Chapter 246: His Name Is Dante

Isabella automatically stepped back to let him in, her mind already calculating. Already trying to understand what his presence here meant, why he’d come without calling, why he looked at her like that.

Like she’d done something.

"Enzo, I...."

"Close the door, Isabella."

She closed it.

He moved through her apartment slowly, not sitting down, not removing his coat. Just taking in the space, the candles, the wine, the table set for two. His eyes moved the setting.

"You’re expecting someone," he said. Not a question.

"A friend," Isabella said carefully.

"A friend." Enzo turned to face her, and something in his expression made her stomach drop. "Do you know his name?"

Isabella opened her mouth.

Closed it.

A cold feeling began spreading through her chest.

"Of course I do," she said.

"Say it." His voice was very quiet.

"Enzo, this is a strange conversation...."

"Say his name, Isabella."

The silence stretched between them like a wire pulled too tight.

Isabella said nothing.

Because the truth, the shameful, humiliating truth was that she didn’t. Not his full name. Not his family name. In three months of meeting in her apartment, of letting him into her bed, of having conversations over wine that she’d thought were intimate and personal....he had never told her hos name.

He’d told her she doesn’t need to know his name and he’d accepted that.

She’d accepted all of it without question.

"You don’t know," Enzo said quietly.

"I...."

"You don’t know his name." He looked at her, and the expression on his face wasn’t angry. That would have been easier. It was something worse. "Isabella Russo. Trained since childhood. Five languages. Combat skills most men would envy." He shook his head slowly. "And you’ve been letting a man you can’t even name spend months inside your apartment."

Heat rushed to Isabella’s face. "That’s not...."

"His name is Dante." Enzo said it simply, like he was placing a stone on a table. "Dante Romano."

Isabella blinked.

The name meant nothing to her immediately. And then it did.

Romano.

"The Romano family," she said slowly.

"Yes." Enzo’s jaw was tight. "Head of the Romano family. Brother of Sal Romano, who Dimitri killed few months ago." He watched her face carefully. "Which makes Dante the one person in this world with the most reason to destroy everything connected to Dimitri Valentino."

The cold feeling spread from her chest to her fingers.

"He’s been using you, Isabella," Enzo said. "Using your apartment as an intelligence base. Every conversation you had in these rooms, about your father, about the Russo family, about our partnership, about Dimitri’s movements....he heard all of it."

"That’s not possible," Isabella said automatically. "I would have noticed...."

"Would you?" Enzo moved to the bookshelf against the wall, reached behind a carved ornament without hesitation, and held up something small. A device, barely the size of a thumbnail, almost invisible unless you knew exactly what you were looking for.

Isabella stared at it.

"We found three," Enzo said. "That one. One in your bedroom. One near the kitchen." He set the device down on the table between them, and the small sound it made was very loud in the silence. "He planted them within his first two visits after we removed the first set he planted. Every word you’ve spoken in this apartment for the past three months has been recorded."

Isabella’s legs felt wrong.

She reached for the back of the sofa, steadying herself.

"He approached you, didn’t he," Enzo said, watching her. "Think back to when you first met him. How it happened. Think about it properly."

She did.

She thought about the evening at the bar, she’d gone to alone after a particularly brutal phone call with her father. She’d been upset. Vulnerable. Not obviously, but enough to someone who was looking for exactly that.

He’d sat beside her at the bar. Ordered the same wine she was drinking. Started talking in that low, careful way of his.

It had felt like chance.

It had felt like relief.

"He chose me," Isabella said. 𝘧𝓇ℯℴ𝓂

"He selected you," Enzo corrected gently. "There’s a difference."

She closed her eyes.

Three months. Three months of believing she had something that was hers. Something that had nothing to do with Dimitri or her father or the engagement that had defined her entire life. Something just for her.

And it had been constructed from the beginning.

Every conversation. Every confidence she’d shared. Every piece of information she’d let slip about her family, about Lorenzo’s business, about the alliances and territories she’d grown up knowing.

All of it fed back to a man who wanted to destroy Dimitri.

"Isabella." Enzo’s voice was different now. Quieter. "Look at me."

She opened her eyes.

He stood across from her, and she saw it....what she’d been unconsciously avoiding seeing since he walked through her door.

Disappointment.

Not the performative disappointment her father wielded like a weapon. Not the cold tactical disappointment of a man reminding her of her failures.

Real disappointment. The kind that came from someone who had believed in you completely and watched that belief fracture.

Enzo loved her. She’d always known that. Had been careful with it, had tried not to exploit it, had told herself she respected him enough not to.

But his love for her was exactly why that look on his face was devastating.

"I didn’t think you would allow this," he said simply. "Of everything I expected from you...strategy, ruthlessness, ambition....I never expected this. I never expected you to be so desperate to be chosen by someone that you stopped asking the questions you were trained to ask."

Each word landed like a precise blow.

"Enzo...."

"You’re better than this." His voice was rough now. "You’ve always been better than this. And that’s what I can’t..." He stopped. Pressed his jaw tight. "That’s what I can’t understand."

"I know," Isabella said, and her voice came out broken.

"Do you? Do you actually understand what could happen if Dante Romano has three months of intelligence on your father’s operations? On our partnership?" He shook his head again. "On everything."