"Boss, it's too dangerous! Wait for the extinguishers, we've got men coming from the south wing—"
"Move! Seraphina is still inside!"
His voice cut through the chaos like a blade. For one moment, one fraction of a second that I would carry with me across an ocean, I heard something in it that I had not heard in nine years. Something raw. Something real.
In the end, he ignored their warnings and rushed into the flames.
What he didn't expect was to find Daniela inside too.
"Dominic... help..." Her voice was thin and trembling, and her hand found her stomach again, the choreography flawless even through smoke and fire. The gesture that had shielded her for months. The gesture that had rewritten the hierarchy of this house.
She hadn't even finished her sentence before he scooped her up in his arms, never once glancing at me.
Without hesitation, he turned and walked away. The flames closed behind him like a curtain falling. And I lay on the floor of the guest room, alone, the heat pressing against my skin, watching the doorway where he had stood. Where he had chosen. The way he had always chosen.
Thirty minutes later, after calming Daniela down, he searched the entire house, but I was nowhere to be found. Every room. Every hallway. The wine cellar, the east wing, the garden perimeter where the soldiers kept watch. He sent Marco to check the cameras. He called the gate. Nothing. I had vanished from the Valente estate like smoke clearing after a fire, and the house felt different without me in it, though he would not have been able to say how.
Late that night, at the airport.
After mailing a package at the terminal counter, I boarded a flight to the UK, coughing as I made my way down the aisle. My lungs still burned from the smoke. My throat was raw. The bruise on my wrist from where I had dragged myself across the floor was already darkening. But my passport was in my hand, and the documents were in my bag, and the ring finger on my left hand was bare.
Just before the plane took off, my phone buzzed with a text from Dominic.
[I don't have time to play hide-and-seek with you.]
[Daniela has a prenatal check-up tomorrow at 10 a.m. Come with her, and get your lungs checked too.]
I didn't reply. Instead, I removed the SIM card and powered off the phone, dropping it into my coat pocket like something dead.