Luna's POVThe dress was the color of red wine, silk that poured over my body like it had been made for someone else's confidence instead of mine. Sofia zipped it up at the back, her fingers quick and practiced, and I stared at my reflection like I was looking at a stranger wearing my face. I'd never have expected Don Russo to invite me to a dinner with him.

"It's beautiful," she said.

"It's expensive." I smoothed the fabric down my hip, feeling the weight of it, the way it clung. "That's not the same thing."

She didn't answer that. She didn't have to. We both knew what I meant...that every thread of this dress had been paid for by a man I hadn't chosen, that wearing it was its own kind of signature on a contract I never signed.

The dining room was the size of a small church, a table long enough to seat twenty stretching down its center, though only two places had been set, one at the head, one at the corner nearest to it. Close enough to be intimate. Far enough to remind me of my place.

Dominic was already seated when I walked in.

He didn't stand. He didn't smile. He watched me cross the room the way a man watches weather move in...calculating, patient, already three steps ahead of whatever I was about to do.

"You look lovely," he said, and it didn't sound like a compliment. It sounded like an observation, filed away with everything else he was cataloguing about me.

I sat. A server appeared instantly to unfold the napkin across my lap, and I fought the urge to flinch at the closeness of unfamiliar hands.

Dinner began.

He ate in silence. Not the awkward silence of two strangers who didn't know what to say...a controlled silence, deliberate, the kind that filled a room more completely than words could. Every clink of his fork against the china was measured. Every glance he sent my way lingered a beat too long, like he was reading something written beneath my skin.

I picked at the food in front of me. Something with saffron, something that probably cost more than a month's rent back in my old life. I couldn't taste it. My stomach was a fist, clenched tight around nerves I couldn't name.

His eyes were on me. They were always on me. I felt them the way you feel sun on the back of your neck...warm, inescapable, faintly dangerous if you stood in it too long.

"You're not eating," he said.

"I'm not hungry." I stated.

"You're nervous." Not a question. He set his fork down with a precision that made the small sound feel enormous. "You don't need to be."

"Easy for you to say." The words slipped out before I could stop them, sharper than I intended. I braced for the reaction.

He only tilted his head, something unreadable moving behind those dark eyes. "Is it?"

I didn't answer. I picked my fork back up instead, hands unsteady, and that was when it happened...the fork slipping from my fingers, clattering against the plate, then the floor, the sound obscene in a room built for silence.

Every server along the wall went rigid. A woman near the sideboard actually stopped breathing, I watched her chest go still, watched her eyes drop to the floor like looking up might be dangerous. Nobody moved to pick it up. Nobody moved at all.

I stared at the fork on the marble, my face burning, waiting for the temperature in the room to drop the rest of the way.

Dominic rose.

Unhurried. He rounded the corner of the table, bent, and retrieved the fork himself. He didn't hand it back to me, he set it aside and, from somewhere, produced another, laying it beside my plate with the same care a man might use setting a chess piece.

"There," he said, sitting back down like nothing had happened at all.

No raised voice. No flash of temper. Just that...a quiet correction, absorbed and erased in under ten seconds, and somehow that was more unsettling than if he'd shouted. Shouting I would have understood. Shouting was a language I'd grown up fluent in. This... this total, unbothered command of a moment that should have belonged to embarrassment, this was something else.

I glanced at the servers. Not one of them had relaxed. They stood like statues arranged around the edges of the room, waiting for permission to exist again.

"You should know how this household works," Dominic said, as if the fork had never fallen, as if we were simply continuing a conversation we'd already begun. He reached for his wine, swirled it once, didn't drink. "There are three rules. You'll only need to hear them once."

I set my hands in my lap to keep them from shaking.

"One." He held up a single finger. "Never lie to me. About anything. I will always know, and the cost of finding out from someone else is always higher than the cost of telling me yourself."

I said nothing. My throat had gone dry.

"Two." A second finger. "Never leave this estate without telling me first. Not the gardens, those are yours. Beyond the gates." His eyes didn't blink. "I need to know where you are. Always."

The word "always"sat heavy in the air between us, thick as smoke.

"Three." He leaned forward slightly, and the temperature of the room seemed to shift with him, the candlelight catching the sharp line of his jaw. "Never allow another man to touch you."

My pulse jumped. "And if I ask why?"

Something flickered across his face, not quite a smile, too dark for that, but close enough to its shadow that my stomach dropped anyway.

"Because I don't share."

Three words. He said them the way other men might say "good morning" ... simple, unbothered, absolute. And yet something in my chest twisted at the sound of them, some traitorous heat unspooling low in my belly that had no business existing in a room this cold, at a table set for a marriage I never wanted.

I hated that my body understood something my mind refused to.

"That's it?" I managed. "Three rules?"

"Three rules," he agreed, "and the understanding that I don't repeat myself."

He picked his fork back up. Dinner resumed, silent again, and I sat there with my new fork gleaming untouched beside my plate, watching the servers along the wall slowly exhale, one by one, now that the danger had passed.

That was when I understood it, really understood it, in the marrow of my bones. It wasn't loyalty that kept this house running so smoothly, so silently, so perfectly. It was fear. I could see it in the way the girl by the sideboard still hadn't lifted her eyes from the floor. I could see it in the careful, choreographed distance every servant kept from Dominic's chair, like proximity itself was a risk.

They didn't love him.

They survived him.

And sitting there in my wine-red silk, three rules settling into my chest like stones, I wondered which one I was going to become.