THE GILDED CAGE

The rain in Verona didn’t wash away sins; it lacquered them, making the cobblestones gleam like wet bone. For Elara Vance, it was the soundtrack to her undoing. She stood in the alley behind the Teatro Olimpico, her couture gown—a liquid silver thing that had cost more than most people’s cars—plastered to her skin. In her trembling hand, she held a bloodied letter opener. At her feet, the man who had been her husband for three years lay still, his chest a ruin of silk and scarlet.

She hadn’t meant to kill him. She’d meant to confront him. But when she’d found the photos on his phone—not of his mistress, but of the children, the ones she didn’t know he had—something in her spine had snapped. He’d laughed when she’d asked. Laughed. And then he’d grabbed her wrist, his thumb pressing into the bruise he’d given her last Tuesday, and the world had gone red.

The sirens were a promise, not a threat, wailing closer. She dropped the letter opener. It clattered against the stone, a sound too delicate for the violence it had committed. She didn’t run. Where would she go? Her face was on every magazine in Italy. The “American Heiress,” they called her. The one who’d tamed the wild Montecchi heir.

“Elara!”

The voice came from the mouth of the alley, ragged and raw. Dante Rossi, her bodyguard—her former bodyguard, technically, since she’d fired him three weeks ago for looking at her with too much pity—stood there, rain plastering his dark hair to his skull. He was built like a Renaissance statue, all sharp angles and suppressed power. His eyes, the color of a stormy sea, darted from the body to her face.

“I didn’t do it,” she whispered, a lie so instinctive it tasted like ash.

He didn’t believe her. She could...