登入Breathe In....Breathe out! That dockside scene was brutal. Watching Elena hear the gunshot, see Dante bleeding, and then get dragged away while everything she thought she could count on fell apart — it’s a lot. James turning like that, Isabella standing there so calm, and Dante forced to drop his gun… it changes things.... I guess. And now Elena is truly alone with the one person who knows exactly how to break her.
Elena POV The wood beneath my knees was cold. Not just cold, but wet in that way that seeps through your clothes and into your skin until you can’t tell if you’re shaking from fear or from the night air biting right through you. I didn’t move. I couldn’t. My hands were tied behind me so tight that my fingers had gone numb a long time ago. Every time I tried to shift even a little the rope dug deeper into my wrists, so I stopped trying. My shoulders burned. My head felt heavy like it was full of water, but I made myself stay awake, eyes open, staring at the way the moonlight broke up on the black surface of the water like it was trying to tell me something I couldn’t understand. I had to stay this way because she was behind me. I couldn’t see Isabella but I felt her there. The heavy feeling of her just existing in the space like she already owned everything about this moment. “Breathe, Elena.” Her voice was soft, too soft for someone standing at the edge of all this. I didn’t ans
Dante POV “Move.” The door didn’t open fast enough. I kicked it in. Wood cracked, hinges snapped, and the sound echoed too loud down the corridor. I didn’t slow down, my heart was pounding so hard it felt like it was trying to punch its way out of my chest. “Clear left!” “Right’s open!” Boots hit concrete. Guns came up. Shadows moved fast all around us, but the place felt too empty, too quiet. The cold air hit me as soon as we pushed deeper, and I already knew before the lights even swept the corners properly. “She’s not here,” Luca muttered somewhere behind me. “I didn’t say stop,” I replied, voice tight. We kept pushing through room after room, and every single one was empty. This looked too clean. It didn’t smell like a struggle or fear. It just smelled like a kind of careful planning that made my stomach turn. She had walked out of here like she had all the time in the world. “This is wrong,” one of my men said. “No,” I said. “This is her.” This wasn’t some panicked r
Elena POV I didn’t know how long I’d been here. There were no windows. No sound. Just this quiet that pressed into my ears until it started to feel like something alive, something watching me. My hands were tied behind the chair so tight that my fingers had gone numb a long time ago. I tried to shift a little to get some blood moving, but the rope bit deeper into my wrists. I stopped moving. “Don’t.” Her voice came from behind me soft. And I froze. “I just fixed that,” she added calmly. “You’ll make it worse if you keep trying.” My throat felt like I’d swallowed glass. “Where am I?” There was a pause. Then footsteps. Slow, measured, not rushed at all. She came into view, and for a second I forgot how to breathe. It was her. The same face. The same eyes. But everything else was wrong. Like whatever used to be human in her had been stripped away and replaced with something else. She tilted her head slightly, studying me not like a person, but like something she was trying to
Dante POV The map didn’t change no matter how long I stared at it. Lines, angles, entry points, exit routes, everything looked clean and perfect on paper, but I knew better. Nothing was ever that clean when Isabella was involved. I kept seeing her face in the hallway, that calm smile like she already knew how this night was going to end. “She’s not going to be where we expect,” I said. No one argued, and that was good. Because if anyone in this room still thought this was a normal rescue mission, they hadn’t been paying attention. They didn’t know her like I did. “Then we hit fast,” Luca said, his finger tapping the lower corridor on the warehouse blueprints. “No hesitation. No warning. We go in hard and we get her out.” “She’ll already be moving,” I muttered. I could feel the weight of everything pressing down on me — the exhaustion, the guilt, the anger I couldn’t shake. Every second Elena was gone felt like another piece of me being carved away. Luca looked up. “You think sh
Dante POV The room didn’t feel the same anymore. Not after she stood here. Not after I looked into those eyes and realized I wasn’t chasing a ghost. Isabella was real. And she had Elena. I was still standing where she left me, the air in the hallway tasting like her perfume and my own blood. My arm throbbed, hot and painful, the bullet wound burning beneath my shirt like it refused to let me forget what had happened. But I didn’t care. Pain was just a distraction. The real problem was that the math didn’t add up. But it was starting to. “Bring Joseph.” Luca didn’t argue. He just nodded and stepped out. He knew that tone. It was the voice of a man who was about to start breaking things. Luca didn’t waste time. A second later, Joseph was dragged into the room, already looking like he knew this wasn’t going to go well for him. The moment the door shut, I moved fast. I grabbed him by the collar and shoved him back into the wall. His head hit with a dull sound, but I didn’t let g
Dante POV The silence in my office didn’t feel like peace. It felt like the split second before a building collapses. I was still staring at the black screen of the tablet, my mind stuck on her words. Sanity. She wanted my sanity. Looking at the blood dripping from my bandaged arm onto the desk, I figured she was halfway there already. Then the noise started. Not a hit. No gunshots. Just a faint sound from the floors down. It spread through the building like a fever, low at first, then growing. “No way...” “Is that—?” “It’s a ghost. Tell me that’s a ghost.” I stood up. My chair scraped across the floor, a harsh sound that made my teeth clench. I walked toward the door, my heart slamming against my ribs like something trapped trying to get out. I stepped into the hallway, and everything just… stopped. My guards were standing like statues. Luca was ten feet ahead of me, his body coiled tight, his face gone a sickly shade of grey. “What are you doing here?” Luca asked with an







