playthingbearLuna's POVI shuddered as his hands lowered...shivers running down my spine. I couldn't bare to look at him because I remembered his face... that night in the club...

"I need to meet my little brother." He whispered behind my hair. "Just see if he's taking care of you just 'right'." My heart thumped faster...the heat radiating from him made me feel like he was staring into my soul. And the fact that I knew what he meant by his statement. I gulped, hating how I couldn't defend myself; no, they'd punish me if I did, just like my father. Then he turned and strutted towards Dominic's office. A place I was terrified of entering.

The lady turned to me, her eyes burning with rage...then she approached me with a face that was contorted with disgust and instantly pulled my hair. I yelped at the way she yanked my head backwards...tears pinching the corner of my eyes at that excruciating pain.

"You stupid bitch. So you're his next play thing I see. But you're not even up to my standard." Her hands curled deeper until her nails dug into my head.

"Please..." Tears trickled down my eyes. "Please...stop."

"Pathetic." She spat. "Do you think that he would ever choose you above me?" She chuckled.

Victoria's fingers were still tangled in my hair when footsteps sounded on the marble behind us...fast, heavy, unhurried by nothing.

"Victoria." The familiar voice tumbled through the room, even causing me to shudder. I felt Victoria's hand loosen from my hair like she'd touched a live wire.

Dominic stood in the archway, and I had never seen stillness look so much like violence. His eyes weren't on me. They were on her hand, still half-raised, still close enough to my hair that the accusation didn't need saying out loud.

And beside him, Victor, who couldn't hide his quiet rage.

"I was just..." Victoria started, chest rising and falling as though she was caught stealing.

"Leave." It was Victor who spoke. "Don't overstep." His tone sent chills down my spine. Calm and deadly.

She didn't argue. Whatever she was to him, whatever history lived in the space between them, it wasn't enough to survive that tone. She smoothed her dress, shot me one last look...not anger now, something closer to warning...and walked out the way she'd come, heels clicking a retreat she was dressing up as a choice.

I realized I was shaking. Small tremors, wrists to shoulders, the kind you can't will away.

Dominic crossed the foyer in four strides and stopped in front of me without touching me. Up close, his anger had a heat to it, something banked and controlled but not gone.

"Did she hurt you?"

Not a question, really. A demand for information, filed away for later use.

"I'm fine," I said, because it was easier than the truth, and because some old instinct in me still reached for *fine* the way other people reached for a light switch in the dark...automatic, before you even decided to.

His jaw ticked. He didn't believe me. He also didn't push, which surprised me more than the anger had.

"Victor was in my office," he said instead, low enough for only me to hear. "You answered the door."

"I didn't know..." I whispered.

"I know." He exhaled, and for one unguarded second he looked less like a Don and more like a man doing arithmetic he hated the answer to. "Go upstairs. Sofia will bring you something to settle your nerves."

My eyes met Victor's. He stood there with a smug look on his face, as though he was calculating my every move. It made me feel watched.

"I don't need..."

"Luna." My name, from him, landed differently than it had all day. Quieter. "Go upstairs."

I went, because the alternative was standing in a foyer with my pulse still climbing, and because some part of me...the part that had spent a lifetime reading rooms and exits...recognized that this was not a fight I could win by staying.

I made it three steps before I looked back.

He was already gone, already moving toward the hallway that led to his office, already the version of himself that his brother was seeing. Speaking of the devil himself, Victor stared at me, giving me a look I couldn't quite fathom before turning to follow his brother.

Whatever happened behind that door, I wouldn't see it. I only knew that the man who walked toward it moved like someone who intended to be the last one standing.

Upstairs, in the room that was apparently mine now, I sat on the edge of a bed too soft for the way my body still hummed with adrenaline, and I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes until color bloomed behind them.

*Little wolf.* Victor's voice, low against my ear. The particular cruelty of a threat wrapped in affection. I hated that I remembered the exact temperature of his breath. I hated more that some traitorous corner of my mind was already cataloguing it...filing it next to everything else I knew about surviving men like him. Don't flinch first. Don't give them the reaction they're fishing for. Let them think you're smaller than you are, right up until it matters that you aren't.

Sofia found me like that ten minutes later, knees drawn up, staring at nothing.

"Donna?" She set a tray down without waiting for an answer tea, something that smelled faintly of chamomile and something else I didn't recognize. "I heard there was... an incident."

"I'm fine," I said again. The word was starting to feel like a smooth stone worn down from overuse.

Sofia didn't argue either, but she sat on the edge of the bed anyway, close enough that I understood it as a kindness rather than an intrusion.

"Victoria was his father's choice, once," she said carefully, like she was handing me a piece of a puzzle she wasn't sure I wanted. "Before you. She has not taken the change well."

"That's one way to put it."

A ghost of a smile. "The Don will handle her."

"The Don has a brother who calls me *little wolf* like it means something," I said, and hated how thin my voice sounded. "Handling Victoria doesn't handle that."

Sofia's expression sobered. She didn't offer easy comfort...no promises that everything would be fine, no platitudes about safety. I appreciated that more than I could have said.

"No," she agreed quietly. "It doesn't. But you are not as unprotected here as you think you are, Donna. Whatever else this house is." She stood, smoothing her skirt. "Drink the tea. It will help."

I wrapped both hands around the cup after she left, more for the warmth than any real intention of drinking it, and stared at the door like it might tell me something useful.

Downstairs, two brothers were in a room together, and I was the reason. Somewhere in that fact was a kind of power I didn't want and couldn't refuse...the errible currency of being wanted by the wrong people.

I thought about the gate at the end of the drive, closed and guarded. I thought about Marco's steady presence in the garden, and Sofia's careful kindness, and Dominic's stillness in the foyer that had somehow felt more like shelter than threat.

I didn't trust any of it yet.

But for the first time since the club, since the sound of a man's neck breaking under Victor's hands, I let myself wonder if surviving this house might mean something different than surviving had meant before.