Chapter 10 - The Name on His Lips
The word hung suspended in the freezing mountain air, carrying a weight that completely arrested her movement.
Cara looked down at his hand encircling her wrist. His grip was unbreakable, an anchor of solid iron, yet he held her with such deliberate restraint that it felt almost reverent. The pulse beneath her skin was fluttering frantically, like a trapped sparrow, but Dante didn't pull her closer. He simply held her there, anchored in the storm.
Around them, the security team had gone completely, unnervingly silent. Marcus stood five paces back, his hand resting near his chest, watching the exchange with an intense, calculated stillness. The only sound left in the world was the steady, rhythmic hiss of the rain drumming against the hemlock boughs and the low rumble of the idling Escalades up on the road.
Dante stepped closer, leaning down slightly so his eyes were level with hers.
His pale gray gaze swept over her battered face, tracing the curve of her jaw, the mud drying against her pale cheek, and the fierce, defiant light that still burned in her hazel eyes despite her exhaustion. The cold, lethal mask he wore in the city had fractured, revealing something ancient, searching, and deeply unsettled beneath.
“Tell me something, Cara,” Dante said softly.
The world stopped.
The air evaporated from Cara’s lungs. A cold shockwave traveled straight down her spine, far colder than the mountain rain soaking through her dress.
Her lips parted, but no sound escaped. Her mind raced in a frantic, terrifying loop.
Cara.
He had said her name.
She had never introduced herself. In all the months she had worked at Bellini’s, in all the times she had cleared his table or poured his San Pellegrino, she had never spoken a personal word to him. She didn't wear a nametag—Bellini’s considered brass tags too common for a five-star dining room; the waitstaff were meant to be anonymous, faceless conduits of luxury service. She had never given him her card, never spoken to his drivers, never crossed his path outside the dining room.
To him, she should have been nobody. Just a terrified waitress who had miraculously stumbled across an accident on Route 9.
Yet the name had rolled off his tongue with effortless, practiced familiarity.
Dante’s thumb stroked the tender skin on the inside of her wrist, feeling the frantic, hammering rhythm of her heartbeat. His eyes didn't leave hers for a fraction of a second.
“Tell me,” Dante repeated, his deep, velvety baritone dropping into a register of quiet, terrifying intensity that made the hair on her arms stand up. “How did you know my brakes would fail?”
Cara stood paralyzed in the mud, the rain pouring down between them.
Slowly, her gaze drifted from Dante’s unyielding gray eyes toward Marcus, and then toward the line of black SUVs waiting silently on the ridge above.
She looked back at Dante. The realization hit her with concussive, breath-stealing force.
He hadn't learned her name tonight.
May you like
He hadn't learned it from the restaurant roster.
Dante Moretti had known exactly who she was long before she had ever dropped that silver tray in Booth Seven.
