Chapter 28

Alina POV

The car ride was quiet, but not the suffocating kind of silence I’d known before. Dante didn’t fill it with idle chatter, nor did he drown it out with music. He simply sat there beside me, his presence enough to stretch the quiet into something steady. His hand never let go of mine. Not once.

My eyes wandered out the tinted window as the city blurred past. Towers of glass, steel, and ambition rose high, glinting against the morning light. I knew Dante belonged to this world. He wore it like armor, breathed it like oxygen. I, on the other hand, felt like a stranger in...