Dante's POV
The world returned in fragments. Pain, a deep, angry throb in his shoulder. The smell of clean linen and her perfume. The soft rustle of a page turning.
He opened his eyes. He was in his bed, not the office chair. Daylight streamed through the windows. And she was there, in the armchair by the fireplace—her chair—but it had been pulled closer to the bed. She was reading, a slight frown of concentration on her face.
He didn't move. He watched her, this woman who had sewn his flesh back together. She had held his hand while he slept. The memory was hazy, dreamlike, but the feeling of her small, cool hand in his was etched into his skin more permanently than any scar.
She glanced up, sensing his gaze. Her green eyes met his, and for a moment, there was no guard between them. Just the quiet aftermath of a storm.
"You're awake," she said softly, closing her book. "How's the pain?"
"Manageable," he rasped, his throat dry.
She was up in an instant, pouring water from a pitcher on the nightstand. She helped him sit up, her arm slipping behind his shoulders with a practiced ease that spoke of nights spent doing this. Her touch was clinical and gentle, but it sent a current through him that had nothing to do with pain. He drank, his eyes never leaving her face.
"Marco said the fever broke before dawn," she said, sitting on the edge of the bed, a careful foot of space between them. "You should eat something. Greta made broth."
He nodded, feeling strangely adrift. The protocols of his life—the distance, the command, the unbreachable wall of Don—felt irrelevant here, in this sunlit room with a woman who had seen his blood and not flinched.
So began the quiet revolution.
Isabella's POV
Nursing Dante Salvatore was nothing like I'd imagined. There were no commands, no brooding silences meant to intimidate. There was just a man in pain, reliant on my help. I changed his bandages, trying to ignore the sheer masculine presence of him in the bed, the heat of his skin under my fingers. I brought him broth and toast, and he ate without complaint.
On the second day, he spoke.
"You didn't have to do this." He was propped against the headboard, watching me organize the medicines on the dresser.
"Yes, I did," I said without turning around. "You would have died of sepsis out of sheer stubbornness."
A low, rough sound that was almost a laugh. "Stubbornness is a family trait, I'm told."
I looked at him then. He looked younger without the armor of his suits and his cold expression. Tired and in pain, but his eyes were clearer, watching me with an unsettling directness.
"Why are you doing this?" he asked again, the question layered.
I busied myself with the pills. "Because despite everything… I don't want you to die."
The admission hung in the air, honest and terrifying.
He was silent for a long moment. "My mother died when I was ten," he said, the words coming out flat, as if he'd rehearsed them for this moment but still found them foreign on his tongue. "Cancer. It was slow. Ugly. I watched the strongest person I knew become a ghost in her bed." He stared at the sunlight on the duvet. "My father told me crying was a weakness. A Don's son is expected to provide strength, not tears. So I held her hand, and I didn't cry. Not until after. Then, I decided I would never be that powerless again. I would build walls so high nothing could get in to hurt the people I…" He trailed off, the word "love" seemingly too dangerous to utter. "The people I was responsible for."
My heart ached for the ten-year-old boy, forced to be a man too soon. I understood then the origin of the fortress. It wasn't built from cruelty but from a child's trauma.
I sat back in the chair, the space between us feeling charged, but not with threat. With shared confidences.
"My mother left when I was five," I heard myself say. The old wound, usually buried deep, felt close to the surface. "No cancer. No drama. She just… packed a suitcase one afternoon and said she was going to find some air. She never came back." I looked at my hands. "My father spent his life looking for that same air at the bottom of a bottle or a betting slip. I decided I would never be that powerless, either. I would never need anyone enough that they could leave me."
This was my own version of building walls. Different bricks, same prison.
We looked at each other across the room, two orphans of different kinds of abandonment, recognizing the familiar architecture of loss in each other.
Dante's POV
Her confession was a gift. A fragile, precious thing she handed him, and he knew the weight of it. Her mother's abandonment, her father's weakness—it explained the fierce independence, the defiance that had drawn him like a moth to a flame. She wasn't just fighting him; she was fighting the ghost of every person who had ever left her.
Over the next few days, the room became a world. They talked. They did not discuss the empire or the contract; instead, they talked about the books in the library. She hated the pretentious modernists; he had a soft spot for epic Italian poetry. She told him about her dream of a gallery, not a lavish one, but a bright space for unknown artists. He told her about his first legitimate business, a shipping logistics company he'd built from the ground up, and the pride he'd felt in something clean.
The sexual tension was a constant, living thing. It was in the way her breath caught when she leaned over him to adjust a pillow, her hair brushing his cheek. It was in the way his gaze lingered on the curve of her neck as she read aloud, just to hear her voice. It was a slow, sweet torture, this new proximity born of vulnerability. He wanted her with a rawness that eclipsed the possessive fury of before. Now, he wanted her with him, not just under him.
He saw her watching him too. Not with fear anymore, but with a curious, hesitant fascination. She saw the man, and he was becoming dangerously real to her.
On the fifth day, he could sit up without dizziness. He called Marco to the room.
Isabella tensed, immediately withdrawing into herself, the easy companion replaced by the wary prisoner.
"The guard outside this door is to be removed," Dante said, his voice still weaker than he liked, but clear.
Marco's eyebrows shot up. "Dante—"
"She is not a prisoner in this room," he said, his eyes on Isabella. He saw her stunned expression. "She may move freely within the mansion. The library, the gardens. The guards on the exterior doors and gates remain. This is done to ensure her safety. Not her confinement." He held her gaze. "Do you understand the difference?"
She nodded slowly, her eyes wide.
"Good," he said. Then, to Marco. "Please bring her the items from her old apartment." Her art supplies. Her books. The cat."
"Dante?" she whispered, her voice choked.
"The cat's name is an insult," he said, a faint, real smile touching his lips for the first time in days. "We'll have to rename him."
Marco left, shaking his head in bemused surrender.
Isabella's POV
The world opened up. The guard was gone. I walked the hallways without a shadow, my footsteps echoing in the quiet house. I spent hours in the library, not as an escape, but as a pleasure. I even ventured into the kitchen, where Greta, after a moment of shock, taught me how to make the lemon risotto. Dante had barely touched it, but I remembered him saying he liked it.
I brought it to him that evening on a tray. He was sitting in a chair by the window, looking out at the park, dressed in a dark robe. He looked regal and weary, a king convalescing.
"You cooked?" he asked, surprise softening his features.
"Greta helped. I'm not promising it's edible."
He took a bite and chewed slowly. His eyes closed. "It's perfect."
We ate in a comfortable silence, the setting sun painting the room in gold. The atmosphere between us was fragile, new, and electric. Every glance, every accidental brush of fingers when I took his empty bowl, sent sparks through my veins.
Later, as I fluffed the pillows on his bed—his bed, which he'd insisted I use while he took the chair, an absurd reversal I was still getting used to—he spoke from behind me.
"Why are you being kind to me?"
I turned. He stood there, his sturdy arm braced against the doorframe, his expression unreadable. The question wasn't accusatory. I was genuinely bewildered.
I thought of the boy who didn't cry at his mother's bedside. I thought of the man who bled in silence to protect a twisted idea of family. I thought of his hand, holding mine in the dark.
The old answer—because I have to—was a lie. The new truth was too vast, and frightening to speak.
So I gave him the truth that had started it all.
"Because despite everything," I said, my voice barely a whisper in the dusky room, "I don't want you to die."
He stepped into the room, the air thickening with everything we weren't saying. His dark eyes held mine, and in them, I saw not an obsession, but a question. An offering.
The ground between us had shifted. The lines between captor and captive had blurred into something infinitely more dangerous and beautiful.
We were standing on new, unsteady terrain, and neither of us knew what would happen next.