DANTE POV
I found Celeste behind my desk.
Not sitting in my chair—that would've been too obvious. She was crouched beside it, frozen like a bunny that knew the wolf had already spotted her.
"Six months," I said quietly. "That's what Ghost told me. Six months to live."
Her face went white. Then red. Then she stood up, shoulders back, chin high like a queen facing death. "So now you know."
"Now I know why you let yourself be sold." I walked into my office, closed the door behind me. Trapping us together. "You're dying. You have nothing left to lose. And for some reason, you needed to get close to me."
"Very smart." Her voice was ice, but her hands shook. "Are you going to kill me now? Save yourself the trouble of watching me die slow?"
"No." I moved to the safe she'd been trying to open. "I'm going to ask you one question, and I want the truth. Did you know my organization destroyed your family?"
Celeste's eyes widened. Just for a second. Just enough.
"Ghost is thorough," I continued. "He found everything. Your father's company. The aggressive takeover. Your mother's claimed death. The fraud charges that weren't true. All of it traced back to my actions." I opened the safe, pulling out a thick folder. "All of it signed off by Victor Kane, using my authority."
I threw the folder at her feet. "So I'll ask again: did you know?"
She stared at the papers scattered around her. At proof of everything she'd lost. "Yes."
"For how long?"
"Three years." Her voice cracked. "I've known for three years that you ruined everything I loved. That you killed my father and stole my life. And when I got diagnosed—when the doctors said I had months instead of years—I made a plan. Get sold at a sale. Make sure you bought me. Get close enough to ruin you the same way you ruined me."
The words should've made me angry. Should've made me reach for my gun.
Instead, I felt something worse. Respect.
"But you didn't know it was Victor," I said.
"Not until tonight. Not until I heard you talking." She looked up at me, those ice-blue eyes filled with tears she wouldn't let fall. "You really didn't order it, did you? You didn't even know about my family until now."
"I knew something was wrong with that deal. Victor said it was important. Strategic. I trusted him." I picked up one of the papers. My signature at the bottom, approving everything. "But the signature's real. The authority's real. Even if I didn't pull the button, I gave him the gun."
"So what now?" Celeste asked. "You know I came here for payback. You know I'm going. You know I've been lying since the second you bought me. What are you going to do about it?"
I should've thrown her out. Should've called Ghost to handle her. Should've protected myself from the tool I'd brought into my own home.
But I kept thinking about how she'd lunged for that flash drive even knowing she'd get shot. How she'd faced her dead mother without breaking. How she'd stood in this office, caught and trapped, and still looked at me like an equal.
"I'm taking you to dinner," I said.
She blinked. "What?"
"Dinner. Food. Conversation. Like normal people." I pulled out my phone. "Then we're going to the opera. Puccini, I think. You said you liked Italian music."
"I never told you that."
"You mentioned it yesterday. In the car. After your mother died. You said your father used to take you to see Tosca at the Met." I met her eyes. "So I bought tickets."
Celeste stared at me like I'd lost my mind. Maybe I had. "You're taking your would-be assassin to the opera."
"You're dying. I'm probably going to war with my best friend who's been stealing from me for years. We're both running out of time." I held out my hand. "So yes. We're going to the opera. We're going to eat expensive food and pretend to be people who aren't killing each other. And maybe—just maybe—we'll figure out what the hell we're actually fighting for."
She didn't take my hand. "This is insane."
"Everything about this is crazy. Dinner and opera is the most normal thing that's happened in two days."
"You know I still want revenge."
"And you know I still own you. We're both stuck." I kept my hand extended. "But we don't have to be enemies while we're trapped together."
Celeste looked at my hand for a long moment. I watched her face—watched her calculate, consider, reject a dozen ideas. Finally, she reached out and took it.
Her fingers were cold. Small. They fit exactly in mine, and I hated how right that felt.
"One dinner," she said. "One play. Then we go back to being enemies."
"Deal."
I pulled her to her feet, and for just a second, we stood too close. Close enough that I could smell her shampoo. Close enough to see the gold flecks in her blue eyes. Close enough to do something incredibly stupid.
I stepped back. "The opera starts at eight. That gives you four hours to decide what you're going to wear."
"I don't have anything to wear. I came here with nothing, remember?"
"There's a closet full of clothes in your room. I had Isabella stock it this morning." I headed for the door. "Get ready. And Celeste?"
"What?"
"No more breaking into my office. If you want to know something, just ask. I'm done with games."
"You're still playing them, though," she said quietly. "Taking me to the opera. Buying me clothes. Pretending you care. It's all just another way to control me."
She was right. But she was also wrong.
I turned back to face her. "Maybe. Or maybe I'm just tired of being the monster everyone thinks I am. Maybe I want one night where I'm just a man taking a woman to see something beautiful before everything falls apart."
"That's not possible. Not for people like us."
"We'll see."
I left her standing in my office, surrounded by evidence of her family's destruction, wearing nothing but my t-shirt and her desire to hate me.
Four hours later, she emerged at the top of the stairs wearing a blue dress that matched her eyes. She'd done something with her hair. No makeup—she didn't need it. She looked like an angel.
An angel planning my murder.
"Ready?" I asked.
She walked down the stairs, each step careful because of her shoulder. When she reached the bottom, she looked at me with an emotion I couldn't read. "This doesn't change anything between us."
"I know."
"I still hate you."
"I know that too."
"Good." She took my arm. "Let's go pretend we're normal."
We were halfway to the car when my phone buzzed. Ghost's name showed on the screen.
I almost ignored it. Almost picked one normal evening over the chaos waiting.
But I answered.
"Boss," Ghost said, voice tight with stress. "We've got a problem. Victor just moved fifty million out of your foreign accounts. And he's calling a meeting with the Five Families. Tonight. Same time as your show."
My blood ran cold. "He's making a move."
"Looks like it. He's telling people you've gone soft. That you're busy. That it's time for new leadership."
I looked at Celeste, beautiful and dangerous in her blue dress. At the opera tickets in my pocket. At the one regular evening I'd wanted.
"Cancel the opera," I said. "We're going to the meeting."
"Wait." Celeste grabbed my arm. "Don't. This is what he wants. He wants you to react. To look weak. To prove his point."
"I can't ignore a direct challenge—"
"So don't. Bring me." Her eyes blazed with something dangerous. Something clever. "Bring your new buy to the meeting. Show them you're not distracted—you're changing. You're building something they don't understand."
It was crazy. Bringing her to a Five Families meeting was basically painting a mark on both our backs.
But it was also exactly the kind of power move that might work.
"You sure about this?" I asked.
"No. But I'm dying anyway." She smiled, cold and beautiful. "Might as well make it memorable."
I called Ghost back. "Change of plans. We're going to the meeting. And I'm bringing Celeste."
"Boss, that's—" " A statement. Set it up."
As we walked to the car, Celeste leaned close. "You know this is probably a trick, right? Victor might be planning to kill us both tonight."
"Probably."
"And you're still going?"
"We're still going." I opened the car door for her. "Because if we're going to die, we might as well do it together."
She slid into the car, and I caught her smile just before she hid it. Not a happy smile. A hunter's smile.
"Dante?" she said as I got in beside her.
"Yeah?"
"The flash drive from my mother. The one you swapped for the antibiotics. Did Victor actually give you medicine, or was that a lie too?" I pulled the syringe from my pocket—the one Victor's doctor had brought an hour ago. The one I hadn't let anyone put into Celeste yet.
"Ghost is testing it now," I said. "Why?"
Celeste took the syringe from my hand and held it up to the light. The liquid inside was clear. Normal.
Then she tilted it, and I saw the dirt at the bottom.
"Because that's not medicine," she said. "That's poison."