Chapter 4
The car ride to the private hospital wing felt endless. Every red light an eternity, every siren in the distance a fresh spike of dread I didn’t have a name for yet.
Because naming it meant admitting how far I’d already fallen for a man I’d sworn I’d never be foolish enough to love.
I found him in a hallway outside a surgical suite—jacket torn, blood on his collar that wasn’t his own—giving orders in a low, controlled voice to four men who looked more frightened of him than of whatever had just happened at the docks.
He saw me and stopped mid-sentence.
“Elena—”
I crossed the hallway before he finished my name and did something I hadn’t planned, hadn’t let myself imagine in four days of silence.
I put both hands on either side of his face, checking for wounds the way he’d once checked my shoulders in a parking garage, and said, voice shaking, “Are you hurt? Tell me the truth.”
“A graze. Nothing worse.” His hand came up, covering mine like he couldn’t quite believe I was touching him first. “Elena, about Marco—”
“I heard him.” My voice cracked. “I heard everything, and I let it get in my head. And I’m sorry. I should have talked to you instead of hiding behind a locked door.”
“You had every right to hide.” His thumb moved once, gently, along my jaw. “I’ve spent my whole life making sure the people I love end up buried or broken. My brother, my mother. I didn’t marry you to add your name to that list. And then I heard my own cousin say out loud the exact thing I’ve been afraid of since the church—that being close to me is the most dangerous thing that could happen to you.”
“I’m not made of glass, Dante.”
“I know.” His voice broke just slightly on the words. “I know that better than anyone in this house. I just don’t know how to stop being afraid of losing you anyway.”
Before either of us could say anything else, one of Ruiz’s men came around the corner at a dead run.
“Sir, it’s Marco. He’s the one who tipped off the Alvarez family. He’s been selling information for six months to cover his debts. And tonight, when it went wrong, he tried to use Mrs. Salvano as leverage to buy his way out.”
Marco had never hated me.
He’d feared what I meant—a wife who made Dante Salvano soft enough, human enough, to become predictable. And a predictable man was a man who could be cornered.
He’d told the rival family exactly when I visited the fabric shop alone. He’d fed them the location of the wedding, the layout of the house, small details that meant nothing until they meant everything.
That night, cornered by his own debts and his own family’s suspicion, Marco had tried one last desperate move: offer me up as a bargaining chip to buy himself out of what he owed the Alvarez family—a debt built on the very gambling habit Dante had quietly covered for years out of a loyalty Marco had never once earned.
Ruiz laid it all out in the hospital corridor, voice flat with the particular disgust of a man who had once trusted the person he was now describing.
Dante’s face went very still.
I had never seen him look like that. Not angry, not cold—something colder than both.
“Where is he now?”
“Being held at the West Warehouse, sir. Waiting on your word.”
I felt the old fear rise in me—the fear of the man I’d married in a borrowed dress six weeks ago, the man capable of the violence everyone in the city whispered about.
I braced for him to walk away and become that man completely.
Instead, he turned back to me first.
“Whatever happens with Marco happens off these grounds, away from you—tonight and always,” he said quietly. “You will never have to see that side of what I do. That was always the one promise I intended to keep, no matter what else broke between us.”
“And what happens to him?”
“Consequences he built for himself, one betrayal at a time.” His eyes didn’t waver. “I won’t lie to you about what that means. But I won’t let it touch you either.”
I realized in that moment that this—not the money, not the house, not even the nail polish—was the truest thing he’d ever shown me: a dangerous man choosing, even now, exactly where the danger was and was not allowed to reach.
“Then go,” I said quietly. “Finish it and come home.”
Something shifted behind his eyes—relief, disbelief, something that looked dangerously close to hope.
May you like
“You’d still call it that? Home?”
“Ask me again,” I said, “after you’ve painted my nails a second time. Then I’ll tell you for certain.”
