POV: Elara Winters
The work is easier than Elara expected.
For three days, Sarah assigns her tasks—laundry, kitchen prep, basic cleaning. The estate is staffed, so Elara isn't doing all the work. She's integrated into a routine. Treated like staff rather than prisoner, which is somehow worse because it means she's starting to feel normal.
On the fourth night, exhausted and craving escape from her own thoughts, Elara finds the library.
It's on the second floor, a massive room lined with books from floor to ceiling. Someone clearly loves reading—really loves it. The books are organized. Worn from use. Marked with notes.
Elara moves along the shelves, running her fingers over spines, finding art books. Photography. History. A collection of Caravaggio paintings.
She pulls the book down and sinks into a leather chair, getting lost in images of light and shadow, beauty and violence all tangled together.
She doesn't hear him enter.
"You read Italian?" Dante's voice makes her jump.
Elara looks up to find him in the doorway, his tie loosened, looking more human than she's seen him. Less like a crime lord, more like a man who's had a long day.
"I studied art history," she says. "Before I had to quit."
Dante enters the library properly now, moving toward the chair across from hers. He sits—actually sits, like they're having a normal conversation. "Why did you quit?"
Elara looks back at the book. "Because someone has to pay the bills when your parents smoke their money."
"Were you good? At art?"
"I was," Elara says. And the bitterness in her voice surprises her. "My professor said I had a real eye for composition. For seeing truth in images." She laughs, hollow. "That doesn't pay rent."
Dante leans back in his chair. "Caravaggio is your taste?"
"I like that he painted truth," Elara says. She looks up at him. "Beauty and violence together. Nothing sanitized."
Something flickers in Dante's expression.
"That's perceptive," he says.
They talk. Just for twenty minutes, but it feels like hours. Dante reveals an education she didn't expect—he's read the books in this library. Actually read them. He discusses chiaroscuro, the interplay of light and shadow, how Caravaggio used it to make saints look human and humans look divine.
When he finally stands to leave, Elara feels unsettled.
This man who kidnapped her can discuss Renaissance painting. This monster reads poetry. This criminal understands art in ways she never expected.
"Come back tomorrow," Dante says at the door. "I want to show you something."
The next night, he's waiting for her in the library. He pulls a book from the shelf—a collection of works by Anselm Kiefer.
"Kiefer paints memory," Dante says, opening the book. "Trauma. He creates beautiful things from destruction."
Elara looks at the images. Raw. Honest. Painful.
"Why are you showing me this?" she asks.
Dante studies her. "Because I think you understand that beauty and pain are the same thing sometimes. That we're all just trying to create meaning from what destroys us."
He says it so quietly that Elara almost misses the vulnerability underneath.
"What destroys you?" she asks.
Dante is silent for a long moment.
"Losing someone," he finally says. "When I was seventeen. Someone I loved. My mother."
Elara waits for him to continue.
"She was the only soft thing in a hard world," Dante says, and his voice has changed. It's colder now, but in a different way—like cold stone, like something has frozen inside him. "After she died, I stopped being soft. I stopped being... anything except what I had to be to survive."
Elara understands, in that moment, why his men fear him. It's not the violence or the power. It's that he's made himself into something that doesn't feel. Doesn't break. Doesn't hope.
"I'm sorry," she says.
"Don't be sorry for me," Dante says sharply. "I'm not a victim."
"No," Elara agrees. "But you were once. Just like I was."
Their eyes meet. Something electric and dangerous passes between them.
Dante turns away abruptly. "I should let you rest."
But before he leaves, he does something unexpected. He pulls a thin volume from the shelf—a book of poetry in Italian. He hands it to her.
"Read this," he says. "And tomorrow night, tell me what you think."
He leaves before she can respond.
Elara opens the book. Reads the first poem. It's about love and loss and the way beauty emerges from darkness.
And she realizes, reading it in the quiet of the library, that Dante Valorian just showed her the most honest part of himself.
She's starting to understand why her parents' cruelty felt like freedom. Because in this prison, in this beautiful room surrounded by books, she's being seen. Being valued. Being treated like her thoughts and feelings matter.
It's dangerous. She knows it's dangerous.
But it's also the first time anyone has ever looked at her like she was worth understanding.