Page 43

The air smelled like champagne, fresh lacquer, and quiet madness.

Isolde stood barefoot on the smooth white marble floor, her long silk nightgown falling like moonlight around her ankles.

She said nothing, only stared ahead eyes wide, chest rising and falling in slow, shallow breaths.

Before her, at the center of the glass-domed conservatory, stood a gilded cage.

It was nearly eight feet tall, its bars made of pure 24-karat gold, each one twisted with filigree vines and inlaid with small, blood-red rubies shaped like thorns.

The floor was velvet.

The ceiling was painted with a mural of birds in flight each wing painted by hand with flecks of diamond dust.

The door creaked open slowly.

Behind her, Dante said nothing.

But she felt him.

Felt the storm of his obsession pressing close like heat before a wildfire.

She turned.

He stood several feet away, dressed in a dark three-piece suit, no tie, the top button of his shirt undone.

His hair was slicked back, jaw freshly shaved, but his eyes-his eyes were feral. Starved. Consumed.

"I had it built," he said softly, "for you."

Her voice barely rose above the hush of the surrounding garden. "It's a cage."

"It's a palace." He stepped forward slowly. "A sanctuary made of gold. The world hurt you. I never will."

She turned her face away. "Dante..."

"You asked me to protect you." His voice dropped, deep and husky. "I'm protecting you from everything. Everyone. Even yourself."

She looked at him again and saw the darkness curling in the corners of his mouth, the quiet pleasure he took in this moment.

In caging something beautiful. Something his.

"You're angry because of Roza," she said, trembling. "You're not thinking straight."

"I've never thought straighter."

The day after Roza's capture, Dante had liquidated half a million euros from a frozen art fund in Zurich.

With it, he bought the bones of a lost opera house in Venice and commissioned a famed goldsmith to craft the cage.

Then he had it flown, in pieces, to New York via private jet.

Alex had asked, quietly, if this was wise.

Dante didn't respond.

Because love, to him, was never wise.

Now, as he stood before Isolde, eyes glowing in the dim garden light, he extended a hand.

"Step in."

She didn't move.

"Dante..."

"I've never hurt you," he said, jaw tight. "Never once laid a hand on you in anger. Never screamed. Never lied. And I've killed for you-without hesitation."

He leaned closer.

"And all I ask... is that you step inside."

She stared at him.

At the man who had broken men's bodies for whispering her name.

The man who looked at her like God made her from bone and fire just for him.

And slowly slowly she stepped into the cage.

The door clicked shut behind her.

Not locked.

But closed.

He reached between the bars, his hands cupping her face.

His fingers traced her jaw, the shell of her ear, the hollow behind it like he was reading Braille written in flesh.

"You're perfect like this," he whispered. "Safe. Mine. Still."

"I'm not afraid of you," she said softly, tears gathering in her eyes. "Even now."

"I know," he replied. "That's why you belong to me."

He sat outside the cage in a velvet chair, watching her with a glass of blood-red wine in one hand, the other resting loosely on his thigh.

"You want to know something?" he murmured. "I had a moment, after Roza took you, where I wondered if I should let you go."

Isolde blinked.

His voice dropped to a slow, poisonous hum. "Not because I stopped loving you. But because I loved you too much."

She rose to her knees inside the cage, gripping the bars. "You scare me when you talk like that."

"I scare myself." He leaned forward. "Because I looked at a world without you and wanted to kill everyone left in it."

She looked down.

A tear slid over her lip.

"I'm not leaving," she whispered. "You don't have to prove anything."

"I do," he said. "Because you don't understand yet what I'm capable of."

Later,

That night, he lay beside the cage.

Didn't force the door open.

Didn't pull her out.

Just rested there, on the velvet chaise near her, reading Dante's Inferno aloud by candlelight. His voice a low lull of sin and punishment.

She curled inside the golden bars like a sleeping dove, fingers clutched around the silk hem of her nightgown.

And she dreamed not of escape.

But of him.

And how terrifying it was to be loved like a possession and yet feel safer than she ever had outside.