Dante's penthouse breathed bergamot and betrayal. Aria stared at the shrine to her stolen childhood—photographs spanning decades of violation. Her at six, pigtails askew as she blew out birthday candles. Her at sixteen, boarding a Greyhound to nowhere with everything she owned in a backpack. Her last night of innocence, asleep in a threadbare tank top, the camera angle intimate enough to count freckles.
Violating didn't begin to cover it.
"Admiring my collection?" Dante materialized beside her like expensive sin, offering crystal glasses filled with liquid amber. "You're far more photogenic when you're not plotting murder."
She smashed the glass against marble. Whiskey and crystal exploded across white walls like abstract art. "You've been stalking me since I was a child?"
He sipped his drink, utterly unmoved by her violence. "Observing. Protecting. Semantics." His thumb traced a photograph of her father's funeral—her seventeen, hollow-eyed, alone. "You think the Ghost is the only one who made deathbed promises?"
The admission hit like a blade between ribs. Aria's voice cracked despite her fury. "Why?"
Dante's predatory smirk dissolved. For one heartbeat, his mask cracked, revealing something raw and desperate underneath. "Because the world tried to break you before you could learn to burn it down." He pressed the surviving glass into her trembling hands. "Drink. You'll need liquid courage for what comes next."
The whiskey scorched her throat. His gaze burned hotter.
He led her to a glass table displaying her father's research—files she'd mourned as lost forever. Her fingers trembled as she touched familiar handwriting, equations that had cost him his life. Project Dollhouse. Human replication protocols. Memory architecture schematics.
"Your father didn't just expose government corruption," Dante said, rolling up Italian silk sleeves. Scars laddered his forearms—old, precise, methodical cuts that spoke of ritualistic punishment. "He discovered how to manufacture perfect human weapons. Spies who didn't know they were spies. The government executed him for it." His voice dropped. "I tried to—"
"Tried to what?" The words scraped her throat raw.
"Save you both." His knuckles went white against the table edge. "But you'd already vanished into their system."
Silence crystallized between them, heavy with seven years of what-ifs. Rain lashed floor-to-ceiling windows like bullets.
Dante's laugh shattered the moment like breaking glass. "Enough melodrama. Let's discuss why you're truly here." He activated a monitor showing Kael's ambulance racing through neon-soaked streets, sirens screaming. "Your feral Ghost is bound for Sterling Corporation's blacksite. By dawn, they'll have vivisected him into manageable components."
The image blurred—Kael's bloodied fingers still clutching her shock glove like a talisman. Something twisted behind Aria's ribs, sharp and unwelcome.
"Why show me this?" Her voice emerged smaller than intended.
Dante invaded her space, backing her against the table. His cologne—smoke and bitter orange—made her dizzy. "Because I want you to choose with full knowledge." His lips ghosted across her temple, breath scalding. "Hate me freely, but understand this—Kael fights to forget his pain. I fight to control mine."
Her pulse betrayed her, hammering against her throat. "And Adrian Sterling?"
"Fights to become his pain incarnate." Dante's hand found her lower back, fingers splaying possessively. "But you… you fight to live despite everything they've done. It's absolutely intoxicating."
Aria shoved him hard enough to rattle his teeth. "I don't need your twisted philosophy."
"Don't you?" He caught her wrist, pressing it against his racing heart. "You're trembling, little phoenix. Not from fear—from hunger." His thumb traced her pulse point with surgical precision. "When did you last feel anything real?"
She recoiled, fleeing to the terrace. Night air slapped her flushed face like absolution.
The door whispered open. Closed. Dante joined her at the railing, close enough to feel his body heat but careful not to touch.
"When I was fourteen," he said quietly, "my father forced me to execute our head of security. The man had a daughter my age—sweet thing who brought me cookies." He lit a cigarette with surgeon-steady hands. "She sends me white roses every anniversary of his death. Never misses a year."
Aria studied his profile in moonlight—the tension bracketing his mouth, the way silver light softened his predatory edges. "Why tell me this?"
"So you see the monster clearly." Smoke curled between them. "Before you start imagining redemption."
Her laugh sounded like breaking. "I stopped believing in fairy tales the night they killed my father."
"Neither do I." His pinky brushed hers—barely contact, electric nonetheless. "But I believe in you."
The admission hung between them, fragile as spun glass and twice as dangerous.
Police sirens wailed in the distance. Aria gripped the railing until her knuckles went white. "Will you help me save him?"
Dante went absolutely still. "Even after everything? The surveillance? The lies? The years of violation?"
"Yes."
He crushed his cigarette with deliberate violence. "Then you owe me a secret."
"Which one?"
His smile could have performed surgery. "The reason your pulse jumps when I touch you."
---
The Sterling Corporation blacksite crouched in the industrial district like a concrete cancer. Dante's Maserati ate distance with predatory efficiency, engine purring death threats at the night. He drove with casual precision, one hand on the wheel, the other resting possessively on her thigh.
"Nervous?" he asked, noting her white knuckles.
"Focused." She checked her weapons—knife, shock glove, the small pistol he'd given her. "You sure your intel is accurate?"
"Sterling's predictable. He'll have Kael in the main interrogation suite—likes to watch the show personally." Dante's grip tightened on her leg. "Are you prepared for what we might find?"
The question hung heavy with implication. Aria had heard stories about Sterling's methods—creative brutalities that made traditional torture look merciful.
They abandoned the car three blocks out, approaching through abandoned warehouses. The facility loomed ahead, all razor wire and floodlights. Dante produced security codes from somewhere, bypassing electronic locks with disturbing ease.
"Family connections," he explained at her questioning look. "Sterling and I share certain… investments."
They moved through sterile corridors like ghosts, Dante leading with the confidence of familiarity. The screaming started two floors down.
Not Kael's voice—too high, too broken. Someone else's agony echoing through ventilation systems.
"This way." Dante's voice carried new urgency.
They burst through reinforced doors into a nightmare made real. Kael sat strapped to a metal chair in the center of a glass-walled chamber, blood dripping steadily from cuffed wrists. But he wasn't screaming. He was smirking at Adrian Sterling through the observation window, defiance radiating from every bruised line of his body.
"Took you long enough, little mouse," Kael rasped, not bothering to look toward the door. His voice carried exhaustion and something else—relief? "Was starting to think you'd found better entertainment."
Then his mismatched eyes landed on Dante's hand resting possessively on Aria's lower back. The temperature in the room dropped ten degrees.
"Get. Your. Fucking. Paws. Off." Each word dripped lethal promise.
Dante's smile turned sharp as broken glass. "Territorial, aren't we? Even while bleeding out?"
Kael tested his restraints, metal groaning under the strain. "I'll show you territorial when I rip your throat out with my teeth."
"Gentlemen," Aria interrupted, stepping between them. "Perhaps we could save the pissing contest until after we're not standing in enemy territory?"
Sterling's voice crackled through the intercom. "Ms. Blackwood. How delightful. Though I must say, your timing is impeccable—we were just about to begin the real interrogation."
Gas began hissing from vents in the ceiling.
"Move!" Dante barked, producing a key card that unlocked Kael's restraints.
Kael surged to his feet, swaying but upright. Blood loss had turned his skin gray, but his eyes burned with familiar fury. "This isn't over," he snarled at Dante.
"No," Dante agreed, catching Aria's hand as alarms began screaming. "It's just beginning."
They ran through maze-like corridors as gas filled the air behind them, Sterling's laughter echoing from hidden speakers. Three against whatever army he commanded.
The odds were terrible.
Aria had never felt more alive.