Chapter 16
The Choice
By the time the ballroom emptied, Mia's hands had stopped shaking.
That was how she knew the worst of it was over and the real part was about to begin.
She sat with Owen in a quiet room off the hotel corridor while Dante dealt with the fallout downstairs. Owen looked thinner than she remembered, but alive in the stubborn, furious way he had always been alive. He apologized three times before she made him stop.
"I shouldn't have dragged you into it," he said.
"You didn't drag me anywhere. I came."
"You shouldn't stay."
Mia looked at him.
He held her gaze. "I'm serious. If you stay with him now, people will say you stayed because you had nowhere else to go."
"And you think that's true?"
Owen went quiet.
That was answer enough.
Mia stood, crossed to the window, and looked out at the city that had tried to swallow them both. For the first time since the club in the rain, she did not feel like the city owned the next move.
When Dante entered the room, he stopped short at the sight of her standing there like she had already chosen.
"Silvio is contained," he said.
"Is that what you call it?"
A corner of his mouth twitched and died. "No."
She turned to face him. "Owen says I should leave."
Dante's eyes narrowed a fraction. "He's not wrong."
That surprised her.
"You agree?"
"I agree that you still have an exit."
The honesty of it made her chest ache.
"And if I take it?"
He held her gaze. "Then I will not stop you."
The sentence was so carefully controlled it was almost painful.
Mia understood suddenly what he was doing. He was giving her the one thing he had not had the first time they met: a door that was real.
She looked at Owen, then back at Dante.
"I don't want to leave," she said.
The room went very still.
Owen swore under his breath, not in protest but in exhausted recognition.
Dante did not move.
"Say that again," he said.
Mia took one step toward him. "I don't want to leave."
He looked at her like he was afraid to believe the words and unable to look away from them.
"Then stay," he said.
This time it was not a command.
It was the beginning of an answer.