. “You were working with him. You planned to betray me.”
Her breath shudders out, her chest rising sharply beneath my grip. “At first, yes. That was the plan.”
The admission still knocks the breath from my lungs even when I already knew the answer.
She swallows against my hand. “But it changed. I fell—”
“No.” My fingers flex, tightening even more.
Her expression twists. “Dario. You think this was easy for me? You think I wanted any of this?”
“I think you made a choice.”
She shakes her head and digs her nails into my wrist, but she doesn’t fight me off. “You don’t understand.”
“Then make me understand.”
She hesitates. And that’s the worst part. If there was something—anything—she could say to make this right, she’d have said it by now.
The stillness in the room hums, louder than any sound.
I let go of her throat, only to shove her back against the wall. She stumbles, gasping, but before she can recover, I lodge a hand beside her head. The impact of my fist against the wood shakes the entire room. Her eyes slam shut as she braces for another hit that never comes.
I watch her, breathing hard. A second passes. Then another.
She blinks up at me, lashes damp, throat flushed where my fingers had been. “Dario, I love—”
I laugh, but there’s nothing in it. Just a hollow, gutted sound.
“You want to say that word to me? Love?” I shake my head, tasting the bitterness like blood in my mouth. My voice rasps from years of hatred clawing its way to the surface.
“Let me tell you about that word you’re about to throw at me, Vittoria.
I see why you think you understand it—if what you have with him is anything to go by.
That sick, fucked up obsession you call devotion?
” I scoff. “That’s not love. Love is trust. It’s putting your life in someone’s hands, handing them the knife, and believing—no, knowing—they won’t fucking use it on you. ”
My voice drops, something dark curling in my chest. “It’s what I had for Enzo before he gutted me in front of the whole goddamn world.”
She stiffens, confusion flickering behind the tears in her eyes.
I shake my head, stepping back just enough to breathe, just enough to stop myself from doing something I can’t take back. Because for all my anger, all my boiling hatred for what she’s done, there’s still that part of me that wants all of this to be nothing but a bad dream.
"I trusted Enzo more than I had anyone in my entire life. Not that I had much of a choice—he was the only one I could turn to after escaping my deadbeat dad and his love affair with alcohol."
Vittoria’s lips part like she wants to say something, but I don’t give her the chance.
“In a better environment with him, I finally had one shot at a future. One chance at something real, something that might have led me to my foster brother, maybe even given us the kind of life we never had. And he took it from me. Not because he had to. Not because I wronged him. But because he couldn’t stand that I was better than him.
Because losing control was something he’d never accept. ”
I inhale sharply as the memories slice through me like razors. The humiliation. The rage. The moment I realized the person I would have walked through fire for was the one who ruined me.
I meet her gaze again and see the storm behind my eyes reflecting in hers.
“You think I’m the monster here?” I say, my voice rough.
“You have no fucking clue what a monster looks like. You sided with a man whose father ruined me. Who let his father do things to me that no fucking kid should ever have to survive. Who pretended to be my friend, then stood back and watched while his father made sure I lost everything. My chance at Juilliard? Gone. My future? Stolen. My dignity? Beaten out of me by a man with enough power to make me disappear if he wanted to.”
She looks shaken, like I just slapped her. “Dario…”
“And your precious Enzo? He watched it all happen. Let his father do it. And when it was over? He fucking laughed.” I lean in, my voice dropping.
“Yeah, I kidnapped you. I was going to use you—just a means to an end, a way to get back at him. But now? Now I can’t even think about sending you back to him.
Can’t stand the idea of anything happening to you.
Because I’m fucking losing my mind over you.
You and I both know damn well that you’re still here, and it has nothing to do with him anymore.
But the man you sided with? He’s worse. And you were too fucking blind to see it. ”
Her lips part, but I shake my head, jaw tight.
"Get out."
She doesn't move.
"Now," I bite out, deadly. "Before I change my mind, put a bullet in every piece of you and send what's left back to him gift-wrapped."
For a second, I think she’ll fight—beg, plead, try to make me understand. But then, barely breathing, she nods.
Turns and walks away.
The door closes behind her
My breath is too loud in the quiet. My skin feels too tight, my heart pounding against my ribs, screaming to be let out. I stare at the door she disappeared behind with hands curling into fists.
The past I buried for years, the one I tried not to think about, claws its way to the surface.
Enzo fucking Castelli.
I exhale through my nose and try to push it back down. But it’s too late. The memories are already ripping through me, hot and bitter, dredging up things I swore I’d never relive.
I was sixteen when I started going to Enzo’s house.
Remo had already escaped by then, leaving me behind with a father who only ever saw me as a punching bag.
The first time I showed up at Enzo’s, it was with a busted lip and a split brow, and his father welcomed me like I was something precious.
He fed me, patched me up, told me I was like a second son to him.
I was stupid enough to believe it.
I thought Enzo was my friend. I thought his father was a safe harbor. But men like him don’t help without expecting something in return.
The touches started small. At first, it was just a hand on my back.
Fingers brushing my arm. A grip on my knee that lingered too long.
Small things, easy to dismiss—until the night he slid a hand over my shoulder and told me I was too handsome for my own good.
That was when I understood exactly what he wanted.
I told Enzo. I fucking told him. And he looked me in the eye and swore he believed me. He said his father was a bastard, that he’d help me get out. I thought, for the first time, I had someone in my corner.
Then the Juilliard audition came. And I got it. With a scholarship from an organization who helped kids like me.
I had a real shot. A fucking dream I bled for.
But the morning of my admission, I woke up to a scandal.
A goddamn media circus. Pictures of me, twisted, manipulated, staged—his father’s hands on me, but the story painted differently.
They made me look willing. Made me look like a cheap whore who used a powerful man for favors.
I was sixteen, and Enzo stood beside his father, watching me drown.
Juilliard cut me loose before I could step through the door. No school wanted me. No one would even hire me. And Enzo? He just smirked. Called it a lesson. Said if I hadn’t opened my mouth, I would’ve had everything.
I close my eyes, breathing through the storm of it. My chest feels like it’s caving in, rage and disgust twisting under my ribs. Vittoria doesn’t understand. She can’t.
Enzo didn’t just fuck with my life. He took it. Stole my goddamn future, left me with nothing but the ruins, and when I clawed my way out—when I built something from the ashes—he had the fucking nerve to try and take that too.
But he didn’t realize something.
The boy he destroyed didn’t survive. I buried him alongside every dream I once had. What crawled out of that wreckage was something else entirely. Someone who doesn’t break. Someone who learned that power isn’t given—it’s taken.
I grip the edge of my desk, knuckles white.
If she thinks I’m letting that slide, she’s out of her goddamn mind. Because I don’t just settle scores.
I make sure there’s nothing left to settle.
But this—her—it doesn’t feel the same. Enzo and his father turned me into something ruthless. Stripped me of anything soft or human, then left me with nothing but sharp fucking edges and a hunger that only power could satisfy.
And yet, when I look at her, when I think about what she’s done, that primal, sick need to keep her and to take her, own her, ruin her for anyone else is still there.
And it fucking hurts.
Because for the first time since I lost everything, I let someone in. I let myself want. And now? Now I don’t even know how to revert back to who I was when I came back here. Back to the man who felt nothing, who needed no one.
She’s changed me. And I hate her for it.
I thought Enzo’s betrayal was the worst pain I’d ever feel.
I was wrong.