Chapter 4

The knock on the door is sharp and familiar.

Luca’s hand stays on my neck. His eyes do not leave mine even as the second knock comes, harder this time. Whoever is on the other side is not used to waiting.

“Don Vescari.” A woman’s voice. Smooth. Confident. The same voice that used to drift down the hallway while I sat alone in the guest room. “You said to come up when I arrived.”

Sophia.

My blood turns cold so fast I feel dizzy. In the first life she never bothered to knock. She walked into rooms like she already owned them. She smiled at me the way people smile at furniture they plan to replace.

The system flares in warning.

[External interruption detected.]
[Mission progress stalled.]
[Host’s elevated stress levels may trigger punishment if contact is broken.]

Luca’s thumb presses once against my pulse. He still has not looked away from me.

“Stay,” he says quietly. It is not a request.

He finally releases my neck and stands. The loss of contact makes the system’s heat twist into something sharper under my skin. I force myself to keep still on the bed even though every instinct wants me to put distance between myself and the door.

Luca opens it.

Sophia stands there in a deep red dress that fits her like it was made to be taken off. Her dark hair is perfect. Her smile is the same one I used to see in my nightmares. She looks past Luca first, straight at me, and the smile sharpens.

“Oh,” she says. “I didn’t realize the little wife was still awake.”

The old version of me would have looked down. Would have made herself smaller. Would have waited for Luca to dismiss her or ignore the insult completely.

My hands curl into the sheets.

Luca’s voice stays level. “I told you to wait downstairs.”

Sophia steps inside anyway. She has always stepped inside anyway. Her eyes travel over the wedding dress still on my body, over the way I am sitting too straight, over the faint mark I can still feel on my neck where his hand had been.

“She looks different,” Sophia says. “Did you finally decide to train her?”

The words land exactly where she wants them to. In the first life I would have absorbed them in silence. Tonight the system’s pressure and the memory of the gun collide inside my chest until something raw pushes out.

“I’m not a dog,” I say.

Both of them look at me.

Sophia’s smile does not fade. It only grows colder. “I see the quiet ones always find their voice eventually. Usually right before they learn why they should have stayed quiet.”

Luca closes the door behind her with a soft click. The sound feels final. He does not tell her to leave. He does not correct her. He simply walks back toward the bed and stops beside me, close enough that his presence feels like a wall.

The system pulses again.

[Rival presence detected.]
[New secondary objective available: Establish dominance in front of the rival.]
[Reward increased if successful.]

My pulse is racing too hard. Fear is still there, thick and familiar, but something else is rising with it. Something the system keeps feeding. I do not want to give Sophia the satisfaction of watching me shrink. I also do not want to find out what the next punishment feels like if I fail the mission completely.

Sophia moves closer. Her perfume reaches me before she does. She looks at Luca the way she always did, like I am already irrelevant.

“I came because you called,” she says to him. “Or did the wedding night change your plans?”

Luca’s hand settles on the back of my neck again. Not tight. Just present. Claiming. The contact sends another rush of system heat through me even as my stomach twists.

“My plans are not your concern tonight,” he answers.

Sophia’s eyes flick between his hand and my face. For the first time something uncertain crosses her expression.

I meet her stare and refuse to look away first.

The system counts the seconds.

And I realize the real conflict is no longer only between me and the man who once let me die.

It is between the woman I used to be and the one who is still deciding how far she is willing to go to survive him.