Chapter 6 - The Confession
The battle outside lasted eleven minutes.
To me, sitting trapped behind three inches of reinforced steel, it felt like eleven years. I watched the remaining thermal dots on the monitors flash, merge, and finally wink out one by one as Moretti’s men closed the trap.
When the silence finally returned to the estate—broken only by the distant wail of police sirens approaching through the snowstorm—the heavy vault door clicked, hissed, and swung open.
Dante stood in the doorway.
His white dress shirt was stained with dark ash and a thin smear of blood across the left shoulder, but he was standing straight, his breathing steady, holding his smoking pistol down by his thigh.
“Is it over?” I asked, standing up so fast my knees wobbled.
“The cleanup crew is secured,” Dante said, tossing his gun onto a side table. He walked over to me, his dark eyes scanning my face with intense concern. “You okay?”
“I’m fine,” I breathed, letting out a ragged sigh of relief. I looked at his shoulder. “You’re bleeding.”
“It’s a graze,” he dismissed with a wave of his hand. “One of their scouts caught me with a ricochet off the library doorframe. Rosa’s already patching up Marcus in the kitchen; she can look at this in a minute.”
Instead of waiting for Rosa, I grabbed a clean medical towel and a bottle of antiseptic from the panic room’s emergency supply kit. Without thinking, I stepped closer to him, unbuttoning the blood-soaked fabric around his shoulder to expose the jagged, shallow furrow cut across his skin.
Dante flinched slightly—not from pain, but from the unexpected intimacy of the touch.
“You move fast for a woman who spent three years pretending to be a domestic prisoner,” he murmured, his voice dropping into a gravelly whisper as I dabbed the antiseptic onto the wound.
“Survival is a powerful motivator,” I replied, keeping my eyes fixed on the task. “When you spend twelve hundred days waiting for a man like Victor Cain to decide whether you get to eat dinner, you learn how to turn your mind into a weapon.”
Dante’s hand rose. His warm, calloused fingers gently cupped my chin, tilting my face upward until I had no choice but to look into his eyes.
“Why didn't you run, Sophia?” he asked, his voice dead serious. “When Victor dumped you at that poker table, I gave you the keys to a car and told you the gate was open. You could have caught a flight to Europe before sunrise. Why stay in the middle of a war zone?”
The air in the panic room grew thin. The hum of the computer monitors seemed to fade into the background.
“Because running from Damian Vale is like running from your own shadow,” I whispered, tears pricking the corners of my eyes for the first time in three years. I didn't let them fall. I refused to look weak. “As long as he thinks I have my father’s original ledger, he will hunt me to the ends of the earth. The only way to stop running... is to make sure he has nowhere left to hide.”
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Dante didn't drop his hand. Instead, his thumb brushed softly across my cheekbone, wiping away a smudge of soot I hadn't realized was there.
“Then we stop running,” Dante said. “Together.”
