9. Mine to Protect
NINE
MINE TO PROTECT
SOFIA
The guards appear on a Tuesday.
I notice them the way you notice a change in the weather — not the event itself, but the atmosphere shifting around it.
I come downstairs for coffee, and there's a man I've never seen standing by the front door.
Not staff. Not one of the regular estate workers who nod politely and avoid eye contact.
This man is built like Enzo — wide, watchful, wearing an earpiece and a look that says he's been authorized to put himself between me and anything that moves.
There's another one by the east wing entrance. And a third at the gate.
Even the house feels different. Quieter. Tighter.
The maids move faster than usual, their conversations cut short whenever I pass. One of the kitchen staff looks at me, then quickly looks away, like she knows something I don’t. No one says anything directly, but silence has a weight of its own.
It presses against my chest with every step I take.
I find Matteo in the study. He's on the phone — always on the phone these days, his voice that low, operational register that signals the conversation isn't meant for my ears.
He sees me in the doorway, and something in his expression shifts. He doesn’t look surprised exactly. More like caught. For one second, he stays still, listening to whoever is on the other end. Whatever they say makes his face harden. Not angry. Worse. Afraid in a way he refuses to show.
Then he says something low into the phone, ends the call, and sets it facedown on the desk, like even the screen has become something he doesn’t want me to see.
"Who are the new additions?" I ask.
"Security."
"I noticed. For what?"
"For you."
Two words.
That is all he gives me.
But they hit harder than an explanation would have. For you. Not for the estate. Not for business. Not because of some general threat he can hide behind. For me.
My stomach tightens because a part of me already knows this isn’t Matteo being dramatic. This is Matteo scared enough to let strangers stand between me and every door.
He says it the way he says everything lately — flat, controlled, final.
No room for discussion. No invitation for questions.
He's been like this since the night he came home with blood on his hands, since the confrontation in the study, since whatever happened that he refuses to tell me about but that put new lines around his eyes and new guards at my door.
"From now on, you don't go anywhere without an escort," he says. "Enzo will drive you to the hospital. One of the members of your security details will accompany you inside. When you're here at the estate, someone will be posted at each exit."
"Each exit. So I'm surrounded."
"You're protected."
"That's not how it feels."
My voice comes out steadier than I feel. Inside, I am not steady at all. Inside, I am back to being the girl who learned that protection can sound a lot like control when it comes from the wrong man.
I hate that thought the second it forms.
Matteo is not him.
But fear does not always care about the difference.
He leans back in his chair. His eyes are tired — the kind of tired that sleep can't touch — but his jaw is set.
Immovable. I've seen that jaw in negotiations, in arguments, and in the moment before he pulled back in the garden.
It's the jaw of a man who has made a decision and will not be moved by logic, emotion, or a woman standing in his doorway in socks and a messy ponytail.
"It's not a cage, Sofia. It's a perimeter."
His voice cracks slightly on the last word. Barely. Maybe I imagine it. Maybe he catches it before it becomes real.
But his hand curls around the edge of the desk so tightly his knuckles pale. He is not as calm as he wants me to think. He is not untouched by this.
He is making orders because orders are easier than feelings.
"There's no difference when you're the one inside it."
Something crosses his face — fast, suppressed, gone before I can name it.
Pain, maybe. Guilt. Fear.
Whatever it is, he buries it before it can reach me. That is what he does. He takes anything soft, anything human, anything that might make him vulnerable, and locks it behind his teeth.
But I saw it.
For one second, I saw the man beneath the boss
He looks away. He picks up his phone. The conversation is over.
I stand in the doorway for another five seconds — long enough to make sure he knows I'm not leaving because he dismissed me, but because I'm choosing to go. Then I turn and walk down the hallway, past the guard at the east wing entrance, who nods at me politely.
His politeness makes it worse.
Like this is normal. Like women are guarded in hallways every day. Like my life has not been quietly rearranged around a threat no one will explain to me.
Behind me, the study door closes.
Not loudly. Not angrily.
Just enough for me to hear it and understand that Matteo has shut me out again.
I don’t nod back.
I hate that thought the second it forms.
Matteo is not him.
But fear does not always care about the difference.
Enzo drives me to the hospital on Wednesday.
Black SUV, tinted windows, a route that takes twice as long as the bus because he loops through side streets and constantly checks mirrors like we're being followed.
Maybe we are. The thought should frighten me.
Instead, it makes me angry — a hot, compressed anger that sits in my chest like a coal, burning everything it touches.
A man in a dark jacket walks three steps behind me through the hospital entrance. He positions himself just outside Lucia's door — not inside, not where she can see him, but close enough that anyone approaching the room would have to pass through him first.
I sit in the chair beside Lucia's bed. Same chair. Same squeak. She's awake today — propped on pillows, the crossword abandoned on the nightstand, her eyes sharp despite the oxygen cannula.
She takes my hand. I take hers. And then she looks past me, through the glass window of the door, at the man standing in the hallway with an earpiece and a posture that screams security detail.
"Sofia." Her voice is quiet. The humor is gone — no jokes about parking lots or handsome nurses. Just my name, spoken with the gravity of a mother who has watched her daughter walk through the door carrying something heavier than a purse and a smile. "What have you gotten into?"
My eyes burn. The anger in my chest shifts, makes room for something else — something older and deeper and shaped exactly like the fear I've been swallowing since I signed my name on forty-two pages and called it a deal.
I should lie. I'm good at lying — I've been lying to her for months about the money, the arrangement, the ring, the man. I could lie right now and she'd let me, because that's what we do, Lucia and I. We lie to each other beautifully and love each other too much to call it out.
But today, in this room, with the oxygen hissing, the guard at the door, and the weight of everything pressing down on my ribs like hands — I can't.
"Something that's going to save your life," I say.
The words come out raw. Unpolished. Nothing like the careful performance I've been giving the world for weeks.
Just the truth, stripped to its bones, handed to my mother in a hospital bed because she asked, because she deserves it, and because I'm so tired of lying that the truth feels like breathing.
Lucia stares at me. Her eyes fill — slowly, the way water rises in a glass, not spilling, just filling.
She is too proud to cry. She has always been too proud to cry.
She cried once when my father left — I was nine, I heard it through the wall — and then she never cried again.
She built a dam out of stubbornness, humor, and the conviction that Marino women don't break where anyone can see them.
But her eyes are full. And her hand is shaking in mine.
"Figlia mia," she whispers. Just that. My daughter, in her language,in her voice, with the whole weight of everything she can't say pressing against those two words until they sound like a prayer.
I hold her hand. I don't cry. Marino women can control themselves.
I don’t cry, but I almost do. I haven’t been that close to crying in months.
Days bleed together.
The estate becomes a beautiful prison. I wake in the guest suite, eat breakfast in the kitchen where Gianna moves around me with a quiet sympathy she expresses through extra servings and fresh flowers on the counter, and then I — exist. In a house with too many rooms and not enough air.
I can't leave without an escort. I can't walk to the gate without a guard trailing three steps behind me.
I can't visit Lucia without Enzo driving me there and a man in a dark jacket standing outside her door like a sentinel.
The world has shrunk to the dimensions of the estate grounds, and the grounds — for all their oak trees, gravel paths, and the garden with the dogwood bench — feel smaller every day.
Matteo and I orbit around each other.
That's the only word for it — orbit. We move through the same house, occupy the same rooms, breathe the same air, and never quite touch.
He's in the study when I'm in the kitchen.
He's on the phone when I'm in the hallway.
He eats dinner at his desk while I eat at the counter.
The kitchen is thirty feet from his study.
I've walked the distance. I've counted the steps.
But the way he closes that door every evening, the way he times his meals so we never sit in the same room — it might as well be a different zip code.