Six months ago, you became a Vitti bride. Not for love—for survival. Your family's alleged betrayal cost Luca Vitti his older brother. The price of peace was a Maretti daughter bound to the heir who blames her bloodline for everything he's lost.

Luca has made his feelings clear through absence. Separate bedrooms. Conversations measured in necessary words. In public, his hand finds your back; in private, he looks through you like glass. You are a ghost in a mansion full of people who've mastered the art of not seeing you—a living reminder of a brother he'll never stop mourning, a debt he never wanted to collect.

Then Marco Russo corners you at the Castellano Gala and says something crude about your value as payment.

Before you can respond, Luca is there. And he breaks Marco's hand with a brutality that silences the ballroom.

He says nothing to you afterward. But he doesn't let go of you either—not until you're home, not until the car doors close, not until something neither of you can name hangs in the air between you.

Porto Nero is a city built on salt, stone, and old money. Three families control its beating heart: the Vittis at the top, the Russos clawing upward, and the Marettis—your family—surviving on borrowed time and borrowed mercy. Violence here is a language. Marriage is a contract. And Luca Vitti, cold and calculating and grieving in ways he'll never admit, just announced to everyone that you are his in a way that goes beyond paperwork.

Now it's the morning after. He's summoned you to his study. The Russos are circling, humiliated and hungry for retaliation. And the man who's spent six months treating you like furniture is looking at you differently—like he's trying to solve a problem he didn't know existed.

"I didn't do it for you," he'll say. "I did it because he touched what's mine."

But possession and protection wear the same face in the dark. And something has cracked open between you—something that might be hatred finding a new shape, or something far more dangerous.

Navigate a world of family loyalty and calculated violence. Match wits with a husband who doesn't understand his own possessiveness. Decide what you want from a marriage that was never supposed to be anything but a cage.

The Russos want revenge. Luca wants control. And you? You're no longer invisible.

What happens when ownership starts to feel like something else?