Dante POV
I have sat across from presidents, criminals, and men who would sell their own blood to stay alive.
None of them made me feel like I was the one being watched.
This girl did.
She sat in the seat across the aisle from me with her hands folded in her lap and her eyes moving around the jet in that careful, quiet way not panicked, not impressed, just observing. Filing things away. Like she was already building a map of her situation and figuring out where the exits were. I had seen that look before, but usually on people who had spent years learning to be afraid. On her it looked almost natural. Like survival was just something she had always done without being taught.
I looked away first. That bothered me more than I wanted to admit.
Three days ago, Marco my head of security, thirty years in this world, unshakeable had walked into my office looking like he had seen something that confused him. Marco did not get confused. He put a photograph on my desk without saying anything and waited.
It was a surveillance photo. A young woman outside a church in a town I had never heard of, holding a small white purse. The photo had been taken from across the street, slightly angled Marco had pulled it from a background check he was running on something unrelated. But he had sharp eyes, and in the bottom corner of the image, just visible through the open flap of her purse, was something he recognized.
My watch.
Not a similar watch. Not the same brand. My watch custom made, one of three in existence, with a small engraving on the back clasp that no photograph could have captured but that Marco knew because he had been with me the day I picked it up in Geneva.
I had not seen that watch in two months.
The last time I remembered having it was the night I closed the Marchetti deal the single most grueling negotiation of my career, fourteen months of work, finished at two in the morning in a hotel conference room with four lawyers and a bottle of Scotch. I did not drink often. I had drunk that night because it was over and because I was tired down to something that felt like bone marrow. I had gone to the hotel bar after. I remembered sitting down. I remembered one more drink.
Then I remembered waking up in my room the next morning, alone, with a headache that had no reasonable explanation for a man of my size and tolerance.
I had not thought about it much afterward. There was no sign of anything wrong. My security had been outside my door all night and reported nothing unusual. I assumed I had simply hit a wall. It happened. Rarely, but it happened.
I had not thought about the watch either. I assumed I had left it somewhere in the chaos of packing up and flying home. I had two others. It was a minor inconvenience, nothing more.
And then Marco put that photograph on my desk.
I stood in my office for a long time after he left, looking at the photo. The woman was maybe twenty-two, twenty-three. Dark hair pulled back. Small, fine-boned face. And visibly, unmistakably pregnant.
I did not let myself think the obvious thought for about six hours. I had people check the hotel records first. My room, that floor, that night who else had been registered. There was one name connected to a room two doors from mine, checked in that same afternoon and checked out the next morning. A woman. The name on the booking was false Marco confirmed that within an hour. A dead end, but not the kind that appeared by accident.
Someone had arranged for that name to be a dead end.
That was when I stopped doubting and started moving. I found out her real name Mia Calloway through the church record for the wedding she was about to walk into. I found out about the groom. I found out her family had arranged the marriage in a hurry, two months ago. Two months.
I was on a plane to Crestfield within four hours.
I did not send men ahead to bring her to me. I did not call lawyers or make arrangements. I went myself, which was something I had not done personally in years, and I did not stop to examine why until now sitting across from her on my jet, watching her stare out the window like she was memorizing the clouds.
"Open your purse," I said.
She turned her head. "What?"
"Your purse. Open it."
Her eyes narrowed slightly but she reached into the bag on her lap and unclasped it, holding it open toward me. I stood up, crossed the aisle, and crouched down to her level so I could see inside without taking it from her. I had decided in the car that I would not take things from her unless I had to. She had already had enough taken.
There it was.
At the bottom of the bag, underneath a phone and a lip balm and a folded piece of paper that looked like a doctor's receipt, was my watch. Still in perfect condition. The clasp facing up, catching the cabin light.
Something moved through my chest that I did not have a name for.
I reached in carefully and picked it up. Turned it over. There on the back clasp, in letters so small you needed to know they were there to find them D.C. My initials. Engraved the day I bought it.
I held it in my palm for a moment.
Two months of not knowing. Two months of a woman alone in a small town, pregnant, with no memory, being pushed into a marriage to a man old enough to be her grandfather by a family that was supposed to protect her. Two months of my child growing without me knowing it existed.
I was not a man who felt guilt easily. I was not built that way. But something cold and sharp was sitting in my chest now that felt uncomfortably close to it.
I looked up at her. She was watching me hold the watch with an expression that was hard to read not angry, not soft. Careful. Like she was waiting to see what I would do with the information the watch represented.
I closed my fingers around it.
"Tell me everything you remember about that night," I said quietly.
She held my gaze. For a second neither of us moved just the low hum of the jet around us and something else in the air that I could not define and did not want to look at too closely.
Then she took a slow breath and said, "I remember one drink. And then I remember waking up alone."
One drink.
The same as me.
My jaw tightened. I sat back in my seat and looked at the watch in my hand and understood with the absolute cold certainty of a man who has spent his entire life in a world where nothing happens by accident that someone had planned this night very carefully.
And they had planned it for both of us.
I pressed the call button for Marco and said one word when he answered.
"Isadora."