At the door, he paused. "What you heard... it's not the whole story."
"Isn't it?" I asked, my voice hollow. "My father has abandoned me. My brother has disowned me. What part of that story is incomplete, Mr. Conti?"
He hesitated, clearly weighing his words carefully. "The part about why my brother brought you here today. Why he wanted you to know the truth, even if he couldn't tell you himself."
I stared at him, trying to process this implication. "Are you saying Rafe knew I would eavesdrop? That he wanted me to hear that conversation?"
"I'm saying my brother rarely does anything without multiple purposes," Luca replied cryptically. "And he knows you better than you might think. Your curiosity. Your determination to find answers. Your unwillingness to be kept in the dark."
Before I could respond, he opened the door to the blue room, gesturing for me to enter. "For what it's worth, Ms. O'Sullivan, I'm sorry. About all of it."
The door closed behind me, leaving me alone with thoughts that spiraled and crashed against each other like waves in a storm. Had Rafe orchestrated this? Had he brought me here knowing I would seek out the meeting, would hear my family's betrayal directly rather than through his words? Was this another manipulation, another way of binding me to him by severing my ties to my former life?
Or was it, as Luca had hinted, an act of brutal honesty—giving me the truth he couldn't speak himself, letting me hear firsthand what my family truly thought of me, where I truly stood in the world?
I didn't know how long I sat there, staring unseeing at the garden beyond the window, my mind replaying the conversation I'd overheard, the words that had confirmed my worst fears and deepest insecurities. Time seemed to stretch and compress, minutes feeling like hours, hours collapsing into moments of crystal clarity amid the fog of betrayal and disillusionment.
When the door opened again, I knew without looking who it was. His presence filled the room—that distinctive energy, that controlled power that I'd come to recognize as uniquely his.
"Grace," Rafe said, his voice softer than usual. "The meeting is over. We can go now."
I didn't turn, didn't acknowledge him. Couldn't face him yet, not with the storm still raging inside me, not with questions I wasn't sure I wanted answered burning on my tongue.
He moved closer, stopping a few feet away—giving me space, respecting the invisible barrier my silence had erected between us. "You heard," he said. Not a question.
"Yes." My voice sounded strange to my own ears—flat, empty, stripped of the emotion that churned beneath the surface. "I heard everything."
He was quiet for a moment, and I could feel him watching me, assessing, calculating his approach. "I'm sorry," he said finally. "You shouldn't have had to learn the truth that way."
Now I did turn, facing him with eyes that felt burning and dry all at once. "Shouldn't I? Isn't that exactly why you brought me here today? So I could hear it for myself? So you wouldn't have to be the one to tell me that my father has written me off, that my brother considers me dead to the family, that I'm nothing but a 'complication' easily set aside when it becomes inconvenient to care about my fate?"
Something flickered in his eyes—not guilt, exactly, but a recognition that I'd seen through whatever plan he'd had. "Yes," he admitted. "I wanted you to hear it directly. Not filtered through my words, not softened by my interpretation. The unvarnished truth about where you stand with your family."
"Why?" I demanded, rising to my feet, anger finally breaking through the numbness. "Why now? Why like this? Was it not enough to take me, to keep me, to make me dependent on you for everything? Did you need to destroy what little remained of my connection to my former life? To ensure I had nowhere else to turn, no one else to rely on?"
Pain crossed his features—not physical, but emotional. A reaction to the accusation in my words, to the implication that his motives had been purely selfish, purely manipulative.
"No," he said, his voice rougher than before. "That's not why. I wanted you to know the truth because you deserve it. Because continuing to hope for a rescue that will never come, for a familythat has abandoned you, is a cruelty I couldn't bear to inflict on you any longer."
"How long have you known?" I asked the question that had been burning inside me since I'd overheard the meeting. "How long have you known that my father wasn't trying to get me back? That he'd written me off as a loss?"
Rafe was silent for a moment, and I could see him weighing honesty against self-protection, truth against the potential damage it might cause. "I suspected from the beginning," he admitted finally. "The lack of public outcry about your disappearance. The ease with which he accepted the story about a study retreat. The way negotiations about other matters continued without your situation being raised as an impediment."
"You suspected," I repeated, the words bitter on my tongue. "But you didn't know for certain until when?"
"Until about a month ago," he said, his gaze steady on mine despite the tension I could see in his jaw, in the set of his shoulders. "When Dante met with Patrick directly about another matter. Your father made it clear then that he considered you... collateral damage. A loss he was willing to accept in exchange for certain business considerations."
A month. He'd known for a month that my father had officially abandoned me, had explicitly stated that he no longer considered my return a priority. A month during which Rafe had continued to let me believe that there was still some uncertainty, some possibility that my family might care about my fate.
"Why didn't you tell me?" I asked, my voice barely above a whisper. "Why let me continue to wonder, to hope, to imagine that somewhere out there, someone was looking for me?"
"Because I couldn't bear to be the one to tell you," he said, the admission clearly costing him. "Because I knew what it would do to you. Because I thought... I thought it might be better for you tobelieve there was still a chance, still a connection to your old life, than to know with certainty that it was gone forever."
"That wasn't your decision to make," I said, echoing words I'd spoken to him before, in other contexts, about other truths withheld. "You promised me honesty, Rafe. Complete honesty. And instead, you kept this from me—the most fundamental truth about my situation, about my place in the world."
"You're right," he acknowledged, surprising me with his immediate concession. "I should have told you. Should have trusted you to handle the truth, however painful. It was... a mistake. One of many I've made where you're concerned."
The admission should have satisfied me, should have validated my anger, my sense of betrayal. Instead, it left me feeling hollow, empty, as if the foundation I'd been standing on had crumbled away, leaving nothing but air beneath my feet.
