Reina POV
She packed one bag.
Not because she only had one bag worth of things. She had a whole room full of clothes, jewelry her mother left her, shoes lined up in neat rows. She left all of it. She took seven days of clothes, her documents, the prepaid phone, and her father's photograph from the nightstand.
If she took more, it would mean she was scared. She was not scared. She was furious and calculating and running on four hours of sleep, but she was not scared.
She zipped the bag and walked out of her room without looking back.
Marco was in the hallway. Of course he was.
"Where are you going?" he asked. Casual. Like a brother asking a normal question.
"I need space," she said. "I'm staying with a friend for a few days."
"Which friend?"
She looked at him. She smiled exactly the way he had taught her without knowing it warm on the outside, nothing underneath. "You don't know her. I'll have my phone."
He looked at the bag. He looked at her face. She kept her expression soft and tired and grieving, all the things he expected to see. She gave him nothing else.
"Okay," he said finally. He pulled her into a hug. "Take care of yourself."
"Always," she said.
She felt his hand check her side again. She had left the prepaid phone in her underwear drawer, buried under things he would not search. He found nothing. She felt him relax.
She walked out the front door and got into the car and did not breathe fully until the house was three blocks behind her.
She had expected the Salvatore house to feel like a threat.
It did not. That was the first surprise.
It was large and quiet in a way that felt almost careful, like a house holding its breath. No unnecessary noise. No men lounging around showing off. The few people she passed in the hallways moved with purpose and looked at her with neutral eyes not hostile, not welcoming. Professional.
Renzo met her at the door. He took her bag before she could say she did not need help with it, showed her to the third floor, and opened a room that was plain and clean with a window overlooking a garden. Green and still and private.
"Bathroom's through there," he said. "Dante will come up when he's done with his call."
She nodded. He left.
She stood in the middle of the room and did a slow turn. No flowers. No performance. Just a room that asked nothing from her.
She sat on the edge of the bed and felt, for the first time in four days, the specific exhaustion of a person who has been performing strength in front of an audience without a break. Her shoulders dropped. Her jaw unclenched. She pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes for a moment.
Then she heard footsteps in the hallway and she straightened up and put everything back.
Dante gave her the tour in four sentences. This floor, your room, his office is off-limits, the kitchen is open. Then he gave her the rules in three more. No closed doors. No contacting Marco without clearing it first. No talking family business with anyone but him or Renzo.
She listened. She nodded.
He watched her the whole time with those dark, careful eyes that gave away absolutely nothing. She used to be able to read him. When they were younger he was the most readable person she knew whatever he felt moved straight across his face, warm and immediate and real. That person was gone. This one had built walls so solid she could not find a single crack.
"Any questions?" he said.
"Not yet," she said.
Something shifted in his face for less than a second. Surprise, maybe. He had probably expected pushback. She would give him pushback eventually she had already decided she was going to follow exactly as many of his rules as made strategic sense but not today. Today she was too tired to fight about things that did not matter yet.
He left. She unpacked her one bag.
Dinner was the strangest meal of her life.
They sat across from each other at a kitchen table that could seat twelve, just the two of them, with food that someone had left covered on the stove. She served herself. He served himself. They ate.
She counted the seconds of silence the way she used to count ceiling tiles in boring meetings. One, two, three. She got to a hundred. She got to two hundred. She looked at her food and thought about the evidence they had and the thirty days on the clock and whether Angelo Ruiz was still in that hotel.
Four hundred seconds.
"Any allergies?" he said. Without looking up.
"No," she said.
He nodded. He kept eating.
That was all.
She finished her food. She washed her own plate. She said goodnight to the back of his head. He said goodnight to the table.
She went upstairs, lay down on the plain clean bed, and stared at the ceiling.
This is fine, she thought. This is a transaction. This is survival. You are not here because you want to be, you are here because it is the smartest move on the board, and in six weeks you will take back your family and your name and you will walk out of this house and you will not think about the way he used to look at you.
She stared at the ceiling for two hours.
Sleep did not come.
At one in the morning she gave up and went downstairs.
The kitchen was dark except for the small light above the stove. She went to the coffee maker and stopped.
There was already a cup there. Ready. Still warm she touched the side and felt the heat. Someone had made it recently.
She looked at it. White mug. Coffee, a splash of oat milk, half a spoon of sugar. No more, no less.
Her exact order.
Her stomach did something she was not prepared for.
She had not told him. She had not mentioned it to Renzo. She had not ordered coffee once since she arrived because she had been too focused on everything else. There was no way he should know this. It had been five years. People forget small things like coffee orders in five years.
People forget them. Unless they never did.
She picked up the cup with both hands. It was the right temperature. The exact right temperature like someone who knew how long it took her to come downstairs and made it at the right moment.
She looked at the doorway to the dark hallway.
Empty. No one there.
She looked back at the cup. She thought about the boy who used to bring her coffee at her father's Sunday dinners without being asked, who learned her order the second time they met and never got it wrong once, who looked at her across rooms full of people like she was the only one in them.
She thought about the man upstairs with the locked face and the impenetrable walls.
She drank the coffee slowly in the dark kitchen.
And then she heard it. Soft, from somewhere above her. Footsteps crossing a room. Stopping near what she calculated was the upstairs hallway. Right above the kitchen.
He had not gone to sleep either.
He had been awake. He had known she would come down. He had made the coffee and left before she could catch him doing it.
Her heart was doing something extremely inconvenient.
She set the empty cup in the sink. She gripped the counter edge and made herself think clearly.
He remembered your coffee order. That is not love. That is memory. Those are different things. Do not be stupid. Do not be the girl who loses the war because she got distracted by a cup of coffee.
She went back upstairs.
She passed his door. The light underneath it was on.
She kept walking.
But she did not sleep for a very long time.