Chapter 9

Dante POV

The whiskey didn't burn anymore. It tasted like nothing.

I sat in my study. The lights were off. The only illumination came from the streetlamps outside, filtering through the heavy velvet curtains like moonlight on a grave.

It had been two weeks.

We dragged the harbor. We hired divers. We bribed the Coast Guard.

Nothing.

The current at the West End is a monster. It drags everything out to the open ocean.

She was gone.

I poured another glass. My hand brushed a stack of papers on the desk. Separation papers. The ones she tried to give me. The ones I tore up. I had taped them back together last night in a fit of drunken madness, tracing her signature with my thumb until the paper wore thin.

The door creaked open.

A silhouette stood there, backlit by the hallway light.

"Dante?"

It was a woman. She was wearing a silk robe. Her silk robe. The emerald green silk I had draped over Elena's shoulders in Milan.

My heart stopped.

"Elena?" I whispered. I stood up, the chair scraping violently against the floor.

She stepped into the room. "Dante, you need to sleep. You haven't slept in days."

The voice was wrong. It was too high. Too pitchy.

It wasn't Elena.

It was Sofia.

She walked toward me, the oversized robe trailing on the floor. She had styled her hair differently. Straighter. Darker.

"I thought..." she started, reaching for my arm. "I thought maybe you needed comfort. I know you're hurting. I miss her too."

She touched my chest.

A red haze exploded behind my eyes.

I grabbed her wrist. Hard.

"Take it off," I snarled.

Sofia flinched. "Dante, you're hurting me."

"Take it off!" I roared. "That is not yours! You do not touch her things!"

I shoved her away. She stumbled, crashing into the bookshelf.

"I'm just trying to help!" she cried. "She's dead, Dante! She's dead and I'm here! I'm the one who needs you now!"

"You are nothing," I said, my voice dropping to a deadly whisper. "You are a ghost of a mistake I made."

"How can you say that?" She pulled the robe tighter around herself. "You chose me. At the docks. You picked me."

The words hit me like a physical blow.

You chose me.

"I didn't choose you," I said, the truth tasting like ash. "I gambled with her life because I thought you were too pathetic to survive. And I lost."

"Dante..."

"Get out," I said. "Get out before I forget who your brother was."

She ran out of the room, sobbing.

I sank back into the chair. I looked at the empty doorway.

The house was huge. It was a fortress. But without the click of her heels in the hallway, without the scent of her perfume lingering in the air, it wasn't a home.

It was a mausoleum. And I was the corpse sitting at the desk.