Page 21 of Ivory Crown

Dante’s response was a slow curl of his lips, a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. Those eyes, dark and fathomless, watched me not with the cold calculation of a predator, but with the heated intensity of a man possessed by something he probably also didn’t fully understand.

Which made this way more fucking dangerous.

Which made him way more fucking dangerous.

Fuck.

“Jade,” he began, still leaning against the wall, “it’s not about surveillance. It’s about admiration. You’re exceptional in ways you don’t even realize. Your dedication...it’s captivating.”

His words should have soothed, flattered even, but they coiled around me like chains. I saw the truth that lingered beneath the surface—the unyielding grip he sought to keep on every aspect of my life.

“Admiration is one thing,” I shot back, swiveling in my chair to face him fully. “But this—this is control. You want to keep me here, under your watch, all the time.”

Dante pushed off from the wall, taking a step closer, a shadow falling across his face. “Everything I do is to protect you,” he insisted, but the claim felt hollow, even to my ears. “You’re too important, Jade. To me, to the world.”

“Then trust me to handle my own life,” I said, standing my ground. “Your protection feels a lot like imprisonment.”

For a moment, silence hung between us, heavy and fraught with unspoken truths. Dante’s gaze never wavered, and I wondered if he understood just how much his world suffocated me, despite the allure of his dark charm.

Finally, he nodded, a reluctant concession, and retreated to a corner of the room, a self-imposed exile. “I get it,” he said. “I don’t want to make you feel like that.”

And then he crossed his arms over his chest and continued watching me.

“You haven’t changed anything.”

“Well, if the choice is to make you feel like that and keep alive or make you feel good and have you die, then the choice is very obvious.”

I was really losing my patience. I understood his need, his desire, to want to protect me. But I also didn’t think–no, I knew–that this wasn’t the way. That there had to be another way.

“What if we went to the police?”

He cocked his head…and he laughed. As if I was joking.

“Dante, what the fuck?” I asked, angry enough to want to slap him. “Is this about sex? Is that it, Dante? You can’t get enough? So you brought me here so you can always have sex with me, whenever you want?”

He met my accusation with a raw intensity that sent a shiver through the air. “To an extent,” he confessed, the words tumbling out like rough-cut jewels. “I’m obsessed with you. With making you come, with the way you taste…” He paused, his jaw tightening as if the admission cost him something. “But it’s also about our child.”

The mention of the baby shifted something within me, a visceral tug that made my defenses waver for just a moment. It was the one truth we couldn’t escape, a connection that bound us irreversibly.

“Because I’m pregnant, you think all this is justified?”

“Because you’re in danger, I think this all justified,” he replied, his voice quiet, controlled.

“Enough!” My voice sliced through the tension like a scalpel on skin, sharp and precise. At some point, he had approached me. Now, Dante’s towering form loomed over me, but I refused to shrink back. “I need space, Dante. Respect my boundaries.”

The battle raging in his gaze was almost tangible. His jaw clenched as if he were grinding down the very instincts that made him who he was—a Moretti, born into a legacy of taking without asking. But as his eyes searched mine, there was something else there too—care, maybe even fear of losing what we had stumbled into.

“Jade,” he started, his voice gravelly with conflict, “I...”

“Stop.” I held up my hand, palm out. “Actions, Dante. Not words.”

We stood there, locked in a silent confrontation. The air between us crackled, charged with everything left unsaid. With a frustrated sigh, Dante backed away, his steps heavy against the tile floor of the room. He sank into an armchair, the leather creaking under his weight, his dark eyes never leaving me.

I turned my attention back to the files scattered across the desk in front of me. My hands moved, steady and sure, betraying none of the inner chaos his proximity caused. Research papers and lab notes consumed my focus, a welcome reprieve from the emotional storm.

Across the room, Dante watched me, a new distance in his posture I hadn’t seen before. But he didn’t stop watching me.

“I’ll respect your boundaries when you’re no longer in danger, got it?” Dante finally said, suddenly annoyed.

---