POV: Elara Winters
The guest room has become her studio without anyone officially designating it as such.
Sarah simply started bringing supplies—canvas, paints, brushes—leaving them silently on the table. Elara assumed Dante ordered it. She hasn't asked for confirmation because asking means acknowledging that he's paying attention to what she wants, what she needs, what makes her feel less like a captive.
On the eighth night, she's so absorbed in painting that she doesn't hear him enter.
"You paint," Dante says, his voice making her jump.
Elara turns, brush still in hand. "I didn't know you came up here."
"I didn't," he says. He moves closer to the canvas. "Not until I noticed you weren't in the library."
The painting is a cage. But the bars are made of gold. And the light coming through them is beautiful. Terrible. Both things at once.
Dante studies it in silence.
"It's good," he finally says. "Really good."
Elara doesn't know why those words matter so much. Why his approval feels like oxygen after drowning.
"I haven't painted seriously in three years," she says, surprising herself with the confession. "When my father got injured, I had to drop out. Had to work. Had to..." She stops.
"Sacrifice," Dante finishes.
"Yes."
Dante doesn't look at the painting anymore. He looks at her. Really looks at her, and Elara feels something shift inside her chest.
"Your parents never encouraged this?" he asks.
"They didn't care," Elara says simply. "They were too high to notice most of the time."
She watches his jaw tighten.
"My mother encouraged art," Dante says quietly. "She said creativity was the only thing that made humans different from animals. That it was the only proof we had souls."
Elara turns fully to face him. "What kind of art did she make?"
"Music," Dante says. "She played violin. Terribly, actually. But she played like it mattered. Like the world was listening."
It's the first time Elara has heard him talk about his mother since he mentioned her in the library. The pain underneath his words is barely concealed.
"How old were you?" Elara asks. "When you lost her?"
"Seventeen." Dante's voice is steady, but his hands are clenched. "A message from a rival family. They burned our vacation home with her inside."
Elara's breath catches.
"I was supposed to be there," Dante continues. "But my father sent me on an errand. He said later it was intentional. That he'd gotten a warning and sent me away to be the witness. To understand that love makes you weak."
The realization hits Elara like a stone: Dante's father didn't save him. His father made sure he'd have to watch people learn how to kill the things he loved.
"That's horrible," Elara whispers.
"That's survival," Dante says. But there's no conviction in his voice. "That's the world teaching you the rules."
Elara sets down her brush. Steps closer to him.
"The world taught me the same rules," she says. "That love means suffocation. That family means abandonment. That the people who are supposed to care about you will use you." She pauses. "But I think... I think the world is lying."
Dante's eyes darken.
"You're being naive," he says, but he doesn't move away.
"Maybe," Elara says. "But you showed me Italian poetry about love. You're worried about me being strong enough to survive. You're breaking the rules you said your father taught you."
Dante reaches out. Touches her face with surprising gentleness. His thumb traces her cheekbone like she's made of something precious.
"This is dangerous," he says quietly.
"Everything about this is dangerous," Elara whispers. "But I'm starting to understand why my parents seemed happy to sell me. Because I don't belong to them. I never did. And maybe—" She swallows hard. "Maybe I belong here."
Dante's expression shatters. For just a moment, his control breaks completely, and Elara sees the boy he was at seventeen. The one who heard screaming and couldn't save anyone. The one who decided feeling things was a liability.
"Don't say that," he says roughly. "Don't say things like that."
"Why not? If it's true?"
"Because," Dante says, stepping back, "I'm the man who kidnapped you. I'm the man who trades in human pain for profit. I'm the man my father created to be incapable of loving anything."
"You're not," Elara says. "You're a man who reads poetry. Who shows exhausted girls art books. Who cares if I'm strong enough to survive."
Dante looks at her—really looks at her—for a long moment.
Then he leaves without another word.
But he leaves the poetry book on the windowsill where Elara will find it later. With a line marked in the first poem:
"In the darkness, I found light because you refused to look away."
That night, Elara lies in her beautiful prison and understands something that terrifies her.
She's starting to feel safe with the one person who should scare her most.
And he's starting to feel something for her that he spent years training himself not to feel.
The next morning, Sarah brings new supplies to Elara's studio. High-quality paints. Professional canvases. Everything an artist could need.
"Mr. Valorian's order," Sarah says simply.
Elara doesn't respond. But she understands.
Dante is breaking his own rules. One small act of kindness at a time. And she's breaking hers too—the rule that love is dangerous, that family is failure, that belonging somewhere is impossible.
They're both learning something their pasts taught them was impossible.
By the time Dante returns to the studio the next evening, Elara has painted something new.
It's not a cage anymore. It's two people in shadow and light, reaching toward each other across a distance that might be uncrossable.
It might be them.
When Dante sees it, something in his expression breaks.
He doesn't speak. Doesn't touch her. Doesn't cross the line into something they both know would be impossible to come back from.
But he stays. And in the quiet of the studio, as Elara continues to paint and Dante watches with eyes that are slowly, dangerously, learning how to feel again—
Something begins.
Something that might heal them both.
Or destroy them completely.