Chapter 2 The Man Who Would Not Let Me Die

The blade bit just as Dante spun toward the sound of my scream.

"Drop the weapon." His voice was so cold that even the man holding me hesitated. I could see almost nothing. The emergency lights had failed, smoke curled through the broken window, and all I knew was the arm locked around my ribs and the edge pressed beneath my jaw.

"One more step, Moretti, and your wife dies."

Dante stopped. In a year of marriage I had seen him furious, bored, amused and ruthless, but I had never seen what crossed his face now, and it frightened me more than his anger ever had. It was helplessness.

"Let her go."

"You should have followed instructions," the stranger said, almost lazily.

Dante's gun stayed level, but his finger slid away from the trigger. "Name your price."

"Your empire."

"Take it."

The word went through me like a second blade. Behind me, even the stranger had fallen silent. In the dark I could feel Dante looking at me and nowhere else. "Take all of it," he said. "The money, the territory, the businesses. But if you hurt her, I will spend the rest of my life teaching you what regret means."

The knife pressed harder. A sharp sting bloomed along my neck and I gasped, and Dante's whole body changed. "Stop!"

The stranger swore. A gunshot split the room, and I squeezed my eyes shut so tightly I saw colours. The arm around me went slack. I stumbled forward, and Dante caught me before I hit the floor. When I dared to look, a man lay crumpled near the doorway, his weapon skidded several feet from his hand.

Dante lowered his gun and took my face between his palms, turning it toward the weak light from the window. "Look at me. Isabella, look at me."

His hands were shaking. It shocked me more than the gunshot had. Dante Moretti had stood before armed enemies without blinking and watched older men beg for mercy across his table, and yet his fingers trembled as they traced the thin line of blood beneath my jaw.

"It's nothing," I said.

"Never say that to me again." Before I could answer he pulled me hard against his chest, and for one dangerous second I let myself stay there, wanting to believe that the fear in his eyes meant he loved me. Then I remembered the contract, and pushed him away.

"Don't. You can't pretend to care about me when you can't explain why someone ordered my execution."

"That man did not work for me."

"You seem very sure."

"Because if he did, he would not have come into my house with orders to kill you."

"Maybe you hired someone else."

His eyes narrowed. "You honestly believe I would arrange your murder and then risk my life to prevent it?"

"I don't know what to believe anymore!"

The words rang off the walls and then left a silence behind them. I thought he would shout. Instead he holstered the gun, shrugged off his jacket, and settled it around my shoulders with a gentleness that felt like an accusation. "Your room. Now."

"I'm not going anywhere with you."

"That wasn't a request."

"And you wonder why I don't trust you."

A muscle jumped in his jaw. "Hate me if it helps you sleep, Isabella. But you will not spend another night unprotected while someone is hunting you."

He took my hand, and I should have pulled away. I followed him instead, not because I trusted him, but because the dead man on the floor suggested that Dante might be the only person in the house who understood how bad things were.

By the time we reached my bedroom it had been turned into a fortress. Two armed guards stood in the corridor, a third waited on the balcony, and a fourth was testing every window lock. Dante dismissed all of them except Marco, his head of security, a heavy, unsmiling man who looked as if he had not slept since the previous decade.

"Nobody enters without my permission. Nobody leaves the house without being searched. I want every camera recording from the last forty-eight hours, and I want to know how the gunmen got in."

"And the dead man, boss?"

"Find out who sent him."

Marco hesitated. "There is something else. The security system was shut down from inside the house. The cameras were off for exactly seven minutes."

Seven minutes. Long enough for someone to walk into the study and place a document where I would find it. Long enough to arrange all of it. A chill ran down my arms that had nothing to do with the broken window.

Dante turned to me. "Who knew you would be in my study tonight?"

"No one."

"Think."

"I went for my phone. I told nobody."

"Who knew you had left it there?"

"I don't know! Stop interrogating me." I stood so abruptly that his jacket slid from my shoulders. "You want answers? So do I. I want to know why my name is on that page, and why you've been hunting for it. And I want to know what really happened to my father."

The room went still. Dante did not move at all, and somehow that made him more dangerous than any gun. "What did you say?"

"My father. The man who died under suspicious circumstances right before you decided that marrying his daughter would be politically convenient."

He crossed the room slowly. "Who told you his death was suspicious?"

"No one had to. I have a brain."

"Answer the question."

I lifted my chin. "Does it matter?"

"Yes. Because the people who killed your father may be the same people trying to kill you."

My anger faltered. He pulled out his phone, opened a photograph, and held it toward me. A man stood in the rain outside a warehouse, beside a black car, speaking to someone whose face the camera had missed. I knew him at once, the slope of his shoulders, the way he held his head.

Adrian. My brother, the only family I had left.

"When was this taken?" My voice barely worked.

"Three days before your father died."

"Why do you have it?"

"Because I have spent a year investigating his murder." His expression softened, but only slightly. "Your father was the last man to speak with mine before he was killed."

I knew Dante's father was dead. Everyone knew. No one had ever told me the two deaths were connected.

"The man my investigators believe ordered my father's murder," Dante said, and stopped, and I felt my heart slamming against my ribs. "Who?"

He looked straight into my eyes.

"Your father."