They dressed me in silk, but I felt the rope in every fold.
The ballroom glittered like a chapel to greed—crystal chandeliers, lacquered wood, velvet drapes the color of dark wine. Smoke hung heavy as fog rolled off the Ligurian coast, clogging my throat, blurring the edges of men who lounged in velvet chairs with the lazy confidence of predators well fed.
A band played something slow and liquid in the corner, a trumpet bending into notes that sounded too much like a woman's sob held behind a closed door.
I stood under the center chandelier with my back straight and my chin lifted, because posture was the last thing I could control. I could feel their eyes grazing me—counting, appraising, deciding—like a hundred cool fingers skimming the surface of my skin.
Fatti forza, I told myself. Pull yourself together.
The silk clung to me when I drew a breath. It wasn't the dress that felt tight. It was the room.
"Fifty thousand dollars," the auctioneer called, his hand cutting the smoke. "Do I hear sixty?"
His voice cracked on dollars as if the weight of the word was too much to carry.
A murmur rippled. "Sixty." "Seventy-five." "Eighty."
The numbers struck like pebbles thrown into a well, dropping and dropping, never finding the bottom.
A heat rose in my face, and I stared down at a crack in the marble to steady myself.
Another floor came back to me—chipped kitchen tiles in Florence— my home, a glass of whiskey overturned, amber bleeding into paper. Papa had cursed softly, pushing the wet from his ledgers with the heel of his palm. "Some debts don't wipe clean, bella," he'd said without looking at me.
He'd said other things too. Never bow, Isabella. Even to wolves. He'd said that the night he shook hands with a man wearing a gold ring thick as a shackle. I can still hear the scrape of that ring against our table, a sound like a lock closing.
"Eighty-five!" a man barked, rich with wine and arrogance.
"Ninety." Another voice, this one hungry.
I dug crescents into my palms with my nails and lifted my chin. They would not see me bend. Let them look. Let them count. I would not give them the pleasure of tears.
The band slid into a darker chord. Somewhere behind me, a woman's perfume drifted by—orange blossom and smoke.
It reminded me of the church in our village on feast days, incense thick in the nave while the priest intoned blessings that everyone pretended to believe. I had believed then. I had believed the world was a place where vows meant something and fathers kept their daughters safe.
"One hundred thousand."
The voice cut the room in half.
Everything is still. Conversations sheared off mid-word. Laughter died. Even the smoke seemed to suspend in the air as if it understood there were rules in this room, and the man who'd just spoken wrote them.
I looked up.
He stood at the threshold like a shadow drawn in ink. Tall, broad, motionless—not a single wasted movement. A suit so precisely cut it felt like armor. Dark hair touched by chandelier light, and eyes that didn't catch the glow at all. Eyes that took.
"Vince DeLuca," someone whispered. Like a prayer, or a warning.
The response was visceral. Men who had been waving money a moment before leaned back, all in silence, their eyes darting to him with a mix of fear and admiration.
Isabella could feel the shift in the room, the way the air seemed to hum with an unseen tension. This man wasn't just any bidder. He was someone who commanded respect, who demanded to be heard.
The auctioneer's throat bobbed as he swallowed. A man near the bar crossed himself. It was almost religious, the way the air bent for him.
Anger flared hot in me, climbing my throat like fire. That he could say a number and end a room. That the room would be glad to be ended.
"One hundred thousand," the auctioneer repeated, the tremor in his voice impossible to miss. "Going once… going twice…" He hesitated, as if waiting for a god to revoke a decree. "Sold."
The gavel fell. The sound splintered along my spine.
He didn't move at first. He looked at me, only me, and in that long quiet stare I felt the strange, savage sensation that this wasn't a purchase, not to him.
He came forward then, and the crowd opened without a word. They parted like water for a prow, everyone already calculating how the currents would change when he passed. A violin skated a thin note that made the hair on my arms lift.
He stopped a breath away. Close enough that I smelled something darker than cigar smoke—ambered wood, clean and expensive. Close enough that I could see a pale scar notched near his jaw, a detail my mind filed away without understanding why it mattered.
"Signora," he said, smooth as a silk blade. "It seems you've been… claimed."
The word slid over me like oil. I lifted my chin a fraction more. "I'm not a prize. You may have bought me, but you'll never own me."
Something flickered in his expression—amusement or interest, I couldn't tell. It vanished quickly, as if anything as human as a smile didn't belong on his face for long. His gaze was too steady. It didn't waver. It didn't have to.
"You'll learn quickly," he murmured, leaning in so only I would hear. "In this city, freedom is a rumor. Property is a fact. And you"—his fingers brushed my forearm, the lightest contact, a test—"are mine."
Heat shot through me, a betrayal of nerves, not desire. I held his stare and reached for steel in my voice. "You don't know who I am."
"I know exactly who you are," he said, unhurried, as if he had the luxury of time where everyone else borrowed it.
"And you'll come to learn that you belong to me now, he stated firmly.