PART 3
He didn’t talk about business, and he didn’t talk about her family’s dark history.
He talked about her—the way she lived, the books she read, the reason she chose the tiny apartment over the luxury suites her father had offered.
He watched her with a focus that was suffocating, as if he were trying to memorize the architecture of her soul before anyone else could touch it.
“I don’t play games, Elena,” he said, his voice a low vibration that seemed to bypass her ears and settle directly in her blood.
“Most men would have simply taken you.
I wanted to see if the woman I saw in the ballroom matched the woman in the real world.”
“And?” she challenged, her hand steady only because she was gripping the tablecloth under the table.
“Did I pass the audition?”
Dante leaned forward, the candlelight catching the sharp, unforgiving lines of his face.
He didn’t smile this time.
His expression was dangerously raw.
“You aren’t an audition.
You are the only thing in this city I haven’t been able to stop thinking about since the second I walked through those doors.
You think you escaped your family? You didn’t.
You just traded one form of protection for another.
But I’m not your father, and I’m not your brother.
I am the man who will burn down the world before I let anyone take you from me again.”
He reached across the table, his hand large and possessive, but he didn’t pull her.
He just rested it near hers, a boundary she was free to cross or retreat from.
She looked at his hand, then back at his eyes—eyes that held a lifetime of violence but, right now, held only a terrifying, all-consuming hunger for her.
She realized then that her brother was right; she was never going back to a small, private life.
Dante Rossi had marked her, not with a blow, but with a gaze that had already claimed her as his own.
The Price of a Birthday
She should have retreated.
She should have stood up and walked out of the restaurant and never looked back.
But as his fingers brushed against her wrist, sending a jolt of electricity through her that felt like coming home, she realized she had been waiting for this precise moment of danger her entire life.
“Why me?” she whispered, her voice finally breaking.
Dante didn’t answer with words.
He stood up, signaled his men, and offered her his arm.
“Because everyone else in that room was looking at what I could do for them.
You were the only one looking at me as if you wanted to see the man behind the shadow.”
He walked her out to the waiting black car, the city lights reflecting off the hood like broken glass.
As the door clicked shut, sealing them into the darkness of the backseat, she knew the life she had built was gone.
She wasn’t just the girl who escaped her family anymore.
She was the woman who had captivated the devil himself—and in the silence of the ride, she realized with a sudden, sharp breath that she didn’t want to escape him at all.
The obsession had only just begun, and for the first time in years, she felt truly alive.
THE END
