Chapter 9: Into the Lion's Den
Valentina's POV
I didn't sleep.
I sat in the backseat of Dante's car, driven by a silent man with a neck tattoo, and watched the city blur past the tinted windows. Streets I'd grown up knowing looked foreign at this hour. Cold. Hostile. Like the city itself had decided I no longer belonged.
Maybe I didn't.
The driver dropped me at the Romano estate gates without a word. I slipped inside before the guards could ask questions, moved through the house like a ghost, climbed the stairs to my room.
Lucia was still asleep in my bed.
I stood in the doorway watching her for a long moment. Her dark hair fanned across my pillow. Her breathing was soft and even. She looked peaceful in a way I envied with my whole chest.
I couldn't tell her. Not yet.
If she knew where I was going, she'd try to stop me. Or worse, she'd insist on coming. And I couldn't drag Lucia into this. She had a life worth protecting. A future that wasn't already burning.
I crossed to my closet quietly, pulled out the escape bag, and started making decisions about what mattered.
The answer was depressingly little.
One change of clothes. My father's watch, the one he'd given me on my eighteenth birthday, heavy gold with his initials on the back. A photograph of Marco and me from three years ago, before the drinking got bad, when he still smiled like he meant it. My mother's pearl earrings.
Everything else was just furniture.
I added cash from the hidden compartment. Two burner phones still in their packaging. My real passport and the fake one I'd never thought I'd use.
The gun I already had on me.
I zipped the bag and set it by the door. Then I sat at my vanity and looked at myself in the mirror.
Valentina Romano. Twenty-five years old. Daughter of a dead man. Sister of a broken boy. Fiancée of a man she didn't love. Mistress-to-be of a man who hated her.
What a legacy.
I picked up a pen and pulled a piece of paper from my desk drawer. Started writing.
Lucia.
By the time you read this, I'll be gone. Please don't look for me. Please don't tell Roberto or Alessandro or anyone else that you knew something was wrong. Just say I left in the night and you don't know where.
I'm not running away. I'm fighting back. I just can't do it from here.
Take care of Marco. He loves you even when he doesn't show it. Don't let Roberto use him as a puppet. Push him to be better.
I love you. More than you know. More than I've ever been good at saying.
I'll find a way to contact you when it's safe.
Val.
I folded the letter, wrote her name on the front, and left it on my pillow beside her sleeping form.
Then I shouldered my bag and walked out of my room without looking back.
Because if I looked back, I wouldn't leave.
The morning shift guards changed at six AM.
I knew this because I'd grown up in this house, watching its rhythms, learning its patterns the way all women in our world learned their cages. Every lock. Every camera. Every gap in the schedule.
Six AM was my window.
I slipped through the east garden, staying close to the hedgerows, moving toward the service gate that the groundskeepers used. It had a code instead of a guard. My father had given me the code three years ago, telling me it was for emergencies.
This qualified.
I punched in the numbers and walked out into the street beyond.
A cab was already waiting. I'd called it from the burner phone two hours ago, given an address three blocks from Dante's penthouse. Never give them the real destination. My father had taught me that much.
The driver barely glanced at me. Just another early morning fare.
I kept my hood up for the entire ride.
Dante's penthouse occupied the top two floors of a glass tower in the financial district. I knew the building. Everyone in our world knew it. The Moretti's legitimate empire had its offices on floors twelve through eighteen. The penthouse was Dante's private domain.
I'd never been inside.
Izzy was waiting in the lobby, leaning against the reception desk, arms crossed, looking like she'd been awake for a week and felt perfectly fine about it.
"You came." She sounded mildly surprised.
"I said I would."
"People say a lot of things." She pushed off the desk, looked at my single bag. "That's all you brought?"
"That's all I have."
Something shifted in her expression. Not quite pity. More like recognition.
"Come on." She led me to a private elevator, pressed her palm to a scanner. The doors opened immediately. "Rules. Don't go to his office without being invited. Don't talk to his men without a reason. Don't leave the building without telling me first. Don't contact your family without his knowledge."
"He told me already."
"I'm telling you again because understanding rules and following them are different things." The elevator rose smoothly. "He's not a patient man, Valentina. He won't warn you twice."
"How long have you worked for him?"
"Since he came back. Four years." The elevator stopped, doors opening directly into the penthouse foyer. "Before that, I worked for my mother's organization in Shanghai. Dante offered me a better deal."
"What deal?"
"The kind you don't discuss." She stepped out. "Come on. I'll show you your room."
The penthouse was nothing like I'd expected.
I'd imagined something cold. Sterile. All glass and steel, a reflection of the man who owned it.
Instead, it was warm. Rich dark wood floors, high ceilings, art on the walls that looked genuinely chosen rather than purchased by a decorator. Books on shelves, actually read, spines creased and pages bent. A kitchen that smelled faintly of coffee.
It felt like someone actually lived here.
It felt like a home.
"His doing?" I gestured at the room.
"His mother's influence. She decorated it before she passed." Izzy paused by a hallway. "He kept everything exactly as she left it."
That surprised me. I filed it away quietly.
My room was at the end of the hall. Large, simply furnished. Cream walls. A window overlooking the city. Attached bathroom with a tub that probably cost more than a car.
Next to it, separated by a single wall and a connecting door, was Dante's room.
The door had a lock. On my side only.
Small mercy.
"Get some sleep." Izzy set my bag on the bed. "He wants to meet at noon. There are clothes in the closet if you need them."
"Whose clothes?"
A pause that lasted half a second too long. "Previous occupant."
So I wasn't the first woman he'd kept here. Good. That was good. It meant this was business. Nothing personal. Nothing sentimental.
Good.
"Thank you," I said. "For last night. For listening."
Izzy looked at me for a moment, something unreadable in her eyes. "Don't thank me yet. You're not safe here just because you're inside these walls." She moved toward the door. "You're not safe anywhere anymore."
"Were we ever?"
She considered that seriously. "No. I suppose not." Her hand rested on the doorframe. "One more thing. Whatever you had with him, whatever you think you remember, whatever feelings survived the years between then and now. Bury them. They'll get you killed faster than a bullet."
She left before I could respond.
I stood alone in the room that smelled like someone else's perfume, in a penthouse belonging to my enemy, in a city that had stopped being mine overnight.
I sat on the edge of the bed. Pulled out my father's watch. Turned it over in my hands, feeling the weight of it, the warmth of the gold.
Trust no one. Not even blood.
"I'm trying, Dad," I whispered. "I'm trying."
The city glittered outside my window, indifferent and beautiful.
Somewhere on the other side of that connecting door, Dante Moretti was sleeping. Or not sleeping. Planning. Calculating. Deciding how best to use me and discard me when I stopped being useful.
I should have been terrified.
Instead, exhaustion finally hit me like a wall.
I lay back on the bed without changing clothes, without pulling back the covers, without doing anything except closing my eyes.
And for the first time since my father died, I slept.