He stood in the threshold, his dark eyes sweeping over the half-packed boxes, the neat stacks of his possessions. His expression hardened into something cold and unreadable—the mask of the Young Don, the face he wore for enemies and strangers.
He seemed to sense something different in me. Something shifted. But he couldn't place what had changed.
He didn't pause to ask.
He walked straight past me toward the bedroom, his footsteps deliberate against the obsidian tile.
The sounds that followed were violent—drawers wrenched open, cabinet doors slamming, the rustle of fabric being torn aside.
Then he stormed back out, tearing through the clothes and personal effects I had already folded with care. His hands moved with desperate fury, scattering everything across the floor.
"What are you doing?"
I stepped forward.
But his arm shot out like a blade, catching me across the chest. The force sent me sprawling to the ground.
"Where's the voice recorder?"
His voice.
Dio mio, his voice.
How long had it been since he'd spoken to me directly? How many months of silence, of cold shoulders, of messages typed on screens because he couldn't—or wouldn't—spare me the sound of his words?
"What voice recorder? I didn't take anything."
I looked down at my right hand. Crimson was seeping through the fresh bandages again, blooming like roses against white linen.
He resumed his frantic search, overturning boxes, ripping through garment bags.
I looked up at him.
I had never seen Nico Volpe like this.
Drenched in sweat, his tailored shirt clinging to his chest. His silk tie yanked loose, hanging like a noose around his throat. His cashmere coat—worth more than most men earned in a month—was covered in dust and debris.
Disheveled.
Desperate.
Unraveling.
"Where is the voice recorder!"
He stopped his destruction and turned on me, towering over my crumpled form like a dark angel of judgment.
"I told you I haven't seen it!"
I had never been this defiant. Never raised my voice to the heir of the Volpe bloodline.
I braced my left hand against the cold floor and struggled to my feet, forcing myself to meet his gaze. To stand before him as something other than the dutiful wife, the silent shadow, the woman who had sacrificed everything and received nothing in return.
He seemed lost. Unmoored from the iron control that defined him.
Anger churned beneath the surface of his features—a storm building behind those dark eyes.