Chapter 44 Chapter 44
Lily
I wake up with a sudden discomfort in my body, like something inside me doesn’t quite belong. My head feels lighter than a leaf, floating, detached. The world around me spins slowly, hazy and dreamlike.
My eyelids feel impossibly heavy, but I force them open—fluttering against the blur of light above me.
The first thing I register is warmth. Arms. I’m in his arms. Sebastian. His scent wraps around me—familiar and haunting. Expensive cologne, leather, danger.
My body is limp against him, my wrists still bound, my head resting weakly on his chest as the soft humming sound of an elevator fills my ears.
The walls are glass. The city glows beneath us like we’re rising into another world.
Ding.
The elevator doors open.
We’ve arrived.
I try to lift my head, try to move, but I can’t. My body won’t listen.
He steps out with me still in his arms. The lights are warm and golden. I see tall ceilings, marble floors, wide glass windows that stretch across the skyline.
New York.
The penthouse.
He brought me home.
“Welcome home,” he says quietly, like this is a gift. Like this is something I wanted.
Then he lowers me gently onto the velvet couch. His touch is soft, but it’s wrong. My wrists are still tied. My mind is screaming.
This isn’t home anymore.
This is his world.
And I’ve just been brought back into it like I never left.
“I’m thirsty,” I whisper, my voice barely audible, dry and cracked.
Sebastian doesn’t hesitate. He rushes to the kitchen—fast, purposeful—and comes back within seconds with a glass of water. He kneels beside the couch, slides an arm behind my back, and gently lifts me to help me drink.
The water cools my throat, but not the fire in my chest.
Once I’m done, he sets the glass aside and sits next to me. He watches me in silence, waiting for me to come back to myself—fully. Not just physically. Emotionally. Mentally.
And when he thinks I’m ready, he speaks.
“You good?” he asks.
“No,” I grit through clenched teeth.
His eyes narrow slightly, jaw tightening, but he keeps his voice even. “What did you do in my absence?”
The question lands like a stone in my stomach.
Heavy. Sharp.
I sigh. My eyes find his, then fall. I look down at my hands—at the bruises on my wrist where the zip tie had cut in. I don’t know where to begin. But I have to speak. I have to say it.
“When I heard about your death… I cried. A lot.” My voice trembles. “I nearly fainted.”
Images flash in my mind. Cold floors. Belladonna holding me up. The world collapsing.
“Belladonna was by my side. Then the godfather. Rocco checked in often. And then… Dante started to come.”
I pause, my throat tightening.
“He’d check on me every time. He didn’t say much at first. He’d just show up with food. Sit with me. Make sure I ate. I couldn’t even go to campus… I couldn’t focus. Your fake death haunted me.”
Sebastian is staring at me. Still, unreadable.
“I needed you,” I say softly. “I wanted your presence. So badly. But all I had was silence… and Dante.”
I bite my lower lip, trying not to cry again. But it’s too late. The tears spill anyway.
“I started seeing you in Dante,” I whisper.
His body stiffens beside me. His jaw clenches.
“What do you mean,” he says slowly, dangerously, “you started seeing me in Dante?”
His voice is colder than ice now. Like steel cutting through the air.
Tears stream faster down my cheeks. “He was kind to me. Gentle. He cooked. He stayed. We had dinner together.”
My voice breaks.
“I started growing close to him.”
I don’t say anything else. I just wait.
Wait for the storm I know is coming.
“Did he fucked you?” His voice is neatly clear.
His chest rises—then holds.
Like he forgets to breathe.
I see the flicker in his eyes—shock, disbelief, pain—before it settles into something far darker. A quiet, murderous rage.
But I don’t flinch.
“No,” I say, my voice steady but venom-laced, “but he touched every inch of my body and tasted me everywhere.”
I pause, watching the words cut deep into him like blades.
Then I let the next ones fall with cruelty wrapped in a half-smile.
“I did the same thing to him.” I pause. “We slept in the same bed, in this penthouse, then at a villa and then in his house in Italy.”
The room stills.
It’s like all the air has been sucked out of the penthouse. The silence is suffocating. Explosive.
Sebastian stares at me, his fists clenched so tightly that his knuckles turn white.
His jaw is locked, grinding.
His nostrils flare, and the vein on his neck pulses violently.
His silence is louder than any scream.
I know I’ve hit him where it hurts most—and I wanted to.
He kidnapped me. Drugged me. Dragged me into this without permission.
So I gave him something to burn for.
But underneath all of it—beneath the wicked grin, the proud tilt of my chin—is pain.
A cry for acknowledgment. A punishment. A cry for him to feel what I felt for eight months.
“You left me to rot in grief,” I continue, my voice colder now, hollower. “And when I tried to survive, when I tried to feel human again—you hate me for it?”
He stands suddenly, knocking the glass off the table. It shatters.
His back is to me now, and I see his shoulders rising and falling like a man on the edge.
But he doesn’t say a word. Not yet.
And I sit there, letting the silence scream between us.
Because in that moment, I don’t care if he breaks—
I already did.
“How could you do this, Lily?” he asks, his voice low and hoarse, like it’s been scraped against gravel. There’s pain laced in every syllable, a kind of disbelief he’s choking on.
I snap my gaze up to meet his. “You were dead to me, Sebastian.”
His face tightens, his eyes narrow—but I don’t stop. I can’t.
“The only man who truly cared about me at that moment… was Dante.”
I see the name crack through him like thunder.
But I keep going, even if my voice shakes. “I needed comfort—and he gave it to me.”
I catch my breath, my chest rising and falling too quickly. The words I’ve buried for so long now come crashing like a wave.
“Then after two and a half months… one day while sitting on the kitchen and I started bleeding. A lot. I couldn’t stop shaking, Sebastian.” My voice cracks. “Dante rushed me to the hospital. And that’s when the doctor told me I had a miscarriage.”
He freezes. My words have the weight of death.
I’m crying now, the kind of tears that come from the soul. “I was pregnant all that time—and I didn’t even know. I was so consumed with grief, with the world spinning without you, that I didn’t even realize I’d missed my period for two whole months.”
My hands tremble as I press my palms to my knees, gasping for air through my sobs. “I lost our baby, Sebastian. Our unborn child. And I didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye.”
His face collapses.
“I thought that baby was the last memory I had of you,” I whisper. “The last part of you that was still alive… and then that too, was gone.”
I close my eyes, letting the pain settle back into my bones. “And through all of that, Dante was there. He held my hand. He made me eat. Bella checked on me like a sister. They became the only family I had left.”
Sebastian stumbles a step forward like the truth is dragging him down. “You’ve had a miscarriage?” His voice is barely audible now, just a fragile breath.
He closes the distance between us, and suddenly I’m wrapped in his arms. The same arms I once craved. The same scent, same warmth.
But now it feels like a stranger’s touch.
“Nobody told me about this,” he says, and I feel the shake in his chest as he cries—cries—for the first time. Real, broken tears that soak into my hair.
“How would I know?” he pleads. “Lily, I didn’t know—I swear to you.”
He pulls back just slightly, his hands trembling as he pulls out a knife from his belt. I don’t flinch. He slices through the zip tie with care and lets it fall to the floor with a whisper.
“I’m so sorry,” he murmurs, pressing a kiss to my forehead, gentle and full of sorrow.
But I don’t close my eyes. I don’t melt into him. I just sit there, stiff, cold, empty.
Because all I feel now—for the man who once burned like a wildfire in my chest—is hatred.
A slow, suffocating hatred born not from a lack of love, but from the ruins of it.
He took everything from me.
And now… I have nothing left to give.