Chapter 17
CASSIA
The study swallows me whole without the anticipation of him. Larger. Colder. I’ve spread quarterly reports across the desk and I’m working this time, not pretending. Numbers don’t lie. Numbers don’t pull away without explanation. Numbers make sense.
I’m cross-referencing shipping invoices when Maria appears at the entrance.
“Mrs. Santoro.”
I look up. Maria’s face is measured, neutral.
“There’s someone at the gate.” She pauses. “She says she’s your sister.”
My pen slips. Hits the desk. Rolls.
The numbers thread through the static in my skull before I can stop them. One, two, three. Automatic. Useless.
Lorenzo brought her in.
I find them in the sitting room off the main entrance, and the woman standing between the two guards is a stranger wearing my sister’s face.
She’s thin in a way that suggests weeks of bad sleep and worse food. Her hair hangs lank and unwashed. Her nails are bitten to the quick. The silk blouse she’s wearing is wrinkled, too large now, like she bought it when she was someone else.
Elena.
My sister, who fled two days before her wedding in a cloud of Chanel and entitlement. Who left a note that said she couldn’t go through with it. Who took our parents’ savings and disappeared without looking back.
She looks up when I enter. Her eyes are red-rimmed. Hollow.
“Cassia.” Her voice cracks on my name. “Thank God.”
I stand at the threshold. Don’t move toward her. Don’t offer comfort. I take her in: the trembling hands, the bitten lips, the way she keeps glancing toward the windows like something might come through them.
“Elena.”
Lorenzo catches my eye. There’s a question in the tilt of his head. What do you want done with her?
“She asked for sanctuary,” he says. “Claims she’s being hunted.”
“I am.” Elena’s voice pitches higher. “They’re trying to kill me. I didn’t know where else to go.”
A hundred responses crowd my throat. I swallow all of them.
“Get Giada,” I tell Lorenzo. “Have her check Elena over.”
He nods once and disappears.
Elena sags with relief, like she expected me to turn her away. Maybe I should have.
“Cassia, I know you’re angry.”
“Sit down.” I gesture to the sofa. “Don’t talk until Giada’s seen you.”
She sits. For once in her life, she does what she’s told.
Giada arrives within fifteen minutes, medical bag in hand, professional calm settled over her features like armor. Doctor mode. Not sister mode. I’m grateful for the distinction.
“Elena Neri?” Giada sets her bag on the side table. “I’m Dr. Santoro. I’m going to check your vitals and make sure you’re not injured. Is that alright?”
Elena nods. Her eyes flick to me, then back to Giada.
“You don’t have to stay for this,” Giada says to me. “I can handle the assessment.”
“I’m staying.”
Giada doesn’t argue. She pulls out a blood pressure cuff, a penlight, moves through her examination with quiet efficiency. Elena flinches when Giada touches her wrist to check her pulse.
“When did you last eat?” Giada asks.
“Yesterday. Maybe the day before.”
“Sleep?”
“I don’t remember.”
Giada makes a note on her phone. Her face reveals nothing, but I can read the diagnosis in her movements: dehydration, malnutrition, acute stress. Elena has been running hard for weeks.
“You’re not injured,” Giada says at last. “Exhausted and underfed, but nothing that rest and food won’t fix.” She turns to me. “I’ll have Nonna Rosa bring broth and bread. Nothing heavy.”
“Thank you.”
Giada packs her bag, but she doesn’t leave right away. Her eyes meet mine, warmth beneath the professionalism.
We’ll talk later.
Then she’s gone, and I’m alone with my sister.
The silence stretches.
“Cassia.”
“Who’s trying to kill you?”
Elena’s hands twist in her lap.
“I don’t know. Not with certainty. The people who hired me.” She stops, starts again. “The man who called.”
“Start from the beginning.”
She takes a shaky breath. This is an Elena I never saw growing up: uncertain, unpolished, stripped of the armor our parents built for her. Part of me wants to feel satisfaction. I don’t.
“Two days before the wedding, I got a call. Blocked number. A man’s voice. He said he knew I didn’t want to marry Dante Santoro, and he could help me escape.”
My stomach tightens. “Go on.”
“He offered me money. A lot of money. Two million dollars, wired to an offshore account, if I disappeared the night before the ceremony.”
Two million.
The number hangs between us. Two million dollars to sabotage a wedding. To humiliate the Santoro family. To throw our father’s alliance into chaos.
“You took it.” My voice comes out flat. “You took two million dollars from a stranger to betray your family.”
“I took two million dollars to escape a cage.” Elena’s chin lifts, a ghost of defiance. “You don’t know what it was like. Being groomed since I was twelve to marry a man I’d never met. Having every choice made for me. I saw a way out and I took it.”
“You didn’t think to ask who was paying? Why someone would spend that much to stop a wedding?”
“I didn’t care.” The defiance cracks. “I just wanted out. I didn’t think about what would happen after.”
“You never do.”
The words land at the precise edge I intended. Twenty-four years of swallowed resentment doesn’t disappear because my sister looks as broken as I’ve been.
“Now they’re cleaning up loose ends,” Elena continues. “Three weeks ago, someone tried to run me off the road in Miami. Last week, a man followed me through an airport in Houston. I’ve been moving nonstop, paying cash, staying off the grid. But they’re getting closer.”
“Who’s ‘they’?”
“I told you, I don’t know.” Her voice rises. “I never saw anyone. Just the voice on the phone. Just the money in my account.”
I process this. Someone with two million dollars to spare. Someone who wanted the Santoro wedding disrupted enough to pay for it. Someone now eliminating witnesses.
Someone inside this organization, or connected to it.
“You took money and destroyed our family’s honor.” I stand. The anger seeps through the cracks. “You didn’t care that Papa would be ruined. You didn’t care that the Santoro alliance was the only thing keeping us safe. You just took your two million and ran.”
“I took money to escape a cage.” Elena stands too, her exhaustion forgotten. “I didn’t know it would hurt you.”
“You didn’t care what it would do. You never do.
” I’m crossing the room now, closing the distance.
“You left, and Papa spent a week drinking himself sick with shame. You left, and I walked into this house and offered myself as a replacement. You left, and I became the bride you were too selfish to be.”
“I didn’t ask you to do that.”
“No. You never ask. You just take and take and take, and someone else cleans up after.”
Elena’s face crumples.
“You don’t understand. You were never the one they were going to sell.”
“No. I was the one you never saw at all. And when you left, I became the one who had to fix it. So don’t tell me about cages, Elena. I’ve been in one my whole life. The difference is, I stayed.”
The silence is deafening.
I’m done smoothing.
“Cassia, I.”
“Cassia.”
My name from the entrance. Low and rough, like it was pulled from him against his will.
I turn.
Dante.
He’s standing at the threshold, and his expression is stripped bare. Not the careful blankness he wears for the world. Raw. Open.
His eyes move over me first, checking, assessing, before they shift to Elena. When they do, they go cold.
He crosses the room. Not to my sister. To me.
His hand finds the small of my back. Warm. Solid. A claim so subtle Elena might miss it, but I don’t. Every nerve ending registers it.
“You okay?” Low. Just for me.
I nod, not trusting my voice.
His thumb traces a small circle against my spine. Once. Then he turns to face Elena, and the man beside me isn’t the one who just touched me with tenderness.
This is the Don. Ice and authority.
Elena’s eyes dart between us. Her gaze drops to his hand on my back, then lifts. Her mouth presses thin. She blinks twice, fast.
She expected to find her invisible little sister enduring a marriage of convenience. Not a husband who crossed a room to stand beside me.
Good.
“Elena was just explaining how she ended up here.” My voice is steadier now. His presence does that. “Someone paid her two million dollars to run. Now they’re trying to kill her.”
Dante’s gaze stays fixed on Elena. His hand remains on my back, but his attention has shifted. Calculating. Dangerous.
“Two million.” He doesn’t phrase it as a question.
Elena shrinks under his attention. “I didn’t know who it was. I swear.”
“But you took the money anyway.”
She has no answer for that.
“Lorenzo,” Dante calls, voice carrying.
Lorenzo appears from wherever he was waiting. Always close when Dante needs him.
“Put her in one of the guest suites. Guards on the door. She doesn’t leave the compound.”
“I’m not a prisoner,” Elena protests, voice thin.
“You’re not a guest either.” Dante’s voice is cold. “You’re a liability and a loose end. Someone wanted chaos within my family enough to pay two million dollars for it. Until I know who and why, you stay where I can see you.”
His hand falls from my back as he steps toward the door. The absence of his warmth leaves a cold spot between my shoulder blades.
He pauses at the threshold. His eyes hold mine. Whatever is behind them, he doesn’t share.
Then he’s gone, calling for Renzo, already in motion.
Giada finds me in the hallway ten minutes later.
I’m leaning against the wall, eyes shut, trying to breathe through everything that just landed on me. Elena. The money. The conspiracy I can feel taking shape just beyond my reach.
“Hey.”
I open my eyes. Giada is standing in front of me, medical bag over her shoulder.
“You handled that well.” She squeezes my arm. Brief. Warm.
My jaw aches. I’ve been clenching it since Elena walked in.
“You’re white-knuckling that wall, you know.” She tilts her head toward my hands, pressed flat against the plaster behind me. Fingers splayed like I’m holding the house up.
I look down at them. She’s right.
“You don’t have to.”
She squeezes my arm once more. Then she’s walking back toward Elena’s room, and I’m alone in the hallway with my hands still pressed to the wall.
The guest room is cold. Impersonal. The sheets smell like nothing, like no one.
I sit on the edge of the bed.
His arm across my waist when he forgets to keep his distance.
That’s what I’m trying not to think about.
Someone paid two million dollars to sabotage his wedding. Someone is now trying to kill witnesses. And I walked in uninvited, unplanned, the accident that disrupted whatever they were trying to accomplish.
The questions circle as I lie in the dark, alone, listening for footsteps that don’t come.
Somewhere in this compound, there’s a traitor with two million dollars worth of motive.
And I’m going to find them.