Chapter 12
Julietta
The phone call came during dinner. Dante was reviewing something on his laptop, and I was pretending to eat the pasta Ricci had prepared while actually mapping the compound's layout in my head—exits, blind spots, security rotations. Old habits. New purpose.
His phone buzzed. Then again. Three times in rapid succession.
I watched his jaw tighten as he read whatever appeared on the screen. The kind of tightening that meant blood vessels were constricting, oxygen flow redirecting to his brain, body preparing for a fight.
"What is it?" I asked.
He didn't answer immediately. Just kept reading, his fingers drumming once against the table—a tell I'd learned meant he was calculating odds.
"Dante."
"Your father's made a move." He set the phone down carefully, like it might detonate. "He's hired Corsica. They're professional trackers. They've already mapped three of my safehouses."
The pasta turned to ash in my mouth.
Corsica. I'd heard the name whispered at the compound. Not with fear exactly, but with the kind of respect reserved for professionals who didn't miss. People who operated in the spaces between law and consequence.
"How long do we have?" My voice sounded steadier than my hands felt.
"A week. Maybe less." He closed the laptop. "You need to leave the city. I have a property upstate—a vineyard estate that's registered under a shell corporation six layers deep. No connection to me on paper. No external cameras. Completely off the grid. I'll move security personnel—"
"No."
He was already pulling out his phone, already making calculations. The speed of it, the automatic pivot into protection mode, made something crack open in my chest.
"Julietta, this isn't negotiable—"
"I said no." I stood up. The chair scraped backward with a sound that echoed. "You said I wasn't a pawn. You said I had a choice. And now you're telling me to hide in a basement while my father hunts me?"
"I'm telling you to survive." His voice dropped into that dangerous register—the one that made everyone in the compound move faster. "Corsica doesn't leave survivors who are easy to find."
"Then I won't be easy to find because I'll be helping you find them first."
He stood too, and the space between us became charged with something that tasted like copper and electricity. "Absolutely not."
"You need someone who knows my father's patterns.
Someone who can predict where he'll strike next.
Someone who understands the psychology of his moves.
" I stepped closer. "That's me, Dante. That's always been me.
I've been watching him since I was eighteen years old, learning how he thinks, how he plans, how he—"
"I don't care what you've learned." He grabbed my wrist, not rough, but firm enough that I felt the intensity of his conviction through his grip. "I care that you stay alive. There's a difference."
"Is there?" I twisted my hand, testing the hold.
He could have tightened it. Instead, he let go, stepping back like I'd burned him.
"Because from where I'm standing, you're doing exactly what Lorenzo did.
Telling me where I can be. What I can do.
Treating me like I'm too fragile to handle the reality of my own survival. "
"You're not fragile. That's not—" He ran his hand through his hair, a gesture of frustration I'd never seen from him before. It made him look younger. Angrier. More human. "Christ, Julietta. You're the opposite of fragile. That's the problem."
"What problem?"
"The problem is that if I let you into the field, if I let you anywhere near this, Corsica will use you as leverage. They'll study you, find your weaknesses, exploit them. And I—" He stopped himself, jaw clenching. "I can't protect you if you're visible."
The thing he didn't say hung between us like a blade.
I can't lose you.
Not because I was useful. Not because I was leverage or a strategic asset or any of the things I'd been my entire life. But because somewhere between the bathroom and the basement and the strategy meetings, I'd become something he actually needed.
The realization made me furious and terrified and something else I couldn't name.
"I'm not asking for your permission to be visible," I said quietly. "I'm telling you I won't hide. Not again. I've spent my entire life in basements, Dante. Literal ones and metaphorical ones. Waiting for someone to tell me what to do, where to go, who to become. And I'm done."
"Being alive isn't—"
"I know it's not freedom." I moved past him, toward the windows.
The city sprawled below us, all light and shadow and movement.
"Being alive is complicated and messy and sometimes it means making choices that terrify you.
But it has to be my choice. And if you take that away from me, if you lock me in a basement to 'protect' me, you become him.
You become every person who's ever tried to cage me because they thought they knew what was best."
I heard him move behind me. Felt the air shift as he closed the distance. For a moment, I thought he'd grab me again, force the issue the way his training would suggest. Instead, he just stood there, breathing.
"You're going to get yourself killed," he said finally.
"Probably." I turned to face him. His eyes were furious and desperate, something raw underneath. "But at least it'll be my death. My choice. My life."
"Not acceptable."
"It's the only offer on the table."
We stared at each other across the six feet of space between us.
I could see the war happening in his body—the tension in his shoulders, the way his hands curled into fists, the rapid calculation happening behind those eyes.
He was running scenarios, I realized. Playing out every version of this conversation in his head, looking for the angle that would make me comply.
There wasn't one. He'd built me wrong if compliance was the goal.
"You work with Marcos," he said finally. His voice was steady but thin, like it was being forced through a narrow space. "Every move. Every plan. Every breath you take outside this compound, he knows about it. And if I tell you to stand down, you stand down. Those are my conditions."
"They're not—"
"Those are my conditions," he repeated, harder, "or you go to the lower levels and you stay there. Choose."
I wanted to argue. Wanted to tell him that conditions meant control, that he was still caging me, just with more options. But I also knew he was terrified. Actual, visceral terror underneath the authority and the absolute certainty. He was trying to keep me alive the only way he knew how.
And I was asking him to let me walk into danger.
"Fine. Marcos knows. I comply with tactical stands." I met his gaze. "But I work. I plan. I hunt. Or you watch me disappear from this compound the moment your back is turned, and then Corsica finds me anyway, and you never see me again."
His expression shifted. Just a fraction. But enough that I knew I'd found the leverage point.
"You wouldn't—"
"I would. Without hesitation. I've learned from the best." I kept my voice soft, which made it worse. "And you know it."
He stared at me for a long moment. Then he turned away, toward the window, and I saw his shoulders rise and fall with a breath that came from somewhere deep.
"You're going to destroy me," he said quietly.
"Probably," I agreed. "But not tonight."
I didn't go to my room immediately.
Instead, I went to the study where Dante had shown me the Medusa painting, and I sat in the dark with just the city lights filtering through the windows.
My hands were shaking. My heart was still hammering against my ribs.
My entire body was vibrating with adrenaline and anger and the strange, intoxicating sensation of having said no and having it actually matter.
I'd said no to the Bennetts. They'd packed my things and shipped me to the compound.
I'd said no to Lorenzo. He'd smiled and arranged my marriage anyway.
But I'd said no to Dante, and he'd actually listened. Actually stopped. Actually changed course because I refused to move.
The difference gutted me.
It meant something was different. I was different. Or maybe he was different. Or maybe we were just different together in a way that made the old rules stop applying.
Footsteps in the hallway. I tensed, then relaxed when I recognized the rhythm. Dante.
He opened the study door and found me in the darkness. For a moment, he just stood there, silhouetted against the light from the hallway.
"I'm sorry," he said.
"I'm not."
"I know." He came deeper into the room, and I could see his face now, exhausted and older than it had looked at dinner.
"That's part of the problem. You're not sorry.
You're not afraid. You're just... moving forward.
And I can't—" He stopped, struggling with something.
"I can't be the person who holds you back. "
"Then don't." I stood up. "Work with me instead of against me. Let me help stop him."
"And if you die?" The question came out raw.
"Then I die knowing I fought. Knowing I chose it." I moved closer. "Knowing it was mine. That's more than I've ever had, Dante. That's everything."
He reached for me, and I let him pull me against his chest. His hands shook slightly as they settled on my back.
"I'm terrified," he whispered into my hair.
"I know." I pressed my face against his shirt, breathed in the scent of him—expensive cologne and something underneath that was just Dante. "That's how I know you actually care."
We stayed like that for a long time, standing in the study with the Medusa painting watching us, both of us trying to figure out how to love someone in a world that was built to destroy them.
Later, alone in my room, I pulled out the notebook I'd been keeping hidden in the lining of my mattress.
I'd started it the week after Dante brought me here. Notes on security rotations. Layout modifications. Personnel movements. The kind of information a spy would gather.
But I wasn't gathering it for Lorenzo.
I was gathering it for myself.
I flipped to the back pages, where I'd been mapping something else entirely. Not the compound or operation, but the patterns of Corsica's movements based on the fragments of information I'd overheard in meetings.
They were professional. Methodical. And they believed they were hunting someone who was hiding.
They weren't prepared for someone who was hunting them.
I picked up a pen and started to write, mapping out the first phase of a plan that would keep me visible enough to draw them out, protected enough to survive it. Dante wanted me to work with Marcos. Fine. But I'd do it on my terms.
If I was going to stop hiding—and I was—then I wasn't going to hide inside the compound either. I was going to move through this city like I owned it, and I was going to make sure Lorenzo understood that his daughter wasn't a commodity anymore.
She was a threat.
And threats didn't hide. They hunted.