16. CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Alina
The blanket smelled like Dante, though she hated herself for noticing it. Even now, the sharpness of cedar needles, the ghost of smoke, and an undercurrent of warm, animal skin—all of it nested in the wool, persistent as a bruise.
She’d spent two hours after the attack in a shivering black-out.
Not unconscious, just blank. Her mind a torched circuit board, refusing to process anything except the next breath.
Upstairs, Luca and the rest had swept the house for survivors, for bugs, for bombs, then convened at the kitchen table to argue next steps in voices pitched low but urgent.
Down here, Alina had been alone with her blanket and terror, staring at the open chute as if another hand might reach through it at any moment to pull her back in.
She’d replayed it a hundred times—the way her ribs squeezed between metal seams, the brittle flex of the aluminum under her knees, the feeling of being compressed was enough to make her feel like she was suffocating.
If Jess hadn’t drilled those breathing exercises into her, she’d have never been able to get out.
The door opened, and all the energy in the room warped around Dante as he entered.
He’d changed out of his shirt; the new one was slate gray, sculpted to his frame in a way that might have thrilled her under different circumstances.
But every line of his body broadcast tension, barely contained.
He scanned the room automatically, eyes flicking to the chute, the window, her hands.
He shut the door and exhaled a hard breath, then crossed to her with a deliberate lack of speed—as if afraid to spook her.
He stopped a meter away. “How are you feeling?”
She blinked at him, once, slow. “Like I survived a horror movie directed by people with no respect for ventilation systems.”
He didn’t get it at first, and she almost laughed at the blankness in his stare. “What?”
Alina shrugged, eyes still fixed on her hands. “Who the hell climbs through vents? Is this Die Hard? Do they not have doors?”
He hesitated, then tried to smile, but it cracked at the edges. “You’re making jokes?”
“It’s that or re-live the part where I almost lost a kneecap. Dark humor is a trauma response.” Her voice came out steadier than she felt.
Dante’s face softened, and he dropped down to sit beside her—leaving a respectful buffer of space between them. “You scared the hell out of me,” he said quietly.
She let the silence stretch, the words registering as neither apology nor accusation. Finally, she said, “Yeah, well. I scared the hell out of me, too.”
His mouth twitched—not quite a smile. He reached out, stopped short of touching her, then closed his hand into a fist and rested it on his knee. “I shouldn’t have left you alone.”
There were so many things she could have said back.
She wanted to tell him that he had bigger things to worry about than her, that she’d been through worse and come out on the other side, that she didn’t need babysitting, just data and advance notice.
But all she could do was stare at the ridged seam of the blanket, fingers twisting against each other until she thought her bones would snap.
“Oh, really?” she said, voice going sharper than intended. “Because I distinctly remember someone leaving. You took the car. You took the gun. You left me with a panic room and a goddamn laundry chute.”
His jaw tightened, just enough to fracture the mask. “I had to. There was a security breach at the secondary location. If I hadn’t—”
“And I had to hide in a metal coffin,” she snapped, then immediately regretted the venom in her tone. “So maybe we both had a rough night.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, and there was no irony in it, just a rawness that made her want to recoil or lean into it, she couldn’t tell which. “It won’t happen again.”
She almost laughed. “You can’t promise that.”
He met her eyes for the first time since entering the room. “I can.”
“You shouldn’t.” Now she did laugh, short and sharp. “How arrogant are you, exactly?”
Dante’s expression darkened—a flicker of old violence behind his restraint. “I will protect you.”
The room went very quiet. Alina drew in a breath and let it out, long and slow, until the tremor in her hands faded. “And I will survive,” she said, “with or without you.”
The words landed between them like a thrown knife. Something in him recoiled, but she held his gaze, refusing to be edited out of the story of her own survival. For a long moment he said nothing, just stared at the blank wall behind her, the muscles in his neck rigid.
Then he leaned forward, elbows on his knees, head in his hands. When he spoke, it was so soft she almost missed it. “Alina… I’m trying.”
She wanted to hate him for it, but she couldn’t. There were too many layers to the truth, and she was too tired to do anything but nod. “I know,” she said. “But you can’t protect me from everything.”
He sat up then, shoulders squared, and looked at her—really looked, the way you look at something you know you’ll never fully understand, not in a thousand years of analysis. “You’re the only thing I’m afraid of losing,” he said, and the honesty in it was so brutal she flinched.
Her mind went white, and for once she didn’t have a comeback. She just breathed. After a moment, she put her hand over his fist and left it there, not holding, not letting go.
She said, “Then stop leaving me behind.”
He didn’t say anything for a long time. Didn’t argue or make another impossible promise. Just nodded, a single precise dip of the head, as if committing the words to memory. He held her eyes, and the air between them grew thick with everything unspoken.
It was the most dangerous truce she’d ever agreed to.