Before
Something is wrong.
It is dark outside when Darrius knocks on my bedroom door.
It takes a couple of knocks before I hear him. Elena’s head is in my lap, and I am combing my fingers through her hair. We have music playing softly in the background, but neither of us is really listening to it. Elena is telling me all about the awful party she went to last night, and I am listening intently because I never get to go to parties. I have responsibilities that require me to make a lot of sacrifices, which include all the joys of life. Elena is still young, only nineteen, and she is Father’s baby girl, which means he is more lenient with her than he is with me. He is more iron-clad with me, more stringent. Even when Elena is defiant, she gets away with it with nothing but a few scolding words and a slap on the wrist. I, on the other hand, face harsher punishment. Which is why I always keep my head down, follow orders and rules, stay at home, and never go to parties.
On the fourth knock, Elena perks up and hurries off the bed to open the door. It is easy to understand why Elena is more favoured than I am. She is sunshine incarnate — always smiling, always giggling. She practically bounces and floats and never simply walks. She knows how to engage someone in riveting conversation, even when it is something silly. She always enraptures people’s attention. People are just drawn to her. She makes it look so easy, so effortless.
“Hello, Darrius.” Elena’s voice is sing-songy — sweet and light. “What can we help you with?”
From the bed, I can see Darrius’s face. Any other time, he would have smiled at Elena, but he does not now. His face is serious, his mouth set in a hard line. His posture is rigid, his hands clasped in front of him. He is a big man, Darrius — broad across the shoulders, with a jaw that looks carved rather than grown, and eyes that miss very little. He has been with Father for ten years and I have never once seen him rattled. He is rattled now.
“Hello, Elena,” he says, without a hint of warmth in his voice. “Boss has summoned Sera to his office.”
A sharp inhale. I am not sure whether it is from Elena or me. None of us has ever been summoned to Father’s office. We have never even seen the inside of it, let alone caught a glimpse. Its oak doors are always shut. When Father is in his office, no one is to disturb him unless it is a dire situation. And by the look on Darrius’s face, something is wrong.
Something is very wrong.
I get up from the bed.
“Can you give me a moment to get ready, Darrius?” I say, and he nods.
“I’ll be waiting just outside the door, Sera,” he says.
The music continues to play in the background, but it suddenly feels distant.
Elena closes the door softly and turns to me.
We had both been getting ready for bed — we are in our pyjamas — and so I have to change into something presentable. I cannot go to Father’s office in my sleeping clothes. He would find that unacceptable, and he would be greatly disappointed.
Elena wrings her hands, nervous. She bites her lip as I head to my walk-in closet for a change of clothes.
“Do you think something has happened?” she asks.
I slide out of my pyjama shorts. “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
I know it in my gut — that something has happened — but I do not want Elena to worry.
“I think something happened. Why else would he summon you to his office?” she says, pacing back and forth just outside the walk-in closet. The soft carpet muffles her footsteps. “He’s never done it before. Not once.”
“Elena.” I walk out in just my underwear and take her gently by the shoulders, stopping her pacing. Once she is still and facing me, I take her hands in mine because she is seconds away from biting her nails — a nervous habit. “Stop. You’ll work yourself into a state.”
“I’m already in a state.”
“I’m sure it’s nothing bad,” I say. “Father probably just wants to have a chat.” Even as I say it, it sounds absurd.
Elena blinks, and then she covers her mouth as she laughs. I laugh with her because that is perhaps the most ridiculous thing either of us has ever said. The very thought is absurd. Still, the laughter helps. Some of the tension leaves Elena’s shoulders. Her hands loosen in mine.
“You’re right,” she says.
“Which part? The part where nothing bad has happened, or the part where Father wants a chat?”
She smiles wide, her eyes gleaming with amusement. “The former, definitely,” she says.
“Now, help me choose a dress,” I say.
Rows of dresses stare back at me. Silks. Satins. Velvets. All beautiful. All expensive. All chosen with care.
I pull out a dark green velvet dress and hold it beside a blue one.
“Which one do you think will do?”
“You’re not going to a formal dinner, Sera,” she says. “It’s just Father.”
But it is never just Father. To her, maybe. But not to me. I always have to do everything well — beyond well, even. Everything effortlessly. I have to be proper. Agreeable.
“You know I can’t show up in Father’s office in pyjamas. Hurry — I don’t want to make him wait,” I say.
Father hates tardiness. He runs an empire built on discipline, structure, and order. Sloppiness is not in his vocabulary.
“The green velvet is way too formal,” she says. “The blue dress is fine. Wear that one.”
I nod.
I make quick work of putting on the dress, then step into a pair of simple black heels. I hurry to my vanity.
My reflection watches me from the mirror. I gather my hair into a tight bun. Not a single strand out of place. The familiar ritual calms me. A little. Only a little.
The room is quiet except for the faint music still drifting from the speakers.
When I am finished, I stand and smooth my hands down the front of the dress, making sure there are no wrinkles.
“Do I look okay?” I ask.
“You look beautiful,” she says. Then her smile falters. Just slightly, just for a second, before she puts it back. She smooths the collar of my dress with both hands, the way Mother does, and drops her eyes. “You always do.”
The way she says it makes something tighten in my chest. I kiss her on the cheek. Her skin is warm and soft.
“Stay out of trouble while I’m gone.”
She snorts. “Says the boring sister.”
I smile despite myself. Then I leave my room.
Darrius is waiting outside, just as he said he would be.
He walks ahead of me down the carpeted hallway.
It is silent at this time of night. Golden pools of light spill from the wall sconces, illuminating expensive paintings and polished wood. Mother is probably in her room, spectacles on, reading a paperback — one of her Harlequin romance novels, no doubt. She loves those. I smile at the thought. While Elena was daddy’s girl, I was always mommy’s girl.
Mother and I are alike in more ways than just looks — Grandmother loves to note how much I resemble her. Every family gathering inevitably ends with her clasping my face between her hands and declaring that she is looking at Lucia all over again. Just as I do, Mother always obeys Father. No matter the situation, she backs him up, because Father always says a wife’s job is to be supportive of her husband. And besides, it always serves well to present a united front.
I used to think they were happy. When I was very young, I thought theirs was a love story I would one day have for myself — quiet and constant, my mother’s hand finding my father’s across a dinner table, the way he held doors. I understood later that what I had mistaken for tenderness was simply good manners. Two people who had been arranged into each other’s lives and had made it work as well as could be expected. I do not think my mother is unhappy. But I do not think she has ever been given the chance to find out what happiness, for her, actually looks like.
I think about that as I walk.
As we walk down the hallway, down the stairs, and then down another hallway, it feels like I am walking to my death. As Father’s massive oak doors loom closer and closer, my hands grow damp. I flex my fingers and flick them slightly, because I cannot wipe them on my dress. That would leave stains, and I have to look presentable.
The west wing of the house feels different at night. In daylight it is just a corridor — dark wood panelling, framed photographs of men I mostly do not know, a runner rug in deep burgundy that runs the length of it. At night the men in the photographs, who are all long dead, feel like they are watching.
Father’s office is at the far end. The oak doors are double, floor to ceiling, with brass handles that are always polished. There is no light under them, which is the one thing that surprises me. He is always working. I have never known a time when Father was not working.
I stop behind Darrius. He knocks once, twice, and then — “Enter.” Father’s voice is calm and deep even through the thick wood.
“Stay here,” Darrius says to me. I nod, and he enters the office, closing the door behind him.
I take a couple of breaths — in and out — to calm my hammering heart.
Then the door opens and Darrius steps out.
“Boss will see you now,” he says, holding the door open for me.
“Thank you, Darrius,” I say, attempting a smile, but I fail.
I cannot stand the pitying look he throws my way, so I take a deep breath and step inside Father’s office.
The first thing I notice is the smell: leather and tobacco and whiskey. Old wood and something underneath it all, faint and sweet, that it takes me a moment to place — pipe smoke. I have never seen Father smoke, but I would not be surprised if he did and I simply did not know about it. I do not know much about Father. We do not have father-daughter bonding moments. It is always business with him. Sometimes I wonder what he and Mother have in common, but then I remember that theirs was a business arrangement — an arranged marriage.
The office is larger than I expected. I have built it up in my imagination over years of being forbidden from it, and the reality is both grander and colder. The ceiling is high, coffered in dark oak that matches the shelving along the left wall — shelves that run floor to ceiling and are filled with books that look unread, their spines uncracked, arranged by colour rather than subject. Decorative, then. The display of a reading man rather than the habits of one.
A single lamp burns on the desk. The rest of the room is in shadow. The French double doors to the garden are shut, their glass dark, and beyond them I can just make out the shapes of Mother’s garden — the neat hedges, the lavender beds, the stone path she has walked every morning since before I was born. Her world out there, and his world in here.
On the wall behind the desk hangs a portrait of Father. It is large — too large for the space it occupies, which I think is the point. He is painted the way he always appears in life: jacket on, wearing the stern expression he always has, with a slight sneer. His eyes are hard in the painting, looking down on anyone looking up at it.
Father is sitting behind the mahogany desk in a wide leather chair. He does not look up when I enter. He is reading. A glass of whiskey sits at his right hand, the amber catching the lamp light, and there is a pen behind his ear that he has not used. His silver hair is combed back from his forehead with the same precision he brings to everything.
I cross the room and stand before his desk. I do not sit. I wait for him to tell me to. Even though I would love to look around and take in the room properly, I do not dare. I have already taken in more than he would approve of. I fix my eyes on the wall behind him, just above the portrait’s frame, and I wait.
“Close the door,” he says, without looking up from the papers on his desk.
I had not realised I had left it open. I go back and close it, and the sound of the latch is very loud in the silence. When I turn around, Father is still reading. He makes me wait another full minute before he sets the papers aside.
“Take a seat, Seraphine,” he says. He always calls me by my full name. Never Sera, never anything shortened. Elena he calls El sometimes, when he is in a generous mood. I have always been Seraphine.
I take a seat and wait. I do not slouch. From a young age, Mother taught us how to sit like ladies, how to carry ourselves with the right posture. I sit straight and fold my hands in my lap and look at my father, who is still looking at his papers.
After a couple of minutes, he straightens them and sets them aside. He takes a sip of his whiskey before leaning forward.
“Do you know why I’ve summoned you here, Seraphine?”
“No, Father.”
“The Villasco family has been in discussions with us for some time,” he says.
I had no idea. Father tries to involve me in the business, but he is the one who decides what I know and what I do not. Whatever he has been discussing with the Villasco family clearly fell into the latter category. I wait for him to continue.
“Renato is their heir. Thirty-eight. He’ll be taking over his father’s operations within the year.”
My stomach plummets.
I shift in my chair. My fingers curl around the armrests. I know where this conversation is headed. And maybe a part of me has always known my life was always going to come to this moment.
“In our world, it is important to form alliances,” he says. “The joining of powerful families is especially important. Do you understand what I’m saying, Seraphine?”
I swallow the lump in my throat. “Yes, Father.”
“Good.” He nods and takes another sip of his whiskey, then leans back in his chair. “The marriage would serve both families well.”
My body goes very still. “Father, Renato Villasco has a reputation.”
“Men in this business—”
“Not for business,” I say, cutting him off — something I have never dared do before. “For what he does to women who belong to him.”
A beat of silence. Father’s jaw tightens.
“I’ve heard the talk,” I say.
“People always talk,” Father says. “It is one of the things I like least about our world. Speculation dressed up as information.”
“Is that all it is?”
He looks at me. “You would not be unprotected.”
“I would be his wife,” I say, my voice rising despite myself. “Which is exactly the problem. His wife cannot be protected from him.”
“You will mind your mouth, Seraphine,” he says, his voice ice-cold. “You will not interrupt me or talk back to me. Do you understand?”
I look at my hands. “Yes, Father,” I mutter.
“You will look at me when you speak, and you will speak clearly.”
I look at him. His eyes give me nothing. “Yes, Father,” I repeat.
“Renato will be joining us for dinner tomorrow evening,” he says. “Make sure you impress him.”
“Yes, Father,” I say, like a parrot.
“Good. You are dismissed,” he says, motioning for me to leave.
I stand. My legs are steady, which surprises me. The floor feels very solid under my feet. I walk to the door and put my hand on the brass handle and stop.
“Father.” I do not turn around. I look at the door in front of me, the dark grain of the wood. “Did you know? About his reputation with women. Before you agreed to this.”
The office is very quiet. I hear him pick up his glass and set it back down.
“Good night, Seraphine,” he says.
I open the door and I leave.
Darrius is waiting outside the door with his hands clasped behind his back. I walk past him without stopping.
“I will walk you back to your room, Sera,” he says, falling into step behind me.
My mind is moving too fast for the pace of my feet. Marrying Renato Villasco would be a death sentence. A life of perpetual fear and pain, each year leaving less of me than the year before. My life is already suffocating enough. I cannot subject myself to the life Renato would give me. It would hollow me out. It would drive me to kill myself, or to kill him, which would amount to the same thing.
“I would like to go to the training room,” I say.
“I’m sorry, Sera, but you should go straight to your room,” Darrius says.
“It will only be for a couple of minutes,” I say. “Dante will be there. He’ll watch over me. You can go let Elena know to head back to her room. I’ll speak with her in the morning.”
Darrius hesitates. He is quiet for a moment. Then: “Did he tell you about the Villasco boy?”
So he knew. He has known, probably for weeks, and he watched me go into that office tonight with that pitying look and he knew.
“Yes,” I say.
“Sera—”
“Please, Darrius.”
He lets out a breath. He looks at me sympathetically. “I’ll give you ten minutes,” he says. “And then I’m coming to get you.”
“Ten minutes is fine,” I say.
He nods again before leaving me in the hallway. I watch him go, and then I turn and walk to the east wing.
I hear him before I reach the door. The repetitive thud of fists against the bag, the low grunt of air on the hard strikes. I stop with my hand on the door handle and listen for a moment. Then I push the door open softly.
Dante Saviore is working the punching bag in the far corner. The overhead lights cast harsh shadows across the room. He is wearing a white T-shirt and sweats, the shirt dark and clinging to the broad planes of his back with sweat. He is barefoot. He has no boxing gloves — just cloth wrapped tight around his knuckles, slamming his fists into the bag over and over, grunting low on each impact. His midnight-black hair is damp with exertion and dishevelled, falling messily across his forehead. The veins in his forearms stand out with each strike. His powerful back is to me, and he has not heard me yet.
His fists slam into the punching bag again.
And again.
The chains rattle overhead. Every strike lands with frightening force. He pivots and drives another punch into the bag.
The entire thing swings violently. For a moment, I simply stand there and watch.
Dante has always fascinated me.
Father trusted Dante with his life. The entire organisation did. Men feared him. Respected him. Obeyed him. I did all three.
The difference was that I also noticed things I probably shouldn’t. The roughness of his voice. The scar near his jaw. The way his large hands could make a weapon look small. The way my pulse always seemed to quicken whenever he stepped too close during training.
He is a magnificent man, Dante. I do not think any man has ever made my body feel the things it feels around him. I remember the crush I had on him when I was sixteen — quickly crushed by the reality that Dante was older than me and would never look at me that way. And even if he were not, he worked for Father, and Father would have had him killed for looking at me wrongly or touching me wrongly. That is the world we live in. Men like Dante understand the rules of it better than anyone.
But I am grown now. I am a woman. Dante is ten years older than me — thirty-one to my twenty-one. It does not matter to me. I still want him. I still want him to look at me the way I look at him. I want to feel his hands on my skin, his mouth on mine. Whenever we train together and he corrects my form — his hand at my wrist, his fingers on my shoulder — it makes my whole body vibrant with want. With need. I always want the touches to linger. I have always wanted more from him than the bare minimum of attention a guard is required to give the person he protects. I have always wanted what I have no right to want from him.
Dante, trained as he is, senses my presence. He stops mid-strike. One hand steadies the bag. He turns around.
His expression shifts when he sees me — but not in the way I expected. I expected the blankness he wears on duty, the careful nothing that he shows Father and Darrius and everyone else in this house who is not me. Instead what I see is something else entirely, there for just a second before he controls it. Something that looks, unmistakably, like dread.
He knows. Of course he knows. He always knows.
“Sera,” he says. His voice is rough from exertion. His deep voice sends an embarrassing flutter through my stomach. He pushes the wet hair back from his forehead.
“I hope I’m not disturbing you,” I say, walking further into the room.
He crosses to the bench along the far wall, sits down, and reaches for his water bottle. He shakes his head. “No.” He takes a long pull of water. “What are you doing here this late?”
He sets the water bottle on the bench and grabs a towel. He wipes the sweat from his neck.
I stop in the middle of the mat and look at him. The familiar scent of rubber mats and sweat surrounds me. Dante is looking at the floor. He does this when he does not want me to read his face, which I know because I have been watching his face for six years and I know every avoidance he has. He tilts his chin down and his eyes go somewhere else, and if you did not know him you would think he was simply thinking. But I know him. He is not thinking. He is waiting for something difficult to pass.
“I’m sure you already know,” I say.
He raises his eyes then. One dark eyebrow lifts. “Know what?”
I stare at him. He sighs. He sets the towel aside and picks up the water bottle again, though he does not drink from it.
“Ah.” His expression hardens slightly. “Renato.”
The name alone makes my stomach twist.
“Father told you?”
“He did.”
“And you didn’t tell me.”
“No.” He holds my gaze. He is not going to look away from this — that much is clear. He owes me the directness of not looking away. “I couldn’t.”
“Couldn’t or wouldn’t?”
He is quiet for a moment. He turns the water bottle in his hands, and I watch him do it — this man who is never still without reason — and I understand that the turning of the bottle is the closest thing to agitation I will ever see from him. “Both,” he says. “It wasn’t my place.”
I nod. I expected as much. I have always known where his allegiances sit, and I have never blamed him for it. He was built for loyalty to my father the way a wall is built for a room — without it, everything collapses. He cannot be otherwise. I have never wanted him to be otherwise.
What I have wanted, I cannot have. What I am being given, I cannot survive.
“Of course.”
His jaw tightens. “Sera.”
“No, it’s fine.” My voice wobbles.
It isn’t fine. Nothing about this is fine.
“They want me to marry him,” I say.
Dante remains silent. That silence hurts more than anything.
“I can’t do it.” I shake my head. The confession escapes in a whisper. “I can’t marry him.” My eyes burn. I blink rapidly, refusing to cry. “I would rather die.”
Something moves across his face at the word die. He puts the water bottle down.
“Don’t say that,” he says, and his voice has changed — lower, stripped of whatever professional distance he was maintaining a moment ago.
“It’s the truth.”
“It’s not a solution.”
“I’m not looking for a solution,” I say. “I’m telling you what I know about myself. I know what Renato Villasco does to women. I know what happened to his first wife. I know what my life would look like in that house, and I know I wouldn’t survive it.” I stop. My hands are very still at my sides, which is taking effort. “Please, Dante. Please don’t let him take me.”
He gets up from the bench and walks to me. One step. Then another. Until he is standing directly in front of me. Close enough that I can see the flecks of grey hidden within his dark eyes. Close enough that I can feel the heat coming off his skin.
“What would you have me do?” he asks quietly.
I shake my head.
“I don’t know.” Because I don’t. If Dante had a solution, he would have offered it already. Nobody says no to Father. My eyes sting. He blurs at the edges. A tear escapes despite my efforts. I hate myself for it. Dante stares at me for several long seconds. Then something shifts in his expression, so quickly I almost miss it. “I don’t know. But you’re the only person in this house I can say any of this to. The only person who—” I stop.
“The only person who what?” he says. His voice is very quiet now.
“Who will actually hear it.”
“Come here,” he says. The words are rough. Gentle. Both at once.
I close the gap between us and he pulls me into his arms. I do not care that he is sweaty. I press my face into his neck and breathe in the salt of his skin. In six years of training sessions, he has never done this. He would not do it outside this room. His arms tighten around me and I feel the steadiness of him, how completely still he is, how nothing about his body betrays the cost of holding me this way.
But his hand moves to the back of my head. Just once, just briefly, his fingers pressing lightly into my hair, and then they are still again.
For the first time since Father’s announcement, the panic eases. Only a little. But enough. Enough that another tear slips free. Then another.
For one selfish moment, I allow myself to imagine what life would be like if things were different.
If he weren’t Father’s man.
If I weren’t Father’s daughter.
If the world were kinder.
“I’m sorry,” Dante says quietly. The words rumble through his chest. “I’m sorry I can’t save you from this, Sera.”
The admission hurts.
Because if Dante can’t save me, nobody can. I tighten my arms around him. I pull myself closer. He lets me. He holds me like that for a moment longer, and then, slowly, he pulls back.
Dante clears his throat. His professional mask settles back into place. “You should get some sleep.”
I look at him. His jaw is tight. He is not looking at me now — he is looking at the punching bag in the corner, at something that is not me.
“Dante.” He turns back to me. “What you said — that you’re sorry you can’t save me.” I hold his gaze. “Is that true? That you can’t? Or is it that you won’t?”
The muscle in his jaw moves. He says nothing for a long moment. Then: “Go to bed.”
I nod.
The reality of my situation crashes back over me.
He’s right. No one can save me. Father has made his decision. The matter is settled. Or at least everyone believes it is.
“Good night, Dante.”
His gaze lingers on me for a second longer than necessary. “Good night, Sera. Sleep well.”
I leave before I can embarrass myself.
Darrius is waiting outside exactly where I expected him to be.
Neither of us speaks as he escorts me back toward my room.
My mind is elsewhere.
The whole way there, I think about what my life will look like married to Renato Villasco. There is absolutely no way in hell I am letting that happen. I have let Father decide everything in my life without question. I have always followed his rules, always obeyed his orders. I have always been a good daughter and done whatever was needed of me.
But this? I cannot do it.
Father will not care what I can or cannot do — he will make me.
But he cannot make me if I am not here. If I am nowhere to be found.
A plan begins to take shape in my mind.
An escape plan.
