Alessia POV:

"Please," I begged, the word tearing from my raw throat. "I need to see him."

Isabella-Bella-didn't even look at me. She was examining her perfectly manicured nails, as if my entire world collapsing was a minor inconvenience.

"The Don is managing a significant transition of power," she said, her voice bored. "He can't be bothered with loose ends."

Loose ends. That's what I was. The final, messy piece of a successful mission.

Silent tears cut clean tracks through the grime on my cheeks. The finality of it crashed down on me, a physical weight that made it hard to breathe.

He never loved me. Not for a second.

I remembered the texts I'd sent him that morning, just hours before the wedding.

I can't wait to be your wife.

You're my forever, Dante.

I love you more than anything.

He never answered. I'd told myself he was busy. The truth was so much worse. He was preparing to destroy me.

My bag was on the chair in the corner. My phone was inside. They hadn't taken it. An oversight. A sign of how little I mattered.

My fingers trembled as I found his number. The one I knew by heart.

It rang twice.

He answered. His voice was clipped, impatient. "Yes?"

"Dante," I breathed, a sob catching in my throat.

Silence. Then, his voice dropped, each word a shard of ice. "This number is for Family business only. Don't call it again."

He hung up.

The dial tone buzzed in my ear, a sound more violent than any gunshot.

I tried again, my thumb hitting redial with frantic desperation.

A recorded voice answered. The number you have dialed has been disconnected.

The phone slipped from my numb fingers, clattering against the cold tile floor. The sound echoed in the sudden, crushing silence of the room.

The pain that ripped through me was worse than the bullet wound. It was a hemorrhage of the soul.

He hadn't just left me. He had erased me.

The days that followed blurred into a haze of sterile solitude and Bella's relentless questions. I was a prisoner, not a patient.

To them, I was the Scorpion's daughter. Tainted. An outcast.

But a stubborn, foolish part of me refused to believe it all. Refused to believe the loving father who taught me to ride a bike and read me bedtime stories was the monster they claimed he was.

They were lying about him. Just like Dante had lied about everything.

They had to be.

Alessia POV:

A silent De Luca Soldier escorted me from the hospital.

Not to freedom, but to another cage.

This one was a cold, minimalist office in a high-rise that screamed of new money and old power.

Dante was there.

He stood with his back to me, facing a wall covered in black-and-white photographs. A memorial: the faces of De Luca members killed by the Gallos over decades of war.

His shoulders were slumped, and even from across the room, I could see the exhaustion etched into his posture. He looked like a man carrying the weight of all their ghosts.

He didn't turn when I entered.

"We found one of your father's safe deposit boxes," he said to the wall of the dead. "Your name is on it."

He turned then, and my breath hitched.

But the exhaustion I'd seen in his posture didn't reach his eyes. They were simply hollow-cold and professional.

He slid a document across the vast, polished expanse of the desk.

"The contents are substantial and illicit," he said, his voice so flat he could have been reading a quarterly earnings report. "I'd advise you to get a lawyer."

He was speaking to a stranger.

My hands trembled. I couldn't bring myself to touch the paper. All I could do was look at him, the man who had held me and whispered promises in the dark.

"Dante, please," I begged, my voice cracking. "Look at me. Was there ever a single moment of truth between us?"

He finally met my gaze, and the hollowness in his eyes was so vast I felt like I could fall into it and never be found.

"It was my job."

He turned to leave, his duty done.

A memory flashed, sharp and painful.

The first time I saw him at my father's charity gala. I'd chased him for months after that, a lovesick puppy.

I remembered faking a fall on a marble staircase just so he would have to catch me. And he had, his arms closing around me, strong and steady.

I remembered the night I finally confessed my feelings, my heart pounding in my chest.

He hadn't returned the kiss. Not on the lips, anyway. Instead, he'd pressed his lips to my forehead, his voice a dark, velvet warning.

"You'll regret this, Alessia."

I had laughed then, delirious with what I thought was victory.

Here, in this cold De Luca office, surrounded by the ghosts of his family, I whispered the words to myself.

"I regret it."

Alessia POV:

The slap of my bare feet against the cold marble echoed in the hallway as I ran after him.

I grabbed his arm. He stopped, but only turned back to me after a deliberate pause. His features were carved from stone, a mask of chilling indifference.

"I regret it," I said, my voice fracturing on a sob.

He just stared at me.

"You promised," I choked out, the memory igniting a sliver of insane hope. "At the gala. You said... if I ever regretted it, you'd help me."

His jaw tightened. A flicker of something-annoyance?-crossed his face. "What do you want, Alessia?" His tone was laced with a contempt so sharp it felt like a physical blow.

"I want to see him," I sobbed, the words torn from my throat. "My father. Just one last time."

"No."

The word was flat. Final. Unmovable.

That single word didn't just shatter my hope. It burned it to ash. And from the embers, a cold, sharp fury began to rise.

"Our love, our intimacy... every touch, every kiss... it was all a lie, wasn't it?" I demanded, my voice gaining a raw, ragged edge. "A meticulously planned operation to get to my father."

Tears still streamed down my face, but they were tears of rage now, not sorrow. He just watched me, his expression unmoved.

"Your tears mean nothing to me," he said, each word a perfectly formed shard of ice. "It was a mission. My feelings were never part of the equation."

"You used me," I spat. "If you had just told me the truth, I would have helped you. He was my father, but if he did what you said... I would have helped you get justice."

For a split second, something cracked in the glacial calm of his eyes. Regret? Doubt? It was there-I saw it-and then it was gone, sealed away behind a wall of ice.

"The Scorpion's syndicate ambushed my team last year," he said, his voice low and guttural. "They killed my Consigliere. My mentor. He bled out in my arms. Justice was never going to be clean."

Before I could respond, Isabella appeared at his side, sliding her arm through his with an air of effortless ownership. Her touch was proprietary, her tone dripping with condescension.

"Is she causing a problem, mio Don?" she asked, her eyes flicking over me with a look of profound disdain before dismissing me entirely.

Dante didn't even glance my way. He looked at her, and the hard lines of his face softened, almost imperceptibly.

"She's not a problem," he said, his voice utterly detached as he turned his back on me completely. "She's just the daughter of a dead man."

He walked away with her, leaving me alone in the hallway, the echo of his words carving a hollow, gaping hole in my chest.