Chapter 10

Dante POV

Never demand a bleeding survivor to explain their fresh wounds before you have completely secured the perimeter. That was a basic rule of tactical interrogation I learned entirely too late. I watched her beautiful eyes widen with pure, unadulterated panic the second I asked her about her painful trauma.

She pulled completely away from my gentle grip and pressed her back aggressively against the passenger window. She could not handle the sudden intimacy or the terrifying reality of exposing her deepest secrets to a new stranger. She looked at me like I had just transformed back into the dangerous monster she saw on the ice.

"Just take me home," she whispered desperately, staring blindly at the dark dashboard of my car. "Please, Dante, just drive me to my house right now and let me sleep."

I did not push her any further or demand the answers I was technically owed for saving her life tonight. I simply unlocked the heavy doors, shifted the sports car back into drive, and pulled onto the empty road. We drove the remaining fifteen minutes in an incredibly heavy, suffocating silence that made my chest ache violently.

I pulled up to the curb outside a massive, highly secured stone estate completely surrounded by tall wrought iron gates. Before I could even throw the powerful transmission back into park, she pushed her heavy door open. She practically threw herself out of the warm cabin and into the freezing midnight wind without a single word of goodbye.

Watching her completely dodge my question as she ran to her front door made a dark frustration boil fiercely in my blood. She scrambled up the steep stone steps, her hands shaking violently as she fumbled with her heavy metal keys. She shoved the thick oak door open and slammed it completely shut behind her without looking back once.

I sat alone in the dark, idling car, staring blankly at the massive fortress that belonged to her billionaire family. She was finally safe from Roman for the night, locked securely inside her expensive and heavily guarded estate. But she was entirely unaware that the most dangerous monster in her life was currently sitting parked directly in her driveway.

The sharp, aggressive buzzing of my cell phone suddenly shattered the heavy silence of the leather cabin. I pulled the device from my dark jacket pocket and stared at the glowing caller identification with pure disgust. Vincenzo was calling me on the encrypted secure line, demanding an immediate status report on my corporate infiltration.

I pressed the green button and lifted the cold phone to my ear without offering a polite greeting. "You are calling me incredibly late," I stated coldly, keeping my eyes locked on Sienna's dark bedroom window on the second floor.

"And you are entirely behind schedule," Vincenzo barked loudly through the tiny speaker, his voice dripping with lethal corporate authority. "I did not send you to that pathetic university to play hockey and waste my valuable time fighting local children. I need total access to their financial servers by tomorrow morning, or I will execute the hostile takeover using brute force."

My jaw clenched so tightly my teeth groaned under the immense physical pressure. If Vincenzo attacked her family blindly without the proxy, he would destroy Sienna entirely in the corporate crossfire just to make a vicious point. I needed to control the exact flow of information to keep her shielded from his absolute wrath.

"I have successfully made physical contact with the primary target tonight," I lied smoothly, burying every single protective emotion I felt for her beneath a solid wall of freezing ice. "She trusts me completely after I removed a local threat from her orbit. I just need a few more days to secure the voting proxy willingly."

"I do not have a few more days, Dante," Vincenzo snarled viciously, slamming a heavy glass down onto a desk in the background. "Her father is moving massive liquid assets offshore as we speak. I need a direct backdoor into their local wireless network tonight so my security engineers can perfectly map their defenses."

"She just walked inside her house and locked the doors," I argued calmly, gripping the leather steering wheel until my knuckles turned stark white. "I cannot simply knock on her heavy door at midnight and ask for the administrative password to the family servers."

"You are my son, act like the apex predator I built you to be," my father commanded ruthlessly. "Sit outside her pathetic house and breach the local perimeter yourself using the tools I provided. If I do not have a clean data clone on my secure server in exactly one hour, I will ruin your entire inheritance and destroy her family publicly."

The line went completely dead, leaving me sitting in the suffocating darkness with a silent phone pressed to my ear. I tossed the useless device onto the empty passenger seat and dragged both hands roughly through my dark hair. The crushing weight of my impossible situation threatened to snap my spine entirely in half.

I had just promised Sienna that I would protect her from the dangerous monsters lurking in the dark. I had just held her trembling body and vowed to completely dismantle the violent champion who terrified her daily. Now, my own blood was violently forcing me to commit the ultimate betrayal right outside her quiet bedroom window.

If I refused Vincenzo, he would drop a nuclear bomb on her family business tomorrow morning and shatter her entirely. If I obeyed him, I would become the exact same kind of manipulative abuser she was desperately trying to escape. I was completely trapped in a violent corporate chess game with her fragile heart sitting directly in the center of the board.

I reached into the dark backseat and pulled my heavy tactical bag over the wide center console. I unzipped the thick black canvas and pulled out a specialized decryption laptop provided by my father's security engineers. The matte black machine hummed quietly as it booted up, bathing the dark cabin in a harsh blue glow.

I stared up at the second floor window, watching the warm yellow light turn completely off as she finally went to sleep. She believed she was entirely safe for the night, entirely shielded from the cruelty of her university life. She truly believed the new transfer student was her quiet protector.

I swallowed the massive lump of absolute self-hatred forming thickly in my throat. I typed a rapid sequence of commands into the terminal, watching the screen flood with highly classified local network addresses. Dante hacks into the local wireless network to secretly begin cloning Sienna's laptop data.