CLAIMED BY THE RUTHLESS DON

The room they gave her wasn’t a guest room. It was her old room.

Elena stood in the doorway and felt the floor tilt slightly beneath her feet. Same four poster bed. Same cream curtains, though someone had clearly replaced them at some point because the originals had a coffee stain on the left panel that used to drive her insane.

Same small writing desk by the window where she used to sketch out impossible dreams of a life that didn’t involve armed men in the driveway.

“You kept it,” she said, her voice coming out smaller than she meant it to.

“I didn’t keep anything,” Dominic muttered behind her, arms crossed in the doorway like he needed the frame to hold him up too. “I simply never had a reason to change it.”

“For seven years?” she asked, skeptical.

“Time moves strangely in this house,” he muttered, and there was something almost bitter beneath the words, like he resented admitting it.

She set her single duffel bag on the bed and turned to face him. “I don’t need a shrine, Dominic,” she said pointedly.

“It’s not a shrine,” he said, jaw tightening. “It’s a room. Rooms exist whether or not you’re in them.”

“Sure,” she said, unconvinced, “and I suppose the curtains just decided to match the old ones out of pure coincidence.”

He didn’t answer that. Which, she thought, was answer enough.

A knock interrupted them, sharp and businesslike.

Marco appeared with her second bag slung over one shoulder, his expression carefully blank in the way of a man who had trained himself not to react to anything.

“Where do you want this, sir?” Marco asked, not looking at Elena directly.

“By the desk is fine,” Dominic said.

Marco set it down and lingered a beat too long, his eyes flicking once, quickly, to Elena’s face, before he cleared his throat.

“Will there be anything else?” he muttered.

“That’s all,” Dominic said.

Marco nodded and left, but not before Elena caught the way his shoulders stayed rigid all the way down the hall, like a man walking away from something he was afraid might follow him.

“He really doesn’t like me,” Elena murmured once the footsteps faded.

“I told you. He doesn’t like anyone,” Dominic said, pushing off the doorframe, stepping into the room in that unhurried way he had, like the world would simply wait for him to arrive wherever he was going.

“Except my mother’s dog. He liked that dog.”

“What happened to the dog?” she asked.

“Died of old age. Marco cried for two days and denied it for two years.”

A ghost of something warm crossed his face, gone before she could hold onto it.

“Don’t ever bring it up. He’ll deny that too.”

Despite herself, Elena felt her mouth twitch.

“Big scary enforcer, ruined by a poodle,” she teased.

“It was a Yorkshire terrier,” Dominic said arrogantly, with the gravity of a man correcting a serious historical inaccuracy, “and I’d appreciate you not repeating that story to anyone, or he might actually break my kneecap this time.”

“Your secret’s safe,” she said, then hesitated. “For now.”

“For now,” he echoed, and there it was again, that flicker of something almost easy between them, before his expression shuttered closed like a door slamming in the wind.

He turned to leave, then stopped in the doorway.

“There’s coffee downstairs,” he muttered, not looking at her. “Kitchen, second cupboard from the left. You still take it black with one sugar, or did that change too, in your seven years of becoming a stranger?”

The question landed somewhere under her ribs and stayed there.

“Black, one sugar,” she said quietly. “Some things don’t change.”

“No,” he muttered. “They don’t.”

He left before she could ask what he meant by that.

Dinner was tense in a way that had nothing to do with the food.

They sat at opposite ends of a table long enough to seat twelve, which felt, Elena thought, like a deliberate metaphor Dominic had constructed simply to torture her.

Marco served the meal himself, refusing help from the household staff, and Elena noticed he’d made a second, smaller dish that looked suspiciously less burnt than what sat on Dominic’s plate.

“Is that for me?” she asked, eyeing the untouched second plate.

“No,” Marco said quickly.

“It has a fork on it, Marco,” she pointed out.

“It’s for later,” he muttered, and set it down in front of her anyway before retreating toward the kitchen at a speed that bordered on fleeing.

Dominic watched the exchange with faint amusement.

“He likes you more than he’s letting on,” he said.

“He looks at me like I might be contagious,” she replied.

“That’s just his face,” Dominic muttered. “He looked at my mother that way too, and she adored him.”

They ate in silence for a while, the only sound the clink of silverware and the distant hum of the city beyond the fortified windows.

Elena found herself watching him.

The way he cut his food with precise, economical movements. The way his eyes flicked toward the door every few minutes, cataloguing exits without seeming to think about it.

“You never used to do that,” she said before she could stop herself.

“Do what?” he asked.

“Watch the door like it’s about to come off its hinges.”

Something shifted behind his eyes.

“A lot changes when you become responsible for two hundred people’s lives, Elena,” he muttered.

“Watching doors is the least of it.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, and meant it.

“Don’t be,” he said, setting down his fork, and for a moment the mask slipped, just slightly, just enough for her to see the exhaustion underneath.

“It’s not your burden to carry.”

“Wasn’t it, once?” she asked.

The question hung in the air between them, fragile as glass.

“Once,” he muttered finally, “you carried a great many things I didn’t ask you to. And then you set them all down and walked out the door without a word.”

“Dominic…” she started.

“Don’t,” he said, voice quiet, but it landed like a wall going up brick by brick. “We’re not doing this tonight. You wanted a truce for your brother’s sake. Let’s keep it a truce.”

She swallowed the words crowding her throat and nodded instead, and the rest of the meal passed in a silence so heavy she could have drowned in it.

It was past midnight when she gave up on sleep entirely.

The house was too quiet, too full of memory, every creak of the floorboards sounding like a ghost walking the halls. She wrapped a cardigan around herself and slipped out of her room, following the pull of old instinct down the corridor to the one place she knew, without needing to think about it, he’d be.

The study door was cracked open. Firelight flickered against the walls.

She found him standing at the window, a glass of something amber in his hand, untouched, staring out at the dark garden like it might give him answers the rest of the world refused to.

“Can’t sleep?” she asked softly from the doorway.

“You remembered,” he muttered, not turning.

“Some things don’t change,” she said, echoing his own words back at him. “You always came here when your head got too loud.”

“And you always found me.”

He finally turned, and in the firelight his eyes looked almost haunted. “Why is that, Elena?” he asked. “Seven years, and you still know exactly where to look.”

“I don’t know,” she admitted.

“I do,” he muttered, setting the glass down, untouched, and crossing the room toward her with a slow, deliberate intensity that made her breath catch in her throat. “It’s because some part of you never actually left this house. You just took the rest of you with you when you went.”

“Dominic…” she said, barely a whisper.

“There’s something you’re not telling me,” he muttered, stopping close enough that she had to tilt her head back to meet his eyes. “About why you really left. I can feel it, Elena, the way I used to feel a storm coming before the sky ever changed color.”

Her heart slammed against her ribs. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, defensive.

“Don’t you?” he asked.

His gaze dropped, just briefly, to the old, faded scar at her collarbone, one she’d always kept covered, one he’d never once asked about, until now.

“Because that mark on your shoulder wasn’t there when you were twenty two. And I’ve spent seven years wondering exactly how you got it… and why the story Marco told me about your betrayal never quite added up.”

Somewhere down the hall, a phone began to ring, sharp and insistent in the silence.

And from the look on Dominic’s face as the ringing continued, unanswered, Elena understood, with a cold drop of dread, that whatever news was coming through that line was about to change everything.