Chapter 4 – The Flight

If hell had a waiting room, it would smell like leather, jet fuel, and his cologne.

I’m still on the top step when he says it.

“Welcome home, wife.”

The word slices down my spine. My hand tightens on the doorframe until my knuckles ache.

Mrs. Moretti.

Right now, it feels like a name someone else should be wearing. Someone softer. Someone stupider.

Mia brushes past me into the cabin, eyes darting everywhere, taking in the cream leather, the dark wood, the flight attendant hovering by the galley with a polite non‑expression. Luca follows, scanning the interior like he’s plotting an evacuation route.

I force my feet to move.

Each step into the cabin feels like it sinks ankle‑deep into wet cement.

“Ms. Vega.” The flight attendant gives me a polite smile that doesn’t reach her eyes. “Can I take your bag?”

“I’ve got it,” I say.

Dante watches me as I walk past him, gaze dragging over my jeans, my hoodie, my scuffed boots. The last time he saw me on a plane I was wearing cutoff shorts and his T‑shirt, sprawled across two seats with my head in his lap, drooling on his chest while a puddle jumper rattled around us.

I remember waking up, mortified. He’d laughed and kissed my forehead.

My stomach flips.

I drop into the nearest seat that isn’t directly across from him. It faces sideways toward the aisle. It’s a terrible strategic choice—he can see me perfectly—but my legs won’t carry me farther.

Mia slides into the club chair behind me, putting a hand on my shoulder for a second before buckling in. Luca takes a seat near the galley, within easy line of sight to both doors.

Dante stays standing as the flight attendant does a quick safety spiel no one listens to. He moves with the motion of the plane as it begins to taxi, balanced, like the floor tilting is normal for him.

I fumble with my seatbelt, metal scraping leather.

A hand appears in my field of vision.

“Here,” he says.

“I know how to buckle a seatbelt,” I snap.

“Your fingers are shaking,” he observes. “Allow me.”

Before I can pull away, he’s already leaning down, one knee on the carpet, his body bracketing my legs.

Heat rushes to my face.

His fingers brush my stomach as he snaps the buckle into place. The belt clicks. His knuckles linger for half a second too long, as if reminding me he could touch more if he wanted to.

“There,” he says, straightening. “Regulations satisfied.”

“I didn’t realize the FAA added ‘husband assistance’ to their checklist,” I mutter.

He huffs something that might almost be a laugh and finally drops into the seat across the aisle, facing me. He fastens his own belt with one economic movement.

The engines roar louder. The plane begins its sprint down the runway. My back presses into the seat, the force of acceleration pinning me. The vibrations travel up through the soles of my boots into my spine.

Outside, runway lights blur into streaks. My breath comes short and shallow.

I’ve flown a hundred times. Still, the moment the plane’s nose tips up, my stomach swoops.

Dante watches me.

“Afraid of flying now?” he asks.

“Afraid of crashing into your ego,” I say. “Everything else is just turbulence.”

His eyes spark. “You always did talk too much when you were scared.”

“I’m not scared.” My fingers dig into the armrest. “I’m furious. There’s a difference.”

We leave the ground.

The city shrinks to glitter beneath us. The jet levels out; the pressure on my chest eases.

The seatbelt sign dings off.

I unclench my hands, flexing them slowly.

Dante unbuckles but doesn’t move away. He rests one ankle on the opposite knee, casual, one hand on the armrest, as if we’re in some executive meeting and not on a flying prison.

“Here’s how this is going to work,” he says.

“Oh good,” I say. “I love being briefed on the terms of my own kidnapping.”

His gaze narrows, but he continues. “For the next year, you will reside at my villa in Sicily. You will have your own room, your own staff, and your own studio. You will not leave the property without my knowledge and adequate security.”

“Define ‘adequate,’” I say. “More men with dead eyes and tight suits?”

“Adequate is whatever keeps you breathing,” he says. “No interviews. No posts about this situation. Officially, you are on medical rest after your tour.”

I bark a laugh. “Right. ‘Heartless siren cancels world domination due to mysterious exhaustion.’ That won’t start any rumors at all.”

“You would prefer the truth?” he asks. “We can hold a press conference. Tell them your manager sold you and I bought you back. See how quickly your streams plummet then.”

“I’d prefer not to be a product on anyone’s shelf,” I snap. “But apparently, I missed that window around the time you married me without telling me.”

“I told you,” he says, voice dropping. “You just didn’t listen.”

“You mumbled into my ear after sex and handed me papers while I was half‑asleep,” I shoot back. “That’s not consent. That’s entrapment.”

Something ugly twists in his expression. “You think I get off on tricking you?”

“I think you get off on controlling me,” I say. “Same difference where I’m sitting.”

His jaw flexes. For a moment, I think he’s going to snap. Instead, he inhales slowly, setting his shoulders back.

“You will not contact Rafael without my knowledge,” he says.

“Excuse me?” My voice spikes. “You don’t get to regulate my friendships.”

“He’s not just a friend,” Dante says. “He’s a man who would happily walk you out of my protection to score points against me. And he is being watched.”

“By you,” I say.

“By others,” he corrects. “Men who want to know who cares enough about you to risk my displeasure. People listen to his calls, Luna. People follow him. Every time you go near him without a proper shield, you paint a target on both your backs.”

“So your solution is to rip the phone out of my hand?” I demand. “Great. Threats outside, tyrant inside. I’m really spoiled for choice.”

“If that’s what it takes to keep you alive, yes,” he says without apology.

I stare at him. “Do you hear yourself?”

“I hear the girl who used to play half‑empty clubs alone at two in the morning,” he says quietly, “complaining because someone is finally willing to take a bullet for her.”

“No one asked you to,” I say, but the words come out softer than I intend.

He leans forward, forearms on his knees, hands clasped loosely. The pose would be relaxed on anyone else. On him, it’s contained violence.

“You’re not a kid with a guitar in Brooklyn anymore,” he says. “You’re a brand. An asset. A symbol. That makes you valuable. It also makes you fragile. There are people who will do very ugly things to own you. I am not going to let them.”

“You already did,” I whisper. “You bought me. You wrote your name next to mine and decided that made me yours.”

“I pulled you out of a contract that would have made you a ghost,” he snaps. “The difference between him and me is that if you tell me to go to hell in a year, I’ll take you there myself and let you watch what I do to the people who touched your name.”

For a heartbeat, the image is so vivid—Dante in all his shadowed rage, tearing down everyone who ever hurt me—that my body reacts before my brain can veto it.

Heat coils are low in my stomach, traitorous and sharp.

I swallow it down.

“You’ve upgraded from ‘I know what’s best for you’ to ‘I know which hell you should live in,’” I say. “Congratulations.”

“We both know you’d be dead if I’d stayed out of it.” His voice goes quiet again. “And we both know you’d be dead if I let go now.”

The jet shudders as it hits a patch of rough air.

My stomach lurches. My fingers clamp down on the armrest.

He sees it.

“Relax,” he says. “It’s just turbulence.”

“Easy for you to say,” I mutter. “You’ve got a whole army of murder elves to catch you if this thing goes down.”

He stands up as if the plane isn’t bouncing under us and crosses the aisle.

Before I can tell him to stay away, the floor jumps.

My seat lurches sideways.

I lurch with it—straight toward him.

His hand closes around my waist, catching me, steadying me with humiliating ease. My hip bumps his thigh; my face ends up much closer to his chest than any sane person should allow at thirty thousand feet.

The scent of him—clean cotton, smoke, something sharper underneath—hits me like a song I haven’t heard in years but still know all the words to.

“Still afraid of falling,” he murmurs.

“I’m afraid of landing,” I shoot back, but my voice has lost some of its bite.

His fingers flex against my side. The heat of his palm seeps through the thin fabric of my hoodie, fanning out over skin that has absolutely no business, remembering him this vividly.

“Let go,” I say. It sounds unconvincing, even to me.

He does… mostly. His hand slid from my waist to the armrest behind me, caging me without technically touching.

“This is why we have rules,” he says. “You don’t get to wander off. You don’t get to make yourself available to anyone who waves a contract or a camera in your direction. You don’t get to decide alone which risks are worth taking.”

“I’ve been deciding that alone for a long time,” I say. “You forfeited your vote when you walked out.”

“Then call this arrears,” he says. His breath ghosts over my cheek. “I’m collecting all the decisions I should have made then and didn’t.”

“You don’t get to retroactively be my hero,” I hiss. “You left me with a note. Remember?”

He leans in, lips a breath from my ear.

“And you,” he says softly, “left me with a voicemail you turned into a Grammy.”

My throat closes.

The plane jolts again, harder this time. I sway; my knee hits the edge of my seat.

He catches my wrist with his free hand, steadying me.

His mouth dips closer to my ear, his voice dropping to that low, dangerous register that used to make me do very stupid things in very small spaces.

“We both know,” he murmurs, “this isn’t the first time you’ve been on your knees for me in a plane.”

Heat punches through me, vivid and humiliating—the memory of that puddle jumper, of me sliding off the narrow seat to kneel between his legs because the turbulence was bad and he’d said, *Distract me, little star,* with that exact tone.

My heart stutters, then slams.

I jerk back, eyes wide, cheeks blazing.

“Fuck you,” I whisper.

He smiles then. Slow. Dark. Certain.

“Eventually,” Dante says. “But not yet.”

The jet hurtles through the night toward Sicily.

And I realize, with a cold, sinking certainty, that the real turbulence hasn’t even started.