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Dante hadn't been himself when he met Roza Kovács.

He was rage in tailored suits. A loaded gun without a target.

Roza found him in a snowstorm-bleeding from the ribs after a shootout with a Balkan trafficker.

She didn't ask who he was. She didn't ask why his shirt was soaked in blood.

She just laughed.

"You look like something that should've stayed in hell," she said in a smoky accent thick with Hungarian roots.

Then she took him home treated his injuries.

Roza was fire in a silk dress.

Her cheekbones were carved high, her eyes a deep gray not stormy, but the silence before one.

She was beautiful in the kind of way that made men afraid to desire her out loud.

Jet-black hair in a loose braid down her spine, skin pale as a porcelain blade, and lips painted deep crimson even when she killed.

She had storm-colored eyes icy and gray-and a presence that said touch me and I'll slit you open.

Her fingernails shaped like daggers.

She was magnetic, dangerous, unpredictable.

And Dante had never loved anyone more violently back then.

They lived in a penthouse overlooking the Vistula River. Made love like war. Drank too much. Killed often.

She helped him smuggle weapons into Western Europe; he taught her how to clean a kill without emotion.

They were soulmates born of ruin.

Until he asked her one question. "Do you ever think about stopping?"

Roza froze.

On the balcony. Barefoot in the snow. Cigarette glowing between her fingers.

"You mean... do I ever think about becoming soft?" she said. "Domestic? A wife?"

"I want something makes mebfeel at peace."

Her head snapped toward him.

"You want peace."

He didn't answer.

She stood slowly, her eyes were blank just like his soul was empty back then.

"You're looking for something soft," she said bitterly. "Something clean."

He looked up at her.

"I'm looking for something I can keep."

Roza didn't speak.

But her silence thundered.

"If you ever find it," she whispered, "I will destroy it. And you'll watch me killing her slowly." She said with a threat leaving him forever.

Three Years Ago - New York

Dante saw her for the first time at the corner of 9th and Aurelia.

Isolde.

She was taking out trash behind the café. Her long hair tied in a braid, apron dusted with flour, lips pink and bare.

A soft, quiet thing. Kind to the stray dog watching her from the alley.

She looked like a prayer he hadn't earned.

He stopped walking.

Watched her for fifteen minutes.

And came back the next night.

And the next.

And the next.

It was never about purity.

It was about stillness. The way she moved like she didn't know monsters existed.

The way she held a teacup like it mattered. The way she blinked too fast when she was nervous.

She was the opposite of Roza.

She was silence in the center of his storm.

So he bought the building next to her apartment.

Installed cameras.

Rewired her locks-to make them "safer."

And waited.

Not to hurt her.

But to own her before the world could taint her.

Roza Kovács sat on a throne made of broken saints.

The cathedral's altar had been converted into a war map.

Red pins marked Dante's holdings. Black pins marked her men. A new gold pin glimmered over New York.

She stared at it like it owed her something.

Her hair was braided tight. Her lips were bare. A scar now split her left brow-a gift from a man she'd killed after torturing for six hours.

She looked older now.

More vicious.

More focused.

And she wore no perfume anymore.

She smelled like gunpowder and old churches.

One of her lieutenants approached.

"She still breathes."

Roza smiled thinly.

"She won't for long."

She picked up a photograph of Isolde-taken from a rooftop, through a sniper scope.

"I wonder what she tastes like," Roza said softly.

The lieutenant hesitated. "You think she knows?"

"No," Roza said. "But she will."

She walked to the edge of the cathedral balcony and looked down over the coastline. "He's forgotten who made him alive. I'll remind him."