Chapter 6

The sunlight outside the atelier was sharp and mocking. It was a beautiful day.

I’d just collected my wedding dress—a simple, ivory sheath, nothing like the elaborate gown Isabella would demand. The ceremony would be a quiet, clinical affair in a Moretti-owned chapel, a transaction sealed on paper. This dress was my armor for that performance.

A black van with tinted windows pulled to the curb just as my driver opened the car door. I had a split second to register that it was wrong—the model was too common, the plates muddy—before two men in dark hoodies emerged. They were efficient, brutal. A hand clapped over my mouth, smelling of chemical sweat and tobacco. Another arm hooked around my waist, lifting me off my feet.

My driver lunged, and a silenced gun coughed once. He crumpled. I was thrown into the van’s dark belly. The door slammed, swallowing the sunny street whole.

I fought, of course. But they were professionals. A prick in my neck, and the world dissolved into a thick, syrupy darkness.

I woke to the smell of damp earth and rust. Concrete beneath me, cold and gritty. A single, bare bulb hung from a wire, casting a jaundiced circle of light. I was in a basement, a root cellar perhaps. My arms were bound behind me around a thick, freezing water pipe.

A figure stepped into the light. He wore a black ski mask and heavy work gloves. In his hand was a whip, longer and thinner than the ceremonial cinta. This was a tool for work.

He didn’t speak. He just began.

The first lash was an explosion of white-hot fire across my shoulders. I bit my lip until I tasted blood, swallowing the scream. The second followed, and the third, a relentless, methodical rhythm. He was an artisan of pain, varying the placement, letting the burn of one stroke compound the agony of the next. I lost count quickly. The world narrowed to the whistle of the leather, the impact, the searing aftermath, and the gasp I couldn’t quite stifle.

Time became elastic, meaningless. I floated in a haze of torment, my mind fracturing. Through the roaring in my ears, I heard him stop. He walked to a corner, pulled out a cell phone. His voice, muffled by the mask but oddly casual, reported, “It is done, Young Master. Ninety-nine, as you ordered. I trust my first task for the Rossi family was satisfactory.”

Young Master. Rossi.

In the labyrinthine hierarchy of the Rossi syndicate, there was only one ‘Young Master.’ Nicholas. His grandfather, Don Rossi, was the ‘Old Master.’ This wasn’t a random kidnapping by a rival.

Ninety-nine lashes. One for every lash I had not landed on him in the armory, with Isabella’s fragile body as his shield. His retaliation was not just brutal; it was deranged in its precise, proportional cruelty. An eye for an eye, a lash for a lash. He had quantified my transgression and paid it back with interest.

The man left. I don’t know how long I hung there, shivering, my back a single, screaming nerve. Eventually, another masked man arrived, cut me down, and dumped me, semi-conscious, in an alley two blocks from the Castellano clinic.

A mandatory check-up at the clinic was enforced by my father—a show of ensuring the family asset was undamaged before the wedding. I moved like an old woman, every shift of fabric against my shredded back a fresh agony. As I walked down the sterile hallway, a soft laugh drifted from an open door to a private treatment room.

I paused. Inside, Isabella sat on an examination table, swinging her legs slightly. Nicholas stood before her, his focus entirely on her hand. He held it gently, dabbing at a tiny, almost invisible cut on her fingertip with an antiseptic swab.

“You have to be more careful with the thorny roses, Bella,” he murmured, his voice a caress.

“It was just a little prick,” she said, smiling up at him. “You worry too much.”

“It’s my job to worry about you,” he replied, and the devotion in his tone was a cathedral, vast and solemn.

He lifted her finger and, with a tenderness that made my stomach turn, brushed his lips lightly over the bandaged spot.

I stood in the hallway, my body a map of his vengeance—ninety-nine coordinates of hatred meticulously etched into my skin.

Ten feet away, he worshipped a microscopic wound on her hand, his touch a sacrament.

I was the canvas for his violence. She was the altar for his devotion.