For three days, Ava waged war.
She refused to eat the meals brought to her room. She threw herself against the locked door until her shoulders ached. She searched every inch of her prison for something, anything, that could be used as a weapon or a way out. She found nothing. The windows were bulletproof and didn’t open. The bathroom had no mirrors that could be broken, no razors that could be stolen. Even the furniture was bolted down, as if Dario had anticipated exactly this kind of resistance. Of course he had. He had planned everything else. On the fourth morning, she woke to find him sitting in the chair by her window, watching her sleep. The sight should have terrified her, but by now she was beyond fear. She had moved into something colder, harder. Pure, distilled rage. “Get out.” Her voice was hoarse from days of screaming at locked doors and unresponsive guards. “Good morning to you too.” He was impeccably dressed as always, his dark suit pristine, his pale blue eyes as steady and unreadable as ever. “You look terrible.” She sat up, very aware that she was wearing nothing but an oversized t-shirt she had found in the closet. Her hair was a mess, her face pale from lack of food, her eyes probably wild with the kind of desperation that came from days of captivity. “I said get out.” “I heard you.” He leaned back in the chair with the casual elegance of a man completely at ease. “I brought breakfast.” “I’m not hungry.” “You haven’t eaten in three days. Your body is starting to eat muscle tissue.” His voice was clinical. “If you’re planning to maintain this hunger strike, you should know it will kill you long before it inconveniences me.” “Good.” The word came out sharp and bitter. “Then you will have a corpse instead of a captive. I’m sure that’s exactly what you wanted.” Something flickered across his features—too quick to identify, but close enough to pain that it made her chest tighten with unwelcome satisfaction. “Eat,” he said quietly. “No.” “Ava.” His voice carried a warning now, a hint of the steel beneath all that expensive tailoring. “Don’t make me force you.” “Try it.” She met his gaze head-on, letting him see exactly how far past caring she had traveled. “See what happens when you try to force food down the throat of someone who would rather die than give you what you want.” The silence stretched between them, taut and dangerous. Then Dario stood, moving with that fluid grace that never failed to make her pulse quicken with a combination of fear and something she refused to name. “You think starving yourself makes you strong?” He moved closer to the bed, and she instinctively pulled her knees to her chest. “You think refusing to eat makes you some kind of martyr?” “I think it makes me free.” The words came out steadier than she felt. “You can cage my body, but you can’t force me to live in your world.” “Can’t I?” He was at the edge of the bed now, close enough that she could see the tiny scar above his left eyebrow, probably from some long-ago violence. “What do you think happens if you die, little bird? Do you think Leandro gets to mourn you in peace? Do you think your parents get to bury their daughter and move on with their lives?” The casual way he said it sent ice through her veins. “You wouldn’t.” “I would do whatever it takes to honor your memory.” His voice was soft, almost gentle, which made the threat infinitely more terrifying. “If you’re not here to protect them, who will? If you’re not here to be my obsession, what do you think I will fixate on instead?” He was right, and they both knew it. Her death wouldn’t free anyone. It would only redirect his dangerous attention to the people she loved most. “You’re a monster.” But the words lacked the heat they had carried before. “I’m a man who loves you.” His hand reached out, stopping just short of touching her face. “I’m a man who would burn down this entire city to keep you safe. I’m a man who would kill anyone who tried to hurt you, who would die before letting anyone take you from me.” “That’s not love. That’s ownership.” “Perhaps.” His fingers finally made contact, brushing against her cheek with devastating gentleness. “But it’s honest. It’s real. It’s more than anyone has ever felt for you before.” She should pull away. Should slap his hand, should spit in his face, should maintain the wall of hatred she’d been building for four days. Instead, she found herself leaning into the touch despite every rational thought screaming at her to resist. “I hate you,” she whispered, but the words came out broken instead of fierce. “I know.” His thumb traced along her jawline, and she shivered despite herself. “But you’re still here. Still fighting. Still alive.” “Because you won’t let me leave.” “Because you don’t really want to.” His voice dropped to barely above a whisper, intimate and terrible. “Because somewhere deep down, you know that what I’m offering is real. Dangerous, yes. Possibly destructive, yes. But real in a way nothing in your carefully constructed life ever was.” “You’re offering me prison.” “I’m offering you everything.” His forehead rested against hers now, and she could feel his breath against her lips. “I’m offering you a man who would start wars for you. I’m offering you passion that would make angels weep and devils jealous. I’m offering you a love so complete, so absolute, that it would rewrite the very definition of the word.” “I don’t want that kind of love.” But her voice was hoarse—lacking the weight of hatred, and they both heard it. “Don’t you?” His free hand found her waist, and she didn’t pull away. “Haven’t you spent your whole life wondering what it would feel like to be someone’s everything? To be worth fighting for, worth dying for, worth risking damnation for?” The questions struck her, The truths she had buried so deep she had almost convinced herself they didn’t exist. “That doesn’t make this right.” “Right and wrong are luxuries for people who have everything to lose.” His voice was hypnotic now, drawing her deeper into whatever spell he was weaving. “I have nothing left to lose except you. And I will not lose you.” “You never had me.” “Didn’t I?” His eyes searched her face, reading things she didn’t want him to see. “Then why are you shaking? Why is your heart racing? Why are you looking at me like you want me to kiss you almost as much as you want to kill me?” Because he was right. God help her, he was right about all of it. She was shaking, but not from fear anymore. Her heart was racing, but not from terror. And she was looking at him like… like she wanted things she had no business wanting from a man who’d destroyed her life. “This is Stockholm Syndrome.” The words came out desperate, grasping at any rational explanation for the traitorous responses of her body. “It’s not real. It’s just… psychology.” “Is it?” His smile was sad and beautiful and extremely dangerous. “Or is it the first honest thing you have felt in years?” Before she could answer, before she could think of another protest or another way to deny what was happening between them, he kissed her. It wasn’t the gentle, careful kisses she had shared with Leandro. It wasn’t sweet or tentative or respectful of her boundaries. It was consuming. Desperate. Full of four days of watching her waste away and months of wanting what he couldn’t have and years of being a man who took what he needed to survive. And despite every logical thought screaming at her to resist, despite every moral principle she had ever held, despite the fact that this man had kidnapped her and threatened her family and destroyed her life… She kissed him back. Her hands found the front of his shirt, fisting in the expensive fabric as she pulled him closer. Her mouth opened under his, letting him deeper, letting him take what he wanted while she took what she needed. For just a moment, she let herself drown in the sensation of being wanted with such desperate intensity. For just a moment, she let herself feel what it was like to be someone’s everything. Then reality crashed back in, cold and harsh and unforgiving. She shoved him away with every ounce of strength she had left, sending him stumbling backward as she pressed her hands to her mouth in horror. “No.” The word came out broken, desperate. “No, no, no. I can’t. I won’t.” Dario straightened his shirt with hands that weren’t quite steady, his pale eyes never leaving her face. “But you did.” “That was a mistake.” “Was it?” He moved toward the door, but paused at the threshold. “Eat, Ava. Please. Because I meant what I said, if you die, everyone you have ever cared about becomes my way of staying close to you. And neither of us wants that.” As the door closed behind him, leaving her alone with the wreckage of her resolve. The most terrifying part wasn’t that she had kissed him back. It was that she wanted to do it again. And again. And again. Until she forgot why she had ever wanted to resist in the first place.Sunlight streaming through the curtains woke Ava from the deepest sleep she had in weeks. For a moment, she lay still, savoring the feeling of being completely rested, completely safe. The storm had passed sometime during the night, leaving only the gentle patter of leftover rain against the windows.She rolled over, expecting to see Dario beside her, but found only rumpled sheets and the faint scent of his cologne on the pillow. Her hand touched the spot where he’d been lying, still slightly warm, which meant he hadn’t been gone long.The memory of last night came back in pieces. The terror under the bed, his arms around her in the cramped space, the way he’d held her while she shook. The threatening text that had changed everything about his expression, even as he’d tried to hide it from her.She sat up slowly, testing how her body felt. The bullet wound was healing well, barely a twinge of pain when she moved. Dr. Reeves had been right about her recovery time. She was almost back t
The thunder was everywhere.Ava pressed herself deeper under the bed, her back against the cold wall, knees drawn to her chest. Each crash of sound sent shockwaves through her body, bringing back the memory of gunshots in a marble kitchen, of glass shattering and blood spreading across expensive floors.“Daddy,” she whispered into the darkness, her voice small and broken. “Daddy, please come get me.”She was eight years old again, hiding from storms that shook their little house. Back when thunder meant safety was just a hallway away, when strong arms could lift her up and carry her somewhere nothing bad could reach her.But she wasn’t eight anymore, and her father was miles away, probably lying awake worried about a daughter who had vanished into a world he couldn’t understand.Lightning illuminated the room for a split second, casting harsh shadows that looked like armed figures. Ava squeezed her eyes shut and tried to make herself smaller, tried to disappear.The bedroom door crash
“Make sure Ava goes to bed early tonight,” he told Rosa, keeping his voice neutral. “She needs her rest.”The words tasted like ash in his mouth, but they were necessary. Distance was the only way to protect them both from what was coming.In his office, Rohan was already waiting with a full briefing.“Security reports just came in,” Rohan said, spreading photos across the desk. “She met with Leandro McCarthy at the coffee shop on Fifth Street. Conversation lasted approximately twenty-three minutes.”Dario picked up one of the photos. Ava sitting across from Leandro, her posture straight, her expression serious. In another shot, she was standing up, cash on the table, while Leandro remained seated with his head in his hands.“Body language analysis suggests she was ending the relationship,” Rohan continued. “She left alone. He stayed at the table for another fifteen minutes before leaving.”Relief flooded through Dario’s system like a drug. She had chosen. Not Leandro with his safe lo
Dario stared at the reports scattered across his desk, but the words blurred together into meaningless shapes. For the past hour, he had been trying to focus on quarterly projections, shipping schedules, anything that might distract him from the image of Ava walking out of his building that morning.She had looked so determined, so sure of herself as she climbed into the car his security team provided. He wondered if she was meeting Leandro, wondered what she would tell him about the weeks she had spent here, wondered if she would come back at all.The knock on his office door interrupted his spiraling thoughts.“Come in.”Rohan entered with his usual efficiency, but there was tension in his shoulders that immediately put Dario on alert. “We have a situation.”“What kind of situation?”“The Torrino family has called for a syndicate meeting. Tonight. They’re demanding your presence.”Dario leaned back in his chair. The Torrinos ran the old country operations across the sea, families t
“Are you out of your mind?”Riley Martinez paced around Leandro’s apartment like a caged animal, her detective badge swinging from the lanyard around her neck. For two weeks now, she had been showing up at his door with the same lecture, the same frustrated energy, the same disbelief that he had walked into Dario Santos’ building and lived to tell about it.“Riley, we have been over this a hundred times,” Leandro said from his position on the couch, laptop balanced on his knees. He wasn’t really working, and hadn't been able to focus on anything since that morning at Santos building, but pretending to be busy was easier than dealing with Riley’s concern.“And we will go over it a hundred more times until it sinks into that thick skull of yours.” She stopped pacing and planted herself in front of him, hands on her hips. “You walked into a known criminal’s penthouse. Alone. With no backup. No plan. No way out if things went wrong.”“But they didn’t go wrong.”“Because you got lucky! Bec
The silence was worse than captivity.Ava had been expecting anger, arguments, maybe even threats when she told Dario they were even. What she hadn’t expected was this cold, polite distance that made her feel like a stranger in his house.For two weeks now, she had watched him walk past her door each morning without so much as a glance inside. His footsteps would pause for just a moment outside her room, long enough for her heart to skip, then continue down the hallway toward his office. He left early and came back late, when she was already asleep or pretending to be.But every morning, there was a flower on her bedside table.Not roses or anything romantic. Just simple flowers that somehow made her chest ache more than grand gestures ever could. Today it was a white lily, yesterday a single daffodil. Each one fresh, carefully chosen, placed there while she slept like a ghost’s calling card.She picked up the lily and turned it between her fingers, wondering what kind of man could be