Chapter 5

By morning, Julian moved me to a private psychiatric wing under the Bellandi name.

The evaluation lasted for hours. Doctors came and went, asking questions I barely heard, while Julian stood behind the glass with a file in his hand and an expression he could no longer keep steady.

The final report was simple.

Severe depressive disorder, with dissociative shutdown.

Julian read those words for a long time.

He had known once. Years ago, when I still smiled in public and broke down only behind locked doors, he had treated me himself. He had known my pain was real, yet after Sophia cried in his office, he still decided my illness was just another performance.

Dante came in first.

He did not shout at the beginning. He played Mother’s voicemail beside my bed, letting her trembling voice fill the room.

“Bella, sweetheart, call me when you can. Just let me know you’re safe.”

My fingers moved slightly under the blanket.

Dante saw it.

For one second, his face changed, but he covered it quickly with anger.

“So you can hear us,” he said. “You just don’t feel like answering.”

I looked past him at the wall.

His jaw tightened. “You don’t get to scare Mother like this and then disappear into yourself.”

I still said nothing.

After he left, Julian took his place beside the bed. He spoke in the careful voice he used with frightened patients, asking me to name the room, the date, his face, anything that proved I was still inside my body.

I gave him nothing.

At last, his composure cracked. He set the file down harder than necessary, then stopped himself before touching me.

“Isabella,” he said, his voice strained, “look at me. Please.”

I slowly turned my eyes toward him.

“You said no one would care if I disappeared,” I whispered. “So let me disappear.”

Julian went still.

“I want to go somewhere none of you can follow.”

The door opened.

Adrian stood there in a wrinkled black suit, his wedding boutonniere crushed against his lapel.

“What did you just say?”

I turned my face away.

He walked in, anger written across his face. “Don’t start this again. You don’t get to threaten us because I married Sophia.”

Julian stood. “Adrian, not now.”

I pushed the blanket aside and moved toward the terrace door.

Adrian stepped in front of it.

“You don’t mean it,” he said, the coldness in his voice sounding forced. “You never do.”

They all did this.

They denied it because they were certain I would stop.

But when I reached for the handle, Adrian’s face changed.

The anger vanished first, then the color.

He stepped fully in front of the door, his voice suddenly rough. “Isabella, stop.”

Julian turned on him. “She’s sick. She is actually sick, and you’re still testing her?”

Adrian stared at me as if he had never seen me before.

“How is that possible?”

Of course he could not believe it.

When I was trying to win him over, I had always been bright for him. After the Moretti ambush, when his enemies poisoned him with something no Chicago doctor could identify, I used the only emergency reward the Program had ever given me to exchange for an antidote.

The exchange erased years of progress and left me with nothing to bargain with when my own deadline came.

But Adrian lived.

When he woke up, he held my hand and promised he would never betray me.

Yesterday, he put my ring on Sophia’s finger.

Julian guided me back toward the bed without forcing me. Adrian remained by the terrace door, still pale, still staring.

“How did you get like this?” he asked.

I looked out the window.

I did not want to see him.

He stepped closer, then stopped himself, as if he had finally realized I might break if he came too near.

“Look at me, Isabella,” he said, his voice unsteady. “Tell me the report is wrong. Tell me someone made a mistake.”

I almost laughed.

Even now, he needed me to be lying, because if I was not, then all of them had been wrong.

I gave him no answer.

Then Sophia called.

She had locked herself in the bridal suite and said she could not breathe, and for a moment, none of them moved. Adrian looked at the terrace door, Dante looked at me, and Julian looked at the monitor beside my bed.

They were afraid to leave.

Finally, Adrian said in a strained voice, “We’ll only be gone for a minute.”

Dante told the nurse outside to stay with me, while Julian paused at the door and looked back.

“Isabella,” he said quietly, “wait for me.”

I gave him no answer.

Then they left.

For the first time all day, the room fell quiet.

The Survival Program sounded in my mind again.

【Isabella, please complete the exit as soon as possible.】

I lifted my eyes to the unguarded door.

This time, I could not afford to be stopped.