The entire time I was locked in that cellar, I refused to apologize.

The sealed space made it hard to breathe. Stone walls, no windows, the kind of room built for men who owed debts they couldn't pay. All I could do was curl into myself as tightly as possible, searching for some small scrap of comfort. Somewhere above me, the compound went on living. Footsteps. Muffled voices. The faint percussion of a door closing in a distant wing.

Then a pair of leather shoes appeared in front of me. Riccardo stood over me, looking down. "Ready to admit you were wrong?"

I thought of the mausoleum, leveled to nothing, and the stubbornness in me held. "I wasn't wrong. Riccardo, you know that burial ground—"

He cut me off before I could finish. "I know."

"Nico wanted it. So I gave it to her."

I stared up at him, eyes wide. "You gave it to her?"

In that moment, I felt like I was looking at a stranger.

Riccardo shrugged it off. His signet ring turned lazily against his knuckle, a habit that looked casual to anyone who didn't know what it meant. "Nico is beautiful and kind. If she hadn't carried me out of those mountains, I probably wouldn't be alive today."

"Bianca, all you have to do is admit you were wrong, and I'll let you out."

The mountains? Nico saved him?

Three years ago, when Riccardo was stranded in the mountains after a deal gone wrong, I was the one who hauled him out. Step by step, his weight on my back, through the snow, while Barone soldiers waited at the treeline because none of them could reach us in time. He survived. I ended up in a Dr.-run clinic for two weeks. When I finally woke up, the first thing I learned was that he'd been keeping a mistress the entire time. That was what ended our marriage.

But how had the person who saved him become Nico?

I opened my mouth. "Riccardo, maybe you should look into—"

"Mr. Barone, please don't be hard on her. It's all my fault. I lost my footing and fell on my own. She absolutely did not push me…"

Nico clicked over in her heels and positioned herself at Riccardo's side, instantly pulling every ounce of his attention. The sound of her shoes on the cellar stairs had been deliberate, timed, rehearsed.

The moment I met her eyes, full of calculation and triumph, I understood. Nico had stolen credit for what I'd done.

Riccardo wrapped his arm around Nico's slim waist, his voice tender. "What are you doing out of bed? The doctor said you need rest."

Nico leaned into him, her voice a syrupy whine. "I missed you. And it looks like she still hasn't realized what she did wrong." One lacquered nail tapped the edge of his lapel, light as a suggestion. "Maybe you should toss something in there with her. I hear people confess to anything when they're scared enough."

Riccardo gave her an approving glance, then turned to the soldiers. "You two. Go put my pets in there."

The word pets sent ice through my veins.

Riccardo had a particular hobby. He kept centipedes, spiders, and snakes. Cold-blooded creatures, all of them. The kind of collection that made visitors go quiet and then never mention it again.

The first time I'd seen them, I'd asked him, "They won't bite me, will they?"

Back then, Riccardo had looked me in the eye and promised, with every appearance of sincerity: "Don't worry. As long as I'm here, I will never let them hurt you. I won't let anyone hurt you."

I never imagined this day would come so soon.

When the centipedes and spiders were released into the cellar, my scalp went numb. They moved as if drawn to me, locking onto my position with terrible precision, swarming up my body in a crawling, writhing mass.

Tiny, sharp stabs of pain, over and over, until I could barely think.

Riccardo's expression wavered. His ring went still.

Nico pressed her fingertips to her temple, her voice going faint. "Oh no, Mr. Barone, I think I'm feeling a little unwell…"

Without a word, Riccardo scooped her into his arms and walked away. The cellar door stayed open. No one came back.

I lifted my head just in time to catch Nico peering back over his shoulder. Our eyes met. She mouthed the words silently: You deserve this, you worthless tramp.

I clenched my jaw and slammed my hands down on the insects, crushing every one I could reach.

Only one thought kept me alive: I am not dying here.

When I came to again, the sharp sting of antiseptic filled my nostrils. I frowned, the smell alone enough to make my stomach turn.

I struggled to sit up, but Riccardo's voice cut through the silence before I could manage it. "You're hurt. Rest. What are you squirming around for?" A pause, then a sigh heavy with irritation. "You never make anything easy."

I clenched my fingers into the bedsheet. "And whose fault is it that I ended up like this?"

Riccardo's expression froze for a split second before hardening over. His signet ring caught the overhead light as his hand tightened around the arm of the chair. "You brought this on yourself. Don't blame anyone else."

His words drove through my chest like a blade, buried themselves deep in my heart. The pain stole every word I might have said.

When I stayed silent, he opened his mouth to speak again, but a shrill ringtone cut him off.

He answered, and just like that, his voice softened without him even seeming to notice.

"Serafina... yeah... I'll pick some up for you on my way over..."

He hung up and the warmth vanished, replaced by ice. "Serafina is being generous this time. She's not making a formal complaint to the Capos. Her birthday is in two days. Don't show your face there."

Two days. That was exactly when I'd planned to leave.

I lowered my gaze and said nothing.

The moment Riccardo walked out, my phone buzzed with a text from Serafina.

Don't kid yourself into thinking Riccardo actually cares about you. He's planning to propose to me at my birthday gala. You're welcome to come watch, of course, but he'd really rather you didn't.

I turned off the phone and stared out the window at the blue sky and drifting clouds. My mind pulled me back to the day Riccardo had proposed to me.

After I'd said yes, he'd lifted me off my feet and spun me around, laughing, again and again. He'd even had fireworks set off over Barone territory for nine straight nights to celebrate.

Back then, he'd been so happy he wanted the whole world to know I was his.

But after that... everything changed. The compound was the same. The man was not.

The next day, I was discharged and went back to the estate. I punched in the gate code, and the panel flashed red. Incorrect password.

I tried again. And again. Each time the same cold rejection blinked back at me, until the system locked me out entirely.

That code, the one my fingers had entered thousands upon thousands of times, now told me I didn't belong here.

I remembered the day I'd first moved into this house. Riccardo had taken my hand, and together we'd set the password.

"Just in case a certain someone forgets," he'd said with a grin, "I picked the day we got together."

That date was also my birthday. There was no way I'd gotten it wrong.

Yet the alarm kept blaring, each beep a slap across my face.

I was still standing there, frozen, when the door swung open from inside.

Serafina stood in the doorway wearing my silk nightgown. She yawned, slow and lazy, as if she'd just rolled out of bed.

Then she swept her hair to one side, deliberately baring a neck mottled with hickeys. Her eyes glittered with satisfaction she didn't bother to hide.

"Oh, I'm so sorry, sweetie. Riccardo brought me home last night, and I threw a little fit, so he changed the code." She tilted her head, lips curling. One lacquered nail tapped lightly against the doorframe. "Guess he forgot to tell you."

There wasn't a shred of guilt on Nico DeLuca's face. If anything, she looked pleased with herself, watching me the way a cat watches something it has already decided to kill slowly. Her eyes tracked every micro-expression, waiting for the fracture, the flinch, the moment I would finally shatter into something she could sweep aside.

But I just stared at her, expressionless. I didn't say a word.

The foyer of the Barone estate was silent around us, the kind of silence that only marble and money can produce. Somewhere deeper in the house, soldiers moved on soft-soled shoes, their presence felt rather than seen. The grandfather clock in the parlor measured the standoff in patient, indifferent ticks.

Nico rolled her eyes, bored by my lack of reaction, and stepped aside to let me through. One lacquered nail tapped the edge of the doorframe, delicate as crystal against porcelain, and a nasty smile curled at the corner of her lips. "Watch your step, sorella. Wouldn't want you to throw out your back carrying all that nothing you own."

My gaze dropped. I caught her foot sliding out to trip me.

Every humiliation. Every backhand dealt in front of men who wouldn't meet my eyes afterward. Every night locked in a room that smelled of cedar and fear. Every degradation I'd swallowed over the past few days surged through me at once, not as fire but as something colder, something that had finally crystallized into a shape hard enough to cut. I lifted my foot and brought it down hard.

"Ahhh!"

Nico shrieked and crumpled to the floor, clutching her foot. The sound was theatrical and immediate, a performance that began before the pain had even fully registered. She knew how to make suffering look beautiful. She'd been practicing on mine for years.

Riccardo came rushing down the main staircase, still buttoning the cuff of his dress shirt, the onyx links catching lamplight as he descended. His signet ring rolled against his knuckle with each step, the unconscious tell of a man assembling authority on the fly. "What happened? Nico, what's wrong—"

Before I could get a word out, Nico beat me to it. She lifted her face, eyes glistening on command, voice pitched to the exact register that made powerful men feel needed. "I was being nice and opened the door for her, and she didn't even appreciate it. She stomped on my foot on purpose!"

Riccardo's face went black. The signet ring stopped rolling. He didn't ask a single question. "Bianca. Apologize."

Again.

No questions asked. Just apologize.

I looked at Riccardo in silence. The chandelier above us threw prismatic light across the floor, refracting into small, cold rainbows that touched nothing and warmed nothing. Two soldiers flanked the hallway behind him, faces blank, hands loose at their sides. They had heard the order. They were already calculating what would follow my refusal.

It didn't matter what I said. He would never believe me. He had made his judgment the moment Nico DeLuca opened her mouth, the same way he had made it every time before. The evidence was irrelevant. The verdict had been delivered at the altar of their arrangement, and I was only ever the defendant. So I said nothing at all.

Riccardo's jaw tightened, the muscle in his cheek jumping once. The ring on his hand was perfectly still now, and everyone near him knew what that stillness meant. "Looks like you don't need those legs of yours."

The words had barely left his mouth before two soldiers stepped forward, one on each side, pinning me in place. Their grips were professional, fingers finding the pressure points in my arms with practiced economy. The lead soldier gave one brief tug to his jacket hem, clearing the holster line, and I felt the dread of that tiny act flood through me worse than any shouted threat.

A third raised a baton and brought it down on my kneecap. The pain was blinding, a white detonation that erased the foyer, the chandelier, the marble, everything except the single shrieking nerve that ran from my shattered joint to the base of my skull. My legs buckled and I hit the floor, cold sweat pouring down my face. I bit down so hard my teeth nearly cracked, but I refused to make a sound. The floor was freezing against my palms. I could feel the grout lines between the tiles pressing into my skin like the bars of a cage laid flat.

Something in my silence set Riccardo off. Perhaps it was the absence of begging. Perhaps it was the realization, dim and unwelcome, that there was a place inside me he could no longer reach. His voice turned brutal, the heir apparent shedding the last pretense of domestic displeasure and speaking as what he truly was: a man who believed pain was a dialect and that if he only spoke it loudly enough, I would finally answer in it. "Fine. You want to play tough? Let's see just how tough you really are."

He ordered the soldiers to throw me into the freezer.

The walk-in cold storage sat beneath the estate's kitchen wing, a reinforced room originally built to hold perishable inventory for the Dr.'s catering front. It had other uses now. Everyone in the household knew that. No one spoke of them.

Riccardo stood at the freezer door, his eyes colder than anything inside it. The vapor curled out around his polished shoes like something alive and obedient.

"Stay in there and cool off, Bianca. You can come out when you're ready to admit you were wrong."

The door sealed with a hydraulic sigh, and the world reduced itself to a steel box and a single overhead bulb that buzzed with the patience of something that had watched other women sit here before me.

The cold ate through my skin, my muscles, my bones. I could feel my body temperature dropping, degree by degree, the way a candle feels itself burning down. Frost formed on my eyelashes. My fingers went white, then blue. The pain in my knee became a distant, throbbing planet orbiting somewhere outside my body, replaced by the more immediate democracy of cold, which hurt everything equally. I pressed my hands together, smoothing the edge of my sleeve over and over, flattening the seam until the fabric grew damp with frost and my fingertips lost all sensation.

I didn't want to die in here.

I was so close. So close to getting out.

I tried to call for Riccardo, but my throat wouldn't produce a sound. The cold had stolen that, too. The only noise was my own breathing, shallow and rapid, fogging the air in small desperate clouds that the room consumed without acknowledgment.