Vivienne's POV
I already knew.
That was the thing destroying me from the inside out as I stood in that room staring at my husband — not the shock, not the fear, not even the rage.
It was the knowing.
The way the pieces had been sitting in front of me for five years, quietly waiting for me to stop being too tired and too beaten down to look at them properly. The flicker behind his eyes at dinner. The words that sounded like promises. The mysterious text. The black car.
Are you safe?
He had been asking me that question for five years. Just never out loud.
"Say it," Dante said. His voice was patient. Like he had all the time in the world. Like men who had been lying for five years could afford patience.
"The Ghost," I whispered. "You're the Ghost."
He didn't deny it.
Something about the silence — the calm, absolute, unapologetic silence — cracked something open in me. I had been holding myself together through sheer stubbornness since I walked into this room, and now the holding gave way all at once.
"You're a murderer," I gasped.
"Yes."
Just like that. One word. No hesitation, no flinching, no scrambling to soften it. Yes, like I'd asked him if he took sugar in his coffee.
"Delilah." Her name came out of me before I could stop it. "Did you—was it you—"
"Yes." He said it before I even finished. "I killed her."
The wall hit my back. I didn't remember moving toward it.
"She humiliated you this morning," Dante continued, his voice perfectly level. "She called you vile things in front of people who should have protected you. She has spent five years trying to break you into pieces small enough to sweep away." Something shifted in his expression. Something cold and final. "So I killed her."
My legs stopped working.
I slid down the wall slowly, and my knees hit the floor, and I sat there because there was nothing else to do. The room felt like it was breathing around me — expanding and contracting — and Dante stood in the middle of it completely unmoved, watching me fall apart with those dark, steady eyes.
"Why?" My voice broke clean in half. "Why any of it? Why marry me? Why the wheelchair, why the illness, why all of it — why?"
He crossed the room.
And then Dante Hawthorne — the Ghost, the most feared man in Ashford City — lowered himself to one knee in front of me. Not quickly. Deliberately. Like kneeling was a choice he was making with full awareness of what it meant.
Up close, he was even more devastating. I could see the sharpness of his face without the dim lighting of the dining room, without the blankets and the performance of illness. I could see the scar along his jaw I'd never noticed. The controlled stillness of a man who moved through the world like he owned it.
"I needed a cover," he said. "The dying heir in the wheelchair draws no attention. No suspicion. No investigation. While everyone watched a man fade, I built an empire."
"And me?" My voice cracked on both words. "What was I? Just part of the costume?"
His eyes moved over my face slowly. "At first," he said, "you were supposed to be convenient. Someone kind enough to seem genuine. Someone desperate enough to agree."
"So I was useful," I said bitterly. "A prop. A—"
"Then you walked in," Dante said, and something shifted in his voice — quiet, almost against his will, like an admission he hadn't planned to make. "You sat across that table from a man you thought was dying, and you looked at him like he was still a person. Not a paycheck. Not a pity case. A person." His jaw tightened. "No one had looked at me like that in a very long time."
I stared at him.
"Don't," I whispered. "Don't make this into something—"
"You read to me," Dante said. "The first month. When you thought I was asleep. You sat by the window and read from whatever book you'd brought, and you didn't do it for performance. You did it because you thought it might comfort someone you believed was suffering." His eyes were burning now. "How was I supposed to stay indifferent to that?"
The air in the room felt too thin.
"You were watching me the whole time," I said slowly. "Every dinner. Every conversation. You were never the man I was talking to."
"I was always the man you were talking to," Dante said. "Just not the version you were allowed to see."
I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes and breathed through the chaos rioting inside my chest. Fear. Fury. Grief. And beneath all of it — God help me — something that wasn't any of those things. Something that recognized what he was saying and found it unbearable precisely because it mattered.
I dropped my hands and looked at him.
"I want a divorce," I said.
The words were steady. Deliberate. The clearest thing I'd said all night.
Dante looked at me for a long moment. And then, slowly, the corner of his mouth moved.
It wasn't a warm smile. It wasn't kind or gentle or reassuring.
It was dangerous. Controlled. The smile of a man who had already considered every possible outcome of this conversation and found them all acceptable.
"No," he said.
One word. The same way he said yes to murder. Like the matter was already closed.
"You don't get to decide—"
"The contract runs until my death or mutual agreement," Dante said calmly. "I'm not dead. And I don't agree." He stood, rising to his full height again, and the room shrank around him. "You're not going anywhere, Vivienne."
"You can't keep me here—"
"I'm not keeping you," he said. "I'm protecting you. There's a difference. One you'll understand soon enough."
"That's the same thing—"
"Is it?" He tilted his head. "Helena sold you to me five years ago without blinking. What do you think she'll do now that you have nothing left? Now that the salary is gone and the shares are gone and you have no money and no power and no allies except the woman running the art gallery?" He paused, letting that land. "My enemies know your face now, Vivienne. They know you're connected to this house. The moment you walk out of it without my protection, you become the easiest target in this city."
I opened my mouth.
Nothing came out.
Because he was right. He was completely, infuriatingly, terrifyingly right, and we both knew it.
"Get some rest," Dante said quietly. "Tomorrow, I'll show you everything. The truth — all of it. No more half answers." He moved toward the door, then stopped with his back to me. "And Vivienne? I know you're angry. I know this feels like a cage. But I need you to understand something before you sleep tonight."
He looked at me over his shoulder. And in his eyes, beneath all that control and all that cold, was something raw and absolute.
"I have never once regretted choosing you," he said. "Not for a single day."
He left.
The door clicked shut behind him.
I sat on the floor of his bedroom for a long time, my back against the wall, my knees pulled to my chest. The estate was silent around me. Outside, Ashford City hummed and glittered, completely unaware that its most feared ghost had just confessed everything to his wife on one knee.
I pressed my forehead against my arms.
I have never once regretted choosing you.
I hated how much that mattered. I hated that I was sitting here cataloguing the way his voice changed when he said it instead of being purely, cleanly terrified.
My phone buzzed.
I pulled it out with numb fingers.
A news alert. New developments in Delilah's murder case. I clicked it automatically.
And went completely cold.
Sources close to the investigation reveal that police have identified a second victim connected to tonight's homicide. A member of the Ashford Holdings board of directors was found dead in his car one hour ago. Investigators believe this is the work of the same killer—
I read the name of the board member.
Mr. Huang.
The man who had stared at the floor while Delilah called me a whore.
My hands started shaking again — but this time it wasn't just fear.
Dante had told me Delilah was punishment for what she did.
But Mr. Huang had only watched.
Which meant Dante wasn't finished.
Which meant every person in that boardroom today was in danger.
Twelve people.
Twelve hands raised against me.
I scrambled to my feet and ran for his door.