Vivienne's POV
I was at Dante's office door before I finished reading Aria's message.
I didn't knock. I pushed it open, crossed the room, and put my phone in his face the same way I had with the news article about Mr. Huang. Except this time my hands weren't shaking with shock.
They were shaking with something closer to rage.
"He went to Aria's gallery," I said. "Caruso sent someone to my best friend's workplace asking about my routine. She has his card, Dante. His actual name on a card, like he wanted her to know who was asking."
Dante took my phone. Read both messages. His face didn't move, but something in the room changed — a pressure shift, like the air before lightning.
"He's sending a message," Dante said.
"To who? To me?"
"To me." He handed the phone back. "He knows I'm watching. He wants me to know he's not afraid to move in daylight." His jaw tightened. "It's a power demonstration."
"Using my best friend as the canvas," I said.
"Yes."
I stared at him. "So what do we do?"
Dante looked at me for a moment — that careful, reading look, like he was measuring something. "We bring Aria here," he said. "Tonight. She's safer inside these walls until this is resolved."
"She'll have questions—"
"You can answer them or not. That's your choice." He was already moving toward the door, already composing the instruction in his head before it left his mouth. "Matteo will send two cars. One for Aria, one visible enough that Caruso's men see we know they're watching."
"And then?"
Dante stopped. Turned back.
"And then," he said, "I think you and I need a conversation you've been working up to for two days."
Aria arrived forty minutes later with a overnight bag, wide eyes, and the expression of a woman who had decided to be furious after she confirmed everyone was alive.
She looked at me. Then at the estate around her. Then at Matteo standing quietly by the door.
"Okay," she said. "Start talking."
I talked for an hour.
When I finished, Aria sat with her hands wrapped around a mug of tea she hadn't touched and stared at the middle distance.
"Your husband," she said slowly, "is the most feared criminal in the city."
"Yes."
"And he's been protecting you for five years."
"Yes."
"And Delilah is dead because of him."
"Yes."
Aria was quiet for a long moment.
"Okay," she said finally.
I blinked. "Okay?"
"Viv." She set down her mug and looked at me with the particular clarity she'd always had — the thing that made her a good art dealer and a better friend. "Delilah called you a whore in front of twelve people and tried to strip everything your father left you. Helena sold you to a dying stranger and has been stealing from you for five years. Caruso just walked into my gallery." She paused. "I'm not saying the man is a saint. I'm saying someone finally did something. And I'm saying you don't look like a woman who wants to run."
I opened my mouth.
Closed it.
"You look like a woman," Aria said carefully, "who is trying to decide if she's allowed to stop running."
The accuracy of it sat between us.
"Go talk to your husband," Aria said. "I'll be here. I'm not going anywhere."
I found Dante in the underground command center, standing over a table with Matteo, studying something I didn't understand. He looked up when I came off the elevator.
I didn't let myself hesitate.
"I want to make them pay," I said. "Helena. The board. Everyone who spent five years treating me like a problem to be managed. I'm done surviving quietly." I held his gaze. "Teach me how to fight back."
The room was very still.
Matteo looked at Dante. Dante looked at me.
"Are you sure?" Dante asked. Not dismissively — seriously. Like he understood the weight of the door I was trying to open.
"I've been good my whole life," I said. "I've been patient and quiet and graceful and it got me nothing. It got my father nothing. Good didn't protect me. Good didn't protect anyone." My voice was steady. "So yes. I'm sure. Teach me to be ruthless."
Something shifted in Dante's expression. Something predatory and proud at the same time.
"With pleasure," he said.
That night, he took me out.
Dark clothes, as he instructed. An unmarked car. Matteo in the front, Dante beside me in the back, the city moving past the windows like a river.
"Where are we going?" I asked.
"To handle a problem," Dante said. "And to show you something."
The warehouse was in the industrial district, all shadows and cold air and the smell of rust. Dante's men were already inside — six of them, positioned around a man tied to a chair in the center of the space.
The man was middle-aged, heavyset, his face cut and bleeding. He was crying. Not dramatically — quietly, the way people cry when they've run out of options.
I stopped walking.
"His name is Petrov," Dante said, low beside my ear. "He sells weapons. Last month he sold a shipment to the Caruso family — guns that were used to kill three of my men. Three people who had families. Children."
I looked at Petrov. At his bloody face. At the way his wrists were bound to the arms of the chair.
"What are you going to do to him?" I asked.
Dante reached into his jacket and removed a gun. He checked the chamber with the ease of a man who had done it ten thousand times.
"What I always do," he said. He walked forward.
I stood at the edge of the room and watched him move — all that controlled, predatory grace — and tried to locate the horror I was supposed to feel.
It was there. But underneath it, my mind was already working.
Three men dead. Petrov sold the weapons. Dante kills him. Petrov's family loses everything. His children grow up without a father and with a reason to hate.
Dante raised the gun.
"Wait," I said.
Every head in the room turned.
Dante paused. The gun stayed level, but he looked at me. Patient. Waiting.
I walked forward. My heels on the concrete floor echoed.
I stopped beside Dante and looked at Petrov — at this man who had made a terrible choice for money and was now sitting in the consequences of it.
"If you kill him," I said, speaking to Dante but loudly enough for the whole room, "his family loses their income. His children grow up without a father and with your name as the reason why. They grow up hating you. Some of them grow up angry enough to become problems." I paused. "But if you ruin him — take his business, his accounts, his licenses, his reputation — you leave him alive and broken. He spends the rest of his life explaining to his family why they have nothing. That is not mercy. That is a longer punishment." I held Dante's gaze. "And it sends a cleaner message. You don't just kill threats. You dismantle them."
The silence in the warehouse was absolute.
Dante lowered the gun.
He looked at me for a moment — something in his expression I hadn't seen before, something that made my chest tighten.
"You heard my wife," he said to Matteo, his voice carrying effortlessly through the space. "Seize Petrov's assets. Destroy his business. Freeze every account connected to him. Leave him his life and nothing else."
Petrov sobbed with relief.
Dante turned and walked out. I followed.
Outside, the night air was cold and clean. I breathed it in deeply, surprised to find that my hands were steady. That my heartbeat was elevated but not panicked.
That I felt, against all reason, clear.
Dante walked beside me to the car. Just before we reached it, he stopped.
He reached out and took my hand.
Not possessively. Not dramatically. Just — took it, his fingers wrapping around mine, warm and certain.
"You surprised me," he said. "In the best way."
I looked down at our joined hands. At the scarred knuckles of a man who had fought his way through a decade of darkness to stand here, holding my hand outside a warehouse at midnight like it was the most natural thing in the world.
"I surprised myself," I admitted.
And for the first time in five years — maybe longer — something lit up inside my chest that wasn't grief or rage or exhaustion.
It felt terrifyingly like being alive.
Dante opened the car door. I got in.
As Matteo started the engine, my phone buzzed.
A message from an unknown number. Different from the one that had asked if I was safe.
This one had no words at all.
Just a photograph.
Aria. Sitting inside the estate guest room I'd left her in forty minutes ago.
Taken from outside the window.
From inside the grounds.
My blood turned to ice.
Someone was already inside the estate.