CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The knowledge that he had breached her defenses was a thrumming realization that Dante Fazzari carried in his chest like a second heartbeat.
He was not a man who dealt in assumptions, but he knew with undeniable certainty that Cassia cared for him.
She had slipped in the warehouse. She had admitted to worrying.
For a woman who guarded her emotions with the lethal, impenetrable efficiency of a mercenary, that single, fractured admission was the equivalent of a white flag.
There was no way Dante was going to let that knowledge slip through his fingers.
He refused to leave anything to chance, and nothing on this earth was going to stop him from anchoring himself into her life from that moment forward.
So, the very next afternoon, less than twenty-four hours after she had stitched his chest back together, Dante stood in the dim, narrow hallway outside her apartment door.
He lifted his right hand and knocked twice against the wood.
It took less than fifteen seconds for the deadbolt to slide back with a clack. The door swung open.
Cassia stood in the threshold. She was dressed down, wearing faded, perfectly worn-in denim jeans and an oversized grey cashmere sweater that hung loosely off one shoulder, exposing the line of her collarbone. Her auburn hair was piled into a messy twist, secured by a single clip.
The moment her pale blue eyes registered who was standing on her welcome mat, the faint curiosity on her face vanished, instantly replaced by a storm of pure, unadulterated medical outrage.
"What do you think you are doing?" Cassia demanded, her voice a slicing blade in the hallway. She didn't step aside. She planted herself squarely in the center of the doorframe, her arms crossing tightly over her chest.
Dante didn't flinch. "Good afternoon, Cassia."
"Do not attempt to charm me right now," she warned, her eyes darting to his left shoulder, which was concealed beneath a soft, dark crewneck sweater.
"You took a curved needle and twelve internal sutures to a deep tissue laceration across your ribs yesterday.
You are supposed to be immobilized. Are you actively trying to undo all of my work?
Do you want to rip out your own stitches and sabotage the fascia? "
"Cassia—"
"Because walking up two flights of stairs and driving across the city is how you induce internal hemorrhaging," she continued relentlessly, a bright, angry flush of color rising in her cheeks.
"And I swear to God, Dante, if I have to dig back into your chest to fix a mistake that could have been prevented by you sitting still on a couch—"
"I didn't drive," Dante interrupted, his voice dropping into a register that was stripped of the Don of the Fazzari family. It was soft. It was incredibly gentle.
Cassia paused, her jaw tightening. "Excuse me?"
"I had Zoran drop me off," Dante explained, leaning a fraction of his weight against the doorjamb.
He looked at her, his pale green eyes unguarded, radiating an affection that seemed to absorb all the oxygen in the hallway.
"And I walked up the stairs very slowly. I promise you, my stitches are fine."
Cassia stared at him, the fierce momentum of her lecture faltering.
"Then why are you here?" she asked, though the abrasive edge of her voice had dulled significantly.
Dante didn't offer a clever deflection. He didn't build a wall of sarcasm. He looked down at her, the carved lines of his face relaxing into something unexpectedly tender.
"Because I wanted to see you," he said. "And I didn't want to wait."
The unvarnished sincerity in his eyes caught Cassia off balance.
The wind vanished from her sails. She opened her mouth to deliver another blistering reprimand, to tell him that his presence was an unacceptable risk to his health, but the words withered on her tongue.
The sheer tenderness in his gaze was dangerously endearing, sending a sudden, chaotic flutter against her ribs that she fiercely resented.
She let out a dramatic exhale, dropping her head back for a second to stare at the ceiling as if asking the universe for patience.
"Fine," Cassia relented, stepping back and pulling the wooden door open wider to clear the threshold.
Her tone dripped with prickly resignation.
"You can come in. But if you manage to pop a stitch and start bleeding, do not sit on my couch.
You can sit on the floor. I am not ruining my upholstery because you refuse to listen to medical advice. "
Dante’s smile broke across his face, bright and victorious. He stepped past her into the pristine sanctuary of her apartment, the door clicking shut behind them.
"The floor sounds perfect," Dante agreed.
And, remarkably, that was what they did.
An hour later, the sun had dipped beneath the Roman skyline, casting long, bruised shadows of twilight across the living room.
They were sitting together on the plush, woven rug in the center of the hardwood floor.
Between them sat a large, grease-stained cardboard box holding the remnants of a Margherita pizza they had ordered from the shop down the street.
It was a scene of surreal domesticity.
Dante Fazzari—a man who dined with corrupt politicians, who commanded billions, who rarely entered a room without calculating the exits—was sitting cross-legged on a floor, eating a slice of pizza from a paper napkin.
He had taken his boots off. He had rolled the sleeves of his dark sweater up to his forearms.
For the first time in longer than he could possibly remember, Dante felt so relaxed.
The suffocating weight of his empire, the crushing responsibilities of the syndicate, the ghosts of the past that usually haunted the periphery of his vision—all of it had evaporated at her door.
Here, in the dim warmth of her apartment, he was unguarded.
He didn't have to calculate his words. He didn't have to project fear. He was himself, breathing clean air.
Cassia sat opposite him, her legs tucked beneath her. She reached for her water glass, her eyes flicking toward him in the low light of a nearby floor lamp. The silence between them had morphed from something defensive into a genuinely casual, easy rhythm.
Dante wiped his hands on a napkin, setting it on the coffee table. He shifted his weight slightly, careful of his ribs, and rested his forearms on his knees.
"When do you have a day to yourself?" Dante asked, breaking the hum of the room.
Cassia took a sip of her water, swallowing before she answered. She looked at him with a mild, lingering suspicion, forever waiting for the other shoe to drop. "Probably in three days. The rotation shifts on Friday."
She set her glass down. "Why? What do you have in mind?"
Dante looked at her. The playful ease bled out of his expression, replaced by an intense seriousness.
"I want you to spend the day with me," Dante said, his voice a low, steady baritone that commanded the space between them. "Just the two of us. Away from the hospital, away from my estates. I just want to take you somewhere."
Cassia froze. She stared at him, her pale blue eyes widening a fraction of an inch as she processed the blunt, unapologetic request. She searched his face for the punchline, for the hidden agenda, but found only sincerity.
"Are you..." Cassia began, her voice faltering before she forced it back into a mask of dry incredulity. "Are you actually asking me on a date?"
Dante let out a slow breath. He didn't look away.
"Yes," he admitted, the single word carrying a tremendous amount of weight.
He reached up, running a hand through his dark hair—an uncharacteristic, restless gesture that betrayed his nerves.
"I am. I have wanted to ask you for a long time now, Cassia.
But I have been genuinely terrified of how to even approach it. "
Cassia’s brow furrowed in confusion. The concept of Dante Fazzari—a man who instilled terror in the hearts of seasoned killers—being afraid of a simple question was impossible for her to process.
"Why on earth would you be terrified?" Cassia asked, her guard dropping as genuine curiosity took over.
Dante looked at her, his pale green eyes stripping away the final layers of his armor. He laid his deepest insecurities bare on the floor of her apartment.
"Because you do not need anything from me," Dante told her, his voice steeped in an unusual, vulnerability. "I look at you, and I realize that I do not really have anything of real value left to offer you."
Cassia stared at him, bewildered. "Why would you say something like that?"
Dante let out a humorless, exhale. He gestured to the room around them, to the fierce independence she had built with her own two hands.
"Because it is the truth," Dante said softly, holding her gaze.
"You do not want my money. You don't need my protection.
You want nothing to do with the Fazzari name, the dynasty, the wealth, or the violence that comes attached to all of it.
Every single thing that the world covets about me, every single thing I used to leverage my existence... you reject."
His eyes burned with a desperate, naked honesty.
"So," Dante asked, his voice dropping to a near whisper, "Cassia... what could I possibly offer you?"
The silence that followed was incredibly thick with the weight of the invisible walls crashing down between them.
Cassia looked at the man sitting on her floor. She saw past the tailored clothes, past the reputation, and past the blood on his hands. She saw a man who had frozen his own heart to survive a tragedy, a man who was now standing unarmed before her, asking if his bare soul was enough.
Cassia didn't look away. She didn't retreat behind her sarcasm. She met his vulnerable gaze with unyielding clarity.
"Dante the man," Cassia answered.
The three words hung in the air. They were unadorned, stripped of romance or poetry, and yet they were the most devastating thing Dante had ever heard in his entire life.