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.

Alessia POV:

Bella moved me.

The new room was a stark white box. No window.

Just a bed, a chair, and a single, buzzing fluorescent strip overhead.

She tossed a threadbare towel and a bottle of water onto the mattress.

"Try not to make a mess," she said, and left.

From the room next door, I heard a woman's sobs. They weren't quiet, polite tears. They were gut-wrenching, soul-tearing sounds-the sound of a soul fracturing under a weight it could no longer bear.

She kept wailing a name, and then a phrase that made the blood in my veins turn to ice.

"Crimson Thorn... my boy... my sweet boy..."

Bella reappeared in the doorway, a file in her hand. She nodded toward the wall.

"A victim of your father's business," she said, her voice a sterile, emotionless drone.

"Her son is dead. Overdosed on the poison the Scorpion sold to high school kids."

I squeezed my eyes shut, but the woman's cries echoed in my head.

My hand flew to my neck, my fingers instinctively closing around the tarnished silver compass that hung there. The only thing of my mother's I had left.

"It will always guide you, Alessia," she'd told me years ago, her voice a soft whisper as she fastened the chain. "Even in the dark."

The dark. I was in it now. Drowning in it.

I remembered my father at her funeral. He'd insisted on a closed casket.

"It's better to remember her as she was," he'd said, his voice thick with a grief I now realized was a performance.

What had he been hiding?

My fingers fiddled with the compass's clasp, a nervous habit. My nail caught on a tiny, almost invisible seam near the hinge. It wasn't part of the design. It was a line. A break.

I pressed.

A tiny click, no louder than a sigh. A hidden compartment sprang open.

Inside, nestled in a bed of faded velvet, was a micro flash drive.

Sleep, when it finally came, wasn't an escape. It was a different kind of hell.

I was in the desert, the sun a merciless hammer overhead. My mother was calling my name, her voice carried on the wind.

"Alessia... The Scorpion... El Jefe... they know..."

I woke with a start, my heart pounding against my ribs. Her words from the dream echoed in my mind. El Jefe. The boss.

I had to talk to Dante.

I grabbed my phone, my fingers shaking as I went to his number. Still blocked. Erased.

A cold resolve settled over me. I wasn't just a loose end. I was a witness.

And I had something they didn't know about.

I dialed the main De Luca business line, the number from their corporate website. A crisp, professional voice answered.

"De Luca Holdings, how may I direct your call?"

"I have new information," I said, my voice sounding strange and distant even to my own ears. "Regarding Daniel Gallo. And Martha Gallo."