CLARA
The cabin hasn’t changed in my absence. Same steep alpine roof, same wall of glass facing the valley, same overpriced everything.
The last time I saw this place, I was going out its bathroom window with my boots in one hand.
Now I’m coming back through the front door with a bodyguard’s fingers around each arm and blood drying on my chin.
I’ve come full circle. The universe really does have a sick sense of humor.
“Home again,” Marco says, holding the door like a gentleman, like his knuckles didn’t split my lip an hour ago.
“This was never home,” I spit back.
Marco doesn’t answer. He walks me through the great room, past the leather sofas, the antler chandelier, the fireplace nobody’s allowed to actually use because smoke damages the art, and past the guest bathroom. He pauses there, tapping one knuckle against the door.
“The window’s been sealed, by the way. After your little performance.” He smiles at me, displaying even white teeth. “But we won’t be needing bathrooms.”
Well, if that’s not fucking ominous, I don’t know what is.
We stop at a door I never paid attention to before, tucked behind the kitchen. He unlocks it, and cool air spills out from the darkness beyond. Marco flips a switch.
The light illuminates stone stairs. There are wine racks along both walls, bottles lying in their little wooden cradles, and absolutely no windows. Not one. Just a light hanging from the ceiling and a floor drain underneath it that I decide not to think about.
My whole body goes cold, pins and needles prickling my skin. “You’re not serious, Marco.”
“I made a mistake earlier,” he says, guiding me down the steps with a grip on my elbow that will bruise.
“I treated you like a guest. Guests have windows. Guests have phones.” He stops me at the bottom and turns me to face him.
His eyes move over my face like he’s checking inventory.
“I will not make the same mistake twice.”
I shake my head in disbelief. “So the new plan is what? Keep me in a basement like a Bordeaux until I’m mature enough to marry?”
Marco gives me a thin smile. “Until you calm down. Yes.”
I laugh, and it sounds just a bit hysterical.
“Marco. Walk me through the ending here, because I genuinely want to know how you think this goes. You can’t force me to marry you.
There’s paperwork. There’s a priest. There are witnesses, and I will make a scene in front of every single one of them.
I will scream during the vows.” I wave my hands as I speak like I’m illustrating the setting.
“I will tell your mother, your uncles, your terrifying friends from Palermo exactly how I got there. You want a wedding video where the bride announces she was kept in a wine cellar? Because that’s the director’s cut you’re purchasing. ”
He listens to all of it with his head tilted, still wearing that small smile. Then he speaks.
“No, you won’t.”
“Watch me,” I hiss.
“Clara,” he sighs. It’s almost fond, and that just makes my skin crawl.
“You’ll be angry for a week. Perhaps two.
Then you’ll be bored, and then you’ll be reasonable, because you have always been reasonable when the alternatives run out.
You’ll wear the dress. You’ll smile. In a few years there will be children.
My mother wants three, though I think two will suffice.
And you’ll have a beautiful life. Houses.
Travel. Anything you want.” He spreads his hands, generous, a man offering me the world.
“Most women would kneel for what I’m giving you. ”
“Then go find most women.” My voice shakes, and I hate it. “There’s a whole planet of them. Women who’d love the houses and the cars and would never elbow you in the rib. Why me, Marco? I’m a waitress. I’m nobody. You could replace me by Friday.”
“Because you’re mine,” he says simply. “And I don’t lose what’s mine.”
They’re the same words, almost. You cannot, will not leave me.
Except when Aldric said them, he stood in a hallway afterward for an hour rehearsing an apology to a door.
He learned. He warmed my socks by the fire and asked instead of ordered and let me walk out of a gate he’d been chained to for seven hundred years.
Marco just sealed the bathroom window.
“I could never be happy with you,” I say quietly.
“You know that, right? Not happy for now. Not eventually happy. Never. You hit me today.” I touch my lip, and my finger comes away red.
“And even before that… The way you talk to me. Bambola. Porcelain doll. You’ve never once asked me a question you wanted the answer to.
I could live in this cellar until my hair goes gray and I would still rather marry the drain in this floor. ”
His jaw tics. Good.
I’m aching to say that I’m already happy. I’m happy with someone else. He makes me breakfast, and he taught me to fillet a fish, and he loves me like the world is ending, and he would fold him into an origami swan.
I swallow the words.
Because Marco found me through butterfly photos.
Marco is patient and vindictive and has men with guns, and if he ever learns there’s a castle in those woods with a man I love in it, he’d go.
Out of pride alone, he’d go. And maybe Aldric would win…
Actually, Aldric would probably win, but maybe isn’t good enough, because I keep seeing my revenant riddled with bullets.
He can’t die. And no matter what they do to him, he keeps not-dying, forever, in pieces.
So I press my ruined lip shut and give Marco nothing.
“You’ll feel differently,” he says, already climbing the stairs, already done with me, “when you’ve had time to think.”
“Marco—”
“Don’t drink anything with a year on it.”
The door closes. The lock turns. It sounds heavy. Expensive even.
I stand there and breathe and try really, really hard not to cry, because the bastard would probably like that.
“Okay,” I tell the wine. “Team meeting.”
The wine says nothing. God, I miss my cat.
I don’t know how much time passes, because in order to tell time I’d need windows and I’ve been robbed of mine. Long enough that I inventory the cellar twice. Long enough that my stomach starts rumbling.
Nobody brings food. I’m not sure I could eat it anyway. Every time I picture chewing, I picture the trout going cold on the table at Blackthorn Keep, the chair beside Aldric’s sitting empty, and my throat just closes up shop.
He’ll know by now. He’ll have walked to the lake looking for me. Maybe he’ll have found the phone.
“Don’t do anything stupid,” I whisper to a bottle of Barolo. “You hear me? They have guns. You have a sword. This isn’t a fair—”
Somewhere above me, something thuds.
I freeze, my ears straining. The cabin is old-money solid. It’s thick, and I’m in a cellar, and maybe I imagined it.
Another thud. This one’s heavier. A piece of furniture, or a body meeting a wall? Then voices. They’re muffled, but rising, and there’s something there I’ve never heard from Marco’s men before.
Fear.
Boots hammer across the floor overhead, fast, scattering in different directions.
A man shouts something in Italian too strangled to translate, and something made of glass explodes—the chandelier, the sliding doors, I can’t tell.
I can’t tell what the hell is going on, and my heart is climbing my ribs like a ladder because either the mob war finally came home to Marco or…
Or.
There’s a gunshot, and I’m off the chair before I tell my legs to move.
“HEY!” I’m at the top of the stairs, banging both of my fists against the door. “Hey! What’s going on? What was that? Somebody answer me!”
Nothing. My knuckles sting, but I just hit the door harder.
“I swear to god, if anyone can hear me—what’s happening up there? WHO GOT SHOT?”
Silence. Then… footsteps.
Slow, even, unhurried footsteps crossing the floor toward the cellar door, each one landing with a thud that makes the wine bottles hum faintly in their racks. I take two steps back.
Maybe calling out was a terrible idea. Maybe I should’ve kept my mouth shut. What if it’s something worse than Marco? Rival mobsters or scorned business partners. Will I be sleeping with the fish in Aldric’s lake?
The lock turns and the door swings open. They must’ve taken out the light in whatever scuffle just occurred, so all I get is a silhouette filling the frame. A man. A tall man.
A very, very tall man, standing in the shadows.