Vivienne's POV
"You should sit down."
I didn't sit down.
I couldn't move at all. My feet had grown roots into the floor and my brain had stopped sending signals to the rest of my body because every single thing I thought I understood about my life had just walked into the room on two perfectly steady legs and looked me in the eye.
Dante didn't move either. He just stood there — and God, he stood, the way mountains stand, the way buildings stand, like the ground beneath him existed specifically to hold him up. No trembling. No breathlessness. No blanket pulled to his chin. No weakness anywhere on him.
Five years.
Five years of dinners across a table from a frail, fading man.
Five years of listening to that thin, tired voice ask me how was your day.
Five years of feeling guilty for the small, terrible part of me that wondered when it would finally be over.
"Say something," Dante said quietly.
"You're standing," I whispered.
"Yes."
"You've been—" My voice cracked. I pressed my hand hard against my mouth for a second, forcing myself back together. "How long?"
His jaw tightened. Just slightly. "From the beginning."
The words hit like cold water straight to the face.
From the beginning.
Not six months in. Not some miraculous recovery. Not a misdiagnosis or a miracle treatment.
From the beginning.
"There was never any illness," I said. It wasn't a question. My voice sounded strange to me — flat, like something had switched off behind it.
"No."
"You were never dying."
"No."
"The nurses. The medication. The wheelchair. The—" I stopped because my throat was closing. "All of it was fake."
Dante held my gaze. "Yes."
The room tilted. I grabbed the doorframe with both hands and held on because my knees had decided they were done cooperating. Five years of my life arranged itself in my head like a deck of cards, and I watched every single one flip over to show me its real face. Every dinner. Every silence. Every time I'd looked at him with pity. Every time I'd felt guilty for wanting to be free.
I had pitied this man. I had genuinely, achingly pitied him.
And he had been watching me from behind those weak, tired eyes and lying.
"Why?" My voice came out barely above a breath. "Why did you—why any of this? Why marry me? Why the wheelchair, why the illness, why five years of—"
"I needed a cover," Dante said. His voice was patient. Careful. Like he'd been rehearsing this. "A man in a wheelchair with a terminal diagnosis draws no suspicion. No one investigates the dying. No one looks closely at a man who can barely lift his head."
Something about the way he said it — so logical, so calm — made something hot flare up behind my ribs.
"A cover," I repeated.
"Yes."
"And me?" I pushed off the doorframe and stood on my own two feet, because I refused to be held up by anything in this room right now. "Was I part of the cover? Was I just a—a prop? A convenient wife to make the story more believable?"
Something moved across Dante's face. Something that wasn't calm.
"At first," he said.
"At first." I almost laughed. The sound that came out wasn't quite right. "And now?"
He took one step toward me. I took one step back. He stopped.
"Now is complicated," he said.
"Uncomplicate it."
His dark eyes moved over my face slowly, like he was reading something written there. "You watched me from across that table for five years, Vivienne. You think I wasn't watching you too?"
"I thought you were dying," I snapped, and there it was — the anger, finally burning through the shock. "I thought you had months. I looked at you and I felt sorry for you. I stayed in this marriage and gave up my entire life because I thought—" My voice broke and I hated it, hated the weakness in it. "I thought at least I was doing something good. At least someone was getting something out of this. And the whole time—"
"You were being protected," Dante said.
I stopped.
"What?"
"You were never alone," he said, and his voice had changed — something harder underneath it now, something absolute. "Every day you drove to Ashford Holdings, I had men watching. Every time Helena and Delilah pushed you further, I knew. Three times in five years, people tried to use you to get to the Hawthorne money. Three times, I eliminated those threats before you ever felt them."
I stared at him. "What does that mean, eliminated—"
"It means you were safe," Dante said simply. "Because of me. Whether you knew it or not."
The room was very quiet.
"Delilah," I said.
The name fell between us like a stone into still water.
Dante said nothing. He didn't have to.
"The Ghost." My voice dropped to barely a whisper. "The news. The press conference. That silhouette in the background—that was you."
Still nothing.
"Did you kill her?" I asked. "Tell me the truth. Right now. Did you kill my stepsister?"
Dante looked at me for a long moment.
"Yes," he said. Quiet. Steady. Completely without apology. "She humiliated you this morning. She called you things in front of people who should have protected you. She has spent five years trying to break you." Something dark moved through his eyes. "So yes. I killed her."
My hand flew to my mouth.
He said it like it was reasonable. Like it was the logical conclusion to a simple problem. Like killing a person was something a person just did when the situation called for it.
"You can't," I said, my voice shaking. "You can't just—people don't just—"
"I do," Dante said.
Two words. Absolute as gravity.
I looked at this man — this stranger standing in my husband's skin — and understood for the first time that I had never been in a quiet, sad, lonely marriage.
I had been living inside something else entirely. Something with teeth.
"Who are you?" I breathed.
Dante held my gaze, and in those dark, steady eyes I saw nothing fragile, nothing fading, nothing that had ever needed my pity or my patience or my quiet grace across a dinner table.
I saw power. Controlled, deliberate, infinite power.
"I think," he said softly, "you already know."
And the worst part — the part that made my blood run cold and hot at the same time, the part I would never admit out loud—
Was that I did.
I already knew exactly who he was.
And somewhere beneath the horror and the rage and the shattering of everything I thought was real—
A voice whispered that Delilah's death didn't feel like a tragedy.
It felt like justice.
And that terrified me more than anything Dante Hawthorne had ever done.