Before I could finish, Dante's phone lit up on the white tablecloth, the screen casting a pale rectangle of light across the silverware. Serena's name pulsed there, and he answered on the second ring without breaking eye contact with me, as though he could hold us both in the same fist.
Her voice came through choked with barely suppressed tears, each word delivered with the cadence of someone who had rehearsed it just enough to make it sound unrehearsed: "Dante, today's the tenth anniversary of you and Miss Valenti. I shouldn't be calling. But I'm really leaving this time. Please believe no one is forcing me. It's all... it's all my choice..."
The line went dead. Dante pulled the phone from his ear, stared at the darkened screen, and called back. Busy signal. Called again. Busy signal. The third time, his thumb pressed down on the screen so hard the glass protector cracked along one edge, a hairline fracture that split his own reflection in two.
He smashed the jade bangle against the edge of the table in a blind rage. The stone didn't shatter so much as explode, fragments of deep green spinning outward across the tablecloth, the bread plate, the ice beneath the oysters. I felt two of them cut across my face, one along the ridge of my cheekbone and one just below my left eye, thin and precise as paper cuts, and the blood that welled there was warm and immediate in the cold salt air.
Dante's hand closed around my throat. His fingers found the same places they always found, fitting against my pulse points as though my neck had been measured for his grip. His expression was ice-cold, carved from the same stone as the shattered bangle, and he demanded to know what sick trick I was pulling now.
I stared straight back at him, unflinching. The pressure on my windpipe made the words thin, but I forced them out steady and clear.
"This has nothing to do with me."
He smiled through clenched teeth. The candlelight painted his face in halves, one side warm gold, the other black. His tie knot was already loosened from the first tug, and now his free hand found it again, pulling it sharp and precise a second time in the same conversation. Someone was about to be cut down.
"Bianca, this pathetic jealous act of yours genuinely disgusts me."
He flung me to the ground. The stone floor of the terrace met my shoulder and hip in two separate impacts, and the cold of it seeped through my dress and into my skin like water through cracked earth. He looked down at me with revulsion plain in his eyes, the same look he gave associates who had failed him, who had broken the code, who were no longer worth the breath it took to address them. Then he turned and strode out without another word, his soldiers falling into step behind him, the restaurant door swinging shut with the soft, definitive click of a lock engaging from the outside.
The second he was gone, my phone buzzed once against the floor where it had fallen from my pocket.
A message from Serena. No preamble, no performance, no trembling voice. Just text, clean and cold:
【So what if you're some powerful heiress from the Valenti family, Bianca? In the end, my three months beat your ten years.】
I typed back 【Congratulations】 and blocked her number. My hands were steady. The blood from the cuts on my face had reached my jaw and was dripping onto the screen, and I wiped it with my thumb before sliding the phone back into my pocket. The terrace was empty. The candles were still burning. The ocean went on doing what it always did.
I was bracing myself against the wall, barely at the door, one hand pressed flat against the cold stone for balance, when one of Dante's soldiers materialized from the hallway beyond the kitchen. He was one of the men I recognized from the estate rotation, thick-necked and silent, the kind of enforcer who followed orders the way a bullet follows a barrel. His hand clamped over my mouth before I could draw enough breath to scream. He dragged me backward through the service corridor, past the walk-in coolers and the dishwashing station where the staff had already been dismissed, and into the restroom at the far end of the hall.
The fluorescent light buzzed overhead. The tiles were white and scrubbed clean, and they squeaked beneath my shoes as he shoved me to my knees in front of the industrial toilet basin. His hand found the back of my head, fingers twisting into my hair, and he forced my face into the water. Once. Twice. Again. Each time he pulled me up just long enough for me to choke in a ragged half-breath, the water filling my nose and mouth and ears until the world became nothing but cold and pressure and the distant, muffled sound of my own heartbeat hammering against the porcelain. I lost count. I stopped fighting somewhere after the fourth time, and my arms went slack against the tile, and the fluorescent light above me fractured into shards behind my eyelids.
When he was done, he stripped the soaked clothes from my half-dead body with the mechanical efficiency of a man handling cargo. The cold hit me everywhere at once, and then the cold got worse, because he opened the door to the restaurant's industrial freezer, the kind used for bulk seafood storage, set to a temperature that turned breath to frost before it left the lips. He threw me inside. The door sealed behind me with a low hydraulic hiss, and the darkness was total, and the cold was a living thing that pressed against every inch of exposed skin and began to burrow inward, searching for whatever warmth remained.
I curled on the frozen floor. The steel grating bit into my bare back and shoulders, and the ice that had already formed along the edges of the shelving units glittered faintly in the crack of light beneath the door. I could feel my heartbeat slowing. I could feel my fingers losing the argument with sensation, the numbness climbing from the tips toward the knuckles, the palms, the wrists. I pressed my thumb to the inside of my wrist and held it there, but I couldn't feel the pulse anymore. Just the cold. Just the dark. Just the slow, creeping silence of a body deciding whether to continue.
At the edge of death, I heard Dante's voice over the restaurant's intercom, tinny and distant, threading through the sealed freezer door like smoke through a keyhole:
"I told you to keep an eye on Bianca. What do you mean you don't know where she is?"
