There wasn't a shred of guilt on Nico DeLuca's face. If anything, she looked pleased with herself, watching me the way a cat watches something it has already decided to kill slowly. Her eyes tracked every micro-expression, waiting for the fracture, the flinch, the moment I would finally shatter into something she could sweep aside.
But I just stared at her, expressionless. I didn't say a word.
The foyer of the Barone estate was silent around us, the kind of silence that only marble and money can produce. Somewhere deeper in the house, soldiers moved on soft-soled shoes, their presence felt rather than seen. The grandfather clock in the parlor measured the standoff in patient, indifferent ticks.
Nico rolled her eyes, bored by my lack of reaction, and stepped aside to let me through. One lacquered nail tapped the edge of the doorframe, delicate as crystal against porcelain, and a nasty smile curled at the corner of her lips. "Watch your step, sorella. Wouldn't want you to throw out your back carrying all that nothing you own."
My gaze dropped. I caught her foot sliding out to trip me.
Every humiliation. Every backhand dealt in front of men who wouldn't meet my eyes afterward. Every night locked in a room that smelled of cedar and fear. Every degradation I'd swallowed over the past few days surged through me at once, not as fire but as something colder, something that had finally crystallized into a shape hard enough to cut. I lifted my foot and brought it down hard.
"Ahhh!"
Nico shrieked and crumpled to the floor, clutching her foot. The sound was theatrical and immediate, a performance that began before the pain had even fully registered. She knew how to make suffering look beautiful. She'd been practicing on mine for years.
Riccardo came rushing down the main staircase, still buttoning the cuff of his dress shirt, the onyx links catching lamplight as he descended. His signet ring rolled against his knuckle with each step, the unconscious tell of a man assembling authority on the fly. "What happened? Nico, what's wrong—"
Before I could get a word out, Nico beat me to it. She lifted her face, eyes glistening on command, voice pitched to the exact register that made powerful men feel needed. "I was being nice and opened the door for her, and she didn't even appreciate it. She stomped on my foot on purpose!"
Riccardo's face went black. The signet ring stopped rolling. He didn't ask a single question. "Bianca. Apologize."
Again.
No questions asked. Just apologize.
I looked at Riccardo in silence. The chandelier above us threw prismatic light across the floor, refracting into small, cold rainbows that touched nothing and warmed nothing. Two soldiers flanked the hallway behind him, faces blank, hands loose at their sides. They had heard the order. They were already calculating what would follow my refusal.
It didn't matter what I said. He would never believe me. He had made his judgment the moment Nico DeLuca opened her mouth, the same way he had made it every time before. The evidence was irrelevant. The verdict had been delivered at the altar of their arrangement, and I was only ever the defendant. So I said nothing at all.
Riccardo's jaw tightened, the muscle in his cheek jumping once. The ring on his hand was perfectly still now, and everyone near him knew what that stillness meant. "Looks like you don't need those legs of yours."
The words had barely left his mouth before two soldiers stepped forward, one on each side, pinning me in place. Their grips were professional, fingers finding the pressure points in my arms with practiced economy. The lead soldier gave one brief tug to his jacket hem, clearing the holster line, and I felt the dread of that tiny act flood through me worse than any shouted threat.
A third raised a baton and brought it down on my kneecap. The pain was blinding, a white detonation that erased the foyer, the chandelier, the marble, everything except the single shrieking nerve that ran from my shattered joint to the base of my skull. My legs buckled and I hit the floor, cold sweat pouring down my face. I bit down so hard my teeth nearly cracked, but I refused to make a sound. The floor was freezing against my palms. I could feel the grout lines between the tiles pressing into my skin like the bars of a cage laid flat.
Something in my silence set Riccardo off. Perhaps it was the absence of begging. Perhaps it was the realization, dim and unwelcome, that there was a place inside me he could no longer reach. His voice turned brutal, the heir apparent shedding the last pretense of domestic displeasure and speaking as what he truly was: a man who believed pain was a dialect and that if he only spoke it loudly enough, I would finally answer in it. "Fine. You want to play tough? Let's see just how tough you really are."
He ordered the soldiers to throw me into the freezer.
The walk-in cold storage sat beneath the estate's kitchen wing, a reinforced room originally built to hold perishable inventory for the Dr.'s catering front. It had other uses now. Everyone in the household knew that. No one spoke of them.
Riccardo stood at the freezer door, his eyes colder than anything inside it. The vapor curled out around his polished shoes like something alive and obedient.
"Stay in there and cool off, Bianca. You can come out when you're ready to admit you were wrong."
The door sealed with a hydraulic sigh, and the world reduced itself to a steel box and a single overhead bulb that buzzed with the patience of something that had watched other women sit here before me.
The cold ate through my skin, my muscles, my bones. I could feel my body temperature dropping, degree by degree, the way a candle feels itself burning down. Frost formed on my eyelashes. My fingers went white, then blue. The pain in my knee became a distant, throbbing planet orbiting somewhere outside my body, replaced by the more immediate democracy of cold, which hurt everything equally. I pressed my hands together, smoothing the edge of my sleeve over and over, flattening the seam until the fabric grew damp with frost and my fingertips lost all sensation.
I didn't want to die in here.
I was so close. So close to getting out.
I tried to call for Riccardo, but my throat wouldn't produce a sound. The cold had stolen that, too. The only noise was my own breathing, shallow and rapid, fogging the air in small desperate clouds that the room consumed without acknowledgment.
