Chapter 101 Amelia

Chapter 101 Amelia
Amelia

The new maid doesn't tell me her name for three days. I stop asking after the first one, because every time I do, the same fear crosses her face that crossed Farrah's, and I refuse to be the reason another woman ends up dead on that loading dock.

He comes for me on the fourth day, no warning, no knock, just the door opening and his voice filling the room before I've even fully sat up.

"Get dressed," he says. "You're having lunch with me."

"I'd rather starve."

"That can be arranged too, if you'd prefer it." He leans against the doorframe, arms crossed, watching me with that same unhurried patience he wears like a second skin. "But I don't think you actually want that. I think you want to keep your strength up, because some stubborn part of you still believes it'll matter eventually."

"Go fuck yourself."

He laughs, low and genuine, the same unbothered sound that unsettles me worse than shouting ever could. "Charming. I do enjoy this version of you." He straightens, and something shifts behind his eyes, the amusement draining into something considerably colder. "Let me make this simple, Amelia, since apparently manners aren't working. I know exactly which house your mother and brother live in. I know which street, which hour the porch light comes on, how long it takes to walk from the front door to the kitchen. After all, you were taken from there. So, if you continue making things difficult for me, I will make things difficult for them instead. Do you understand?"

Ice floods through my chest, fast, and every ounce of fight drains straight out of my spine.

"You wouldn't."

"I would." He says it simply, no theater to it, which is somehow worse than if he'd shouted the threat instead. "I have absolutely no interest in hurting people who've never once crossed me. But I will, without a single moment of hesitation, if it convinces you that cooperation costs you considerably less than defiance does."

I hate him. I hate him with a clarity that feels almost clean compared to the grief still sitting raw in my chest, but hatred doesn't protect my mother, doesn't protect a little brother who with all his macho and 'I don't care' attitude is probably worried sick about me and I understand exactly how thoroughly this man has learned to weaponize the people I love most.

"Fine," I say, forcing the word out through gritted teeth. "Lunch."

"Excellent." He smiles, and I want to claw it off his face. "The maid will help you dress. I'll expect you in twenty minutes."

Lunch is set in a room I haven't seen before, a long table draped in white linen, food arranged with the kind of careful presentation that feels obscene given everything else happening inside these walls. He sits at the head of the table, gestures for me to take the seat beside him, and I do, because refusing costs me nothing except his amusement, and I don't currently have the energy to fight a battle that small.

He talks. I don't answer. He asks about my childhood, about my time in the military, about mundane things dressed up as casual curiosity, and I sit there with my jaw locked shut, staring at a plate of food I have no intention of touching until my stomach forces my hand.

Halfway through the meal, he reaches over and adjusts a strand of hair that's fallen across my face, fingers lingering a beat too long against my cheek before I jerk back.

"Don't," I say, the first word I've given him all afternoon.

"There's a voice." He smiles, satisfied, like he's won something. "I was starting to wonder if you'd forgotten how to use it."

"Touch me again and find out."

"Is that a threat, Captain?" He leans back in his chair, studying me with open amusement. "I find I like your threats considerably more than your silence. At least they're honest."

I go back to staring at my plate, refusing to give him anything else, and he lets the silence stretch, though I catch him watching me the entire time, unhurried.

"Nothing to say," he says eventually, setting down his fork with exaggerated patience. "Throwing tantrums, are we?" Amusement laces every word, the particular delight of a man who finds my silence considerably more entertaining than conversation would have been. "Very well, then. I have something to show you."

He stands, and before I can react, two guards materialize on either side of my chair, hauling me up by the arms with rough, practiced efficiency. I don't fight it, not yet, not until I understand exactly what I'm walking into.

They march me down a corridor I haven't seen before, him following close behind, unhurried, and my mind starts racing through every worst possibility it can construct. A cell. A punishment room. Something considerably worse than the golden light of the room I've been trapped in.

The door opens onto darkness instead, and for one terrifying second, panic claws up my throat before the light snaps on and I see exactly what this room actually is.

Monitors. An entire wall of them, each one showing a different angle of the same location, grainy but clear enough to make out faces.

Ren's face isn't there. Matteo's is, hunched over a table covered in papers. Marco stands near a window, phone pressed to his ear. And there, unmistakable even through the low resolution, is my brother, pacing a narrow strip of concrete floor with the particular restless energy I've watched him carry through every crisis of his life.

"You're watching a live feed," he says, close enough behind me that his breath stirs against my ear, casual, conversational, like he's discussing the weather. "They're chasing nothing but ghost companies and dead ends. They think they're close. They're not. They'll never find you. He'll never find you." A pause, deliberate, designed to land. "Except I want him to. He's already lost."

"Why are you doing this?" The question leaves me quiet, hollowed out, because I've run out of energy to make it anything else.

His fingers trail slowly along my shoulder, and I stiffen instantly, disgust rolling hard through my chest.

"Because I can."

"That's not an answer." I force myself to hold still, to think instead of simply recoiling, because recoiling gives him exactly the reaction he wants. "You have to have a reason. Everything about this, the years of planning, the patience, all of it, shows careful intention. This is revenge, isn't it? Ren or his family did something to you, and you're trying to make them pay for it."

He doesn't answer, and I feel the tension roll off him in a sudden, sharp wave, his fingers tightening against my shoulder hard enough that I wince.

I've hit a nerve.

"Tell me, Amelia," he says, voice dropping lower, shifting the subject with deliberate, unsettling speed. "Did you and Ren ever have sex?"

"What the fuck is wrong with you?" The words tear out sharp, disgust and fury both flaring hot and immediate.

"I'll take that as a no." Something satisfied curls through his tone, and I hate him more in that single moment than I have since this entire nightmare began.

"Get your hands off me." I twist hard against his grip, but his fingers only tighten further, pinning me in place with more strength than I expect from someone who's spent every previous encounter relying on words instead of force.

He turns me by the shoulders, forcing me to face him, and before I can react, his mouth crashes against mine, hard and invasive, one hand fisting into my hair to hold me still.

I bite down.

He rips back with a sharp hiss, and I use the half second of distraction to swing my palm across his masked face as hard as I can manage, the impact ringing loud through the small, dark room.

He laughs.

It's not a normal laugh, not the low, controlled amusement he's used every previous time. This one comes out ragged, almost manic, something unhinged bleeding through the careful composure he's worn since the moment I first woke up in that gilded room, and it terrifies me.

"There she is," he says, breathing hard, releasing my hair. "There's the fire everyone warned me about."

"Don't touch me again." My voice shakes despite every effort to keep it steady, adrenaline and revulsion both crashing through me at once. "I mean it. Don't you dare touch me again."

"You'll find," he says, straightening his mask, his voice regaining some of its usual composure, "that what you want has very little bearing on what actually happens in this building."

He steps closer again, and I brace myself, but this time he simply studies my face, close enough that I can see the faint scarring at the edge of one pale eye, something old and thin, barely visible unless you're looking directly at it the way I am now.

"You're going to warm up to me eventually," he says quietly. "They always do. Fighting is exhausting, Amelia, and you're already running on considerably less than you started with. One day you'll simply stop, and when you do, I intend to be exactly where I am right now."

"Never."

"We'll see." He reaches out, tracing one finger slowly down the side of my face, over my jaw, down the line of my throat, and I hold perfectly still, refusing to give him the reaction he's clearly hunting for, though every muscle in my body screams to pull away. His hand pauses at my collarbone, thumb pressing lightly against my wrist still faintly bruised from the rope, and something almost tender crosses his expression, which somehow disgusts me more than any of the cruelty has. "You have no idea how patient I actually am. I've waited four years for a moment considerably larger than this one. I can wait considerably longer for you to come around."

"You'll die waiting."

Something flashes behind his eyes at that, quick and dangerous, and for a moment I think I've pushed too far, that the next thing to land will be considerably worse than a stolen kiss. His hand slides lower, fingers curling loosely around my wrist, testing, deliberate, and I yank it back before he can tighten his grip.

"I said don't."

"You did." He doesn't chase the pull-back, just lets his hand drop, though the amusement in his eyes tells me this is a retreat, not a surrender. "Careful, Amelia. Every line you draw only tells me exactly where you're softest. I'll remember every single one."

I step back, putting whatever distance the small room allows between us, and he lets me go, watching with the patient, unbothered interest of a man who genuinely believes time is entirely on his side.

He gestures toward the monitors still playing their silent, grainy footage of the people I love searching a country I'm no longer trapped in.

"Watch them fail a little longer," he says. "It's good for you. Teaches you exactly how alone you actually are in here."

I don't look at the screens. I keep my eyes fixed on him instead, refusing to give him that particular satisfaction, and something in my continued defiance seems to needle at him more than I expect, his jaw tightening beneath the mask.

"You think you're so clever," he says, and something in his voice has shifted now, sharper, less controlled, the careful mask of amusement finally starting to crack under whatever nerve I keep managing to hit without fully understanding why. "You think you can just sit there and refuse to break, refuse to look, refuse to give me anything. Let me tell you something about the man you're so desperate to be found by."

"Don't."

"Ren Moretti," he says, ignoring me entirely, his voice rising now, something raw and furious bleeding through every syllable, "grew up with everything. Every privilege, every advantage, every single thing our father ever denied me."

The word lands in the room like a physical blow, and for one suspended, impossible second, I can't process it at all, my mind simply refusing to accept what I just heard.

"Our," I repeat, barely more than breath. "What did you just say?"

He goes utterly still, and I watch something dawn behind his pale eyes, the realization of exactly what he's just let slip, fury rising fast and hot to replace whatever composure he'd been clinging to a moment before.

"You heard me," he says, voice shaking now, low and furious, all pretense of calm control completely abandoned. "I am Ren Moretti's brother. And he doesn't even know I exist."

The words hang in the dark room, and I stare at him, at the pale eyes I've spent days trying to read, and something about them suddenly makes a horrible kind of sense. The build. The bone structure beneath the mask. The particular, unhurried way he carries himself, so eerily close to the way Ren does that it should have told me something days ago if I'd let myself actually look.

"That's not possible," I say, though even as the words leave me, I already know how weak they sound. "Ren only has one brother. Dante."

"Dante." He spits the name like something bitter. "The golden one. Raised in the house, given the name, given the title, given every single thing that should have been mine by right of blood alone." His hands curl into fists at his sides, and I watch four years of carefully contained fury finally breaking loose all at once. "Our father had me with a woman he never married, never claimed, never once acknowledged outside of the money he paid to keep her quiet. I grew up watching Ren from a distance my entire life. Every birthday. Every holiday. Every single milestone that family celebrated without ever once knowing I existed on the other side of the fence."

"So this is what, revenge for a childhood you think you deserved differently?" My voice shakes, but I force the words out anyway, because staying silent now feels more dangerous than provoking him further. "You kidnapped me, you killed Farrah, you built four years of this because your father was a coward who never told his son the truth?"

"Don't." His voice cracks like a whip, sharp enough that I actually flinch. "Don't you dare simplify this into something small enough for you to dismiss. You have no idea what it costs to watch a brother inherit an entire world while you inherit nothing but silence."

"So make him pay," I say. "Make your father pay. But leave me out of it. I never did anything to you."

"You're not being punished." Something in his voice shifts again, quieter now, though no less dangerous for the change. "You're the one thing in this entire world he actually loves without condition. Everything else, the territory, the name, the family, he was raised to want those things. You, he chose. That makes you worth more to me than anything else he's ever been handed."

I don't answer. I can't, my throat too tight, my mind still reeling from everything he's just handed me, more information in thirty seconds than in every previous day combined.

He straightens, visibly reassembling the composure he lost, and when he speaks again his voice has gone flat and cold, all trace of the raw fury from a moment ago tucked back beneath careful control.

"You'll forget you heard that," he says. "Or you'll wish you had."

He turns and walks out, leaving me standing alone in the dark room with five monitors still playing silent footage of a search that will never once think to look for a name nobody's ever spoken.

The guards return me to my room without a word, and I sit on the edge of the bed long after the door locks behind them, staring at nothing, turning the truth over and over until it finally settles into something I can actually hold.

Ren has another brother. A brother born out of shame and silence, raised in the shadow of a family that never once claimed him, patient enough to build an entire empire of cruelty out of that single, festering wound.

I press my palm flat against my chest, feeling my own heartbeat finally start to slow, and something cold and clear settles into place beneath the grief.

Ren is gone. Nothing about tonight changes that. But now I have a name that isn't a name yet, a shape behind the mask, a wound so deep that built every single thing currently happening to me. And wounds like that, I know from enough years in the field to know it well, always leave a mark somewhere. A file. A record. Some version of the truth that isn't buried quite as deep as he thinks it is.

I lie back against the pillow, staring up at the ceiling, and for the first time since I woke up in this room, the plan forming in my mind isn't about escape alone anymore.

It's about making sure that whoever eventually comes looking for me, Valentino or some version of justice I haven't figured out yet, knows exactly whose name to look for when they finally get here.

I close my eyes, and for the first time in days, sleep comes without a fight, because I finally have something worth staying strong for. A name without a name yet. A crack in his composure I intend to keep pulling at until it splits wide open.