The uneasy truce settled back over the penthouse, but it felt different this time. I focused on him, searching for clues about the man behind the CEO. I noticed how his harsh features softened while he was with Aria. I saw him with Elara, where he showed a quiet respect that revealed long-standing affection. And I saw him alone, late at night in his office, the burden of his empire clear on his face.
My curiosity grew into a quiet obsession. One evening, using the access he had given me to check the Falkon Ventures files, I ventured into his private server. It felt like a fortress, full of firewalls and encryption, but my love for tech, a hobby I'd developed for years, helped me. I found a vulnerability, a digital seam, and slipped through.
There, buried beneath layers of security, I discovered it. A single, heavily encrypted folder simply labeled with a date: the date his parents were murdered. Inside were not business documents, but two decades of a son's desperate, obsessive search. There were private investigator reports, dead-end leads, financial analyses of his father's rivals, and grainy photographs of long-dead suspects. It was a raw wound, preserved in digital amber. This wasn't just his past; it was his present, a ghost he fought with every day. The cold, controlled man was a facade hiding a core of unresolved pain.
A few nights later, the chilling reality of that pain burst into the present. I was working late in Dante's office, with his approval, cross-referencing a legal point when the elevator doors opened. It wasn't Dante. It was Leo, looking grim, dragging a terrified, disheveled man behind him. I vaguely recognized him as a mid-level analyst from one of the corporate reports, and he was sobbing.
"We have a problem," Leo said to Dante, who instantly rose from his desk, his whole body on high alert.
I froze in my chair, hidden in the shadows. They hadn't seen me.
"This is Julian Vance," Leo said, pushing the man forward. "He's been leaking your movements to a disposable IP address for the last six weeks. We traced it back to Valerius."
Vance collapsed onto the floor, a weeping mess. "He made me do it!" he cried, his voice high with fear. "He has my wife, my daughter! He sent me pictures! He said he'd kill them if I didn't tell him when you were traveling alone!"
This was the informant, the reason for Dante's near-fatal accident. I braced myself for the explosion. I expected cold, ruthless fury from the man who paid every debt.
But Dante remained unnervingly calm. He listened to Vance's panicked confession, his face a mask of stone. When the man finished, a terrible silence filled the room.
"Your betrayal nearly made my sister an orphan," Dante said, his voice completely emotionless. It was more frightening than any shout. "It put everyone under my protection at risk."
He turned to Leo. My blood ran cold. This was it.
"Get his family," Dante ordered.
Vance let out a strangled cry, believing it meant death.
"Bring them here," Dante continued, his voice icy. "Put them in the secure wing on the fourth floor. They will not leave. Mr. Vance now works for me directly. He will become our most valuable source of misinformation. He will feed Marco Valerius every false lead, every wrong turn, every carefully crafted lie I want him to believe."
I couldn't breathe. It wasn't rage or vengeance. It was a move of breathtaking, chilling strategy. It was a cold, calculated mercy that was more terrifying than any punishment. He hadn't just neutralized a threat; he had absorbed it, weaponized it.
But Vance, lost in his own panic, didn't see it that way. He saw only a trap. "No! You'll kill them! You'll kill us all!" he screamed. In a flash of desperation, he scrambled backward and pulled a small, silver pistol from the back of his waistband.
Everything happened in an instant.
He raised the gun, his hand shaking wildly, aiming it straight at Dante's chest.
Leo moved to intervene, but Dante was quicker. He moved with a lethal grace I had never seen before, a blur of controlled violence. He lunged forward, not at the man, but at the gun. He grabbed Vance's wrist, twisting it sharply.
CRACK.
The sound of the gunshot was deafening in the enclosed space. The bullet went wide, embedding itself in the bookshelf behind the desk. But Vance, panicked and fighting for his life, wouldn't let go. He struggled, trying to bring the weapon back to bear.
Dante's face was a mask of cold necessity. There was no time for strategy now, only survival. With another brutal, efficient movement, he wrenched the gun free. In the struggle, faced with the immediate threat to his life, to Leo's, to mine, he did the only thing he could.
A second CRACK echoed, sharper and more final than the first.
Julian Vance crumpled to the floor. A dark, crimson stain began to spread across the pristine white marble.
The silence that followed was complete. Dante stood over the body, the smoking gun still in his hand, his chest rising and falling. He was no longer just a CEO or a brother. He was a killer.
His head slowly lifted, and his haunted, jade-green eyes found me in the shadows.
The man I thought I was beginning to understand—the strategist, the protector, the grieving son—vanished. All I could see was the monster. With a choked sob, I scrambled from my chair and fled the room, the image of his cold, deadly face burned forever into my mind.