When I opened my eyes again, I was tied to a bed.
The ropes were thin and professional, the kind soldiers used when clean restraint mattered more than intimidation. My wrists were bound to the wrought-iron headboard, the knots placed precisely where struggling would tighten rather than loosen them. Feeling had returned to my limbs, and with it came the full inventory of damage: the swollen knee, the bruised arms, the raw ache of rewarmed skin that still remembered the cold.
Riccardo stood beside the bed in a tailored tuxedo, black as a hearse, his expression glacial. The signet ring caught the lamplight and held it, still and certain.
"Today is Nico's birthday. I won't let you ruin it."
"So your solution is to tie me up like a prisoner?"
I stared at him in disbelief. Though I shouldn't have been in disbelief at all. Nothing he did should have surprised me anymore. And yet there it was, the stubborn ember of shock, the last remnant of the woman who had once believed this man's promises meant something.
A sharp, hollow ache bloomed behind my ribs. Not from the beating. Not from the cold. From the simple, devastating recognition that I was looking at the face of someone who had once kissed my forehead in the dark and told me he would never let anything hurt me, and that person had never existed.
Riccardo didn't deny it. All he said was, "Be good. Once tonight is over, I'll make it up to you."
The words landed like coins dropped on a coffin lid. He actually believed them. That was the worst part. He believed that whatever happened tonight could be bartered away tomorrow with a gift, a gesture, some counterfeit tenderness dispensed in the same hands that had ordered a baton to my knee.
He turned to leave. I called out before he reached the door.
"Riccardo. You promised me once that you'd give me a villa. Do you remember?"
His body went rigid for a split second. The memory touched something in him, something older than the cruelty, older than Nico, perhaps older than whatever broke inside him and made him believe love was a thing you enforced. Then he turned back to face me. "I remember. Have you decided which one?"
I nodded quickly. My heart was a fist pounding against the cage of my chest, but my voice came out steady. Years of silence had taught me how to sound calm while everything inside me screamed. "Yes. I already drafted the papers. They're in the second drawer of this nightstand."
"Just sign them, and I promise I won't cause any more trouble. Deal?"
Riccardo didn't think twice. He pulled the papers from the drawer, scrawled his signature with the Montblanc he kept in his breast pocket, the pen moving in the same decisive strokes he used to sign pacts and tribute orders, and set the documents back on the nightstand.
He never noticed the severance papers and the share-transfer agreement tucked in with them. The documents I had prepared over weeks of careful, silent work. The papers that would dissolve our blood-bound union and reclaim every Bellandi holding the Barones had swallowed when my father's car went off the coast road and never came back.
He didn't even glance up. "Done. Remember what you said."
Then he turned and walked out to celebrate another woman's birthday in a house built on my family's bones.
The door closed. I counted the seconds. Ten minutes, measured by the soft ticking of the clock on the nightstand, each second a small, precise liberation.
Then I pulled out the razor blade I'd hidden inside the lining of the pillowcase and began sawing through the ropes, strand by strand. The fibers parted slowly, grudgingly, as if the restraints themselves couldn't believe what was happening. My wrists bled where the blade slipped, but I didn't stop. Blood and freedom had always been the same currency in this world. I was simply paying my own way out.
The moment I was free, I called a moving crew from a phone I'd kept hidden and told them to pick up the boxes I'd packed days ago from the service entrance, the crates marked as kitchen inventory that no soldier would think to inspect twice.
At the same time, I grabbed the signed severance agreement and the other documents, tracked down the photographer I'd been paying in cash for a week, collected every photograph he'd taken of Riccardo and Nico over the past few days, and went straight to an attorney outside Barone territory. I handed over everything. The severance papers. The share transfers. The photographs. The financial records I'd copied from the social club ledger when Nico left it unattended, believing no one in the house could read double-entry books. She had underestimated me. They all had. It was the only advantage I'd ever been given, and I had used it down to the marrow.
I booked a flight to Thornridge, climbed into a cab at the edge of Crestfall where Barone eyes were thinnest, and pulled the second SIM card out of my phone.
Riccardo had bought it for me.
Back when he wanted to make sure he could always reach me, that I'd never disappear from his signal, that the leash was digital as well as physical. He had called it devotion. He had called it making sure his wife was safe. He had called it love, and for a while, God help me, I had believed him.
I didn't need it anymore.
I snapped the card in half and tossed it out the window. It caught the streetlight for a fraction of a second, two small plastic shards spinning in the air, and then it was gone, swallowed by the dark road behind me the same way this city had swallowed my name, my inheritance, and the first twenty-seven years of my life.
Riccardo Barone, I hope we never cross paths again.
Crestfall. I never wanted to come back.
