The CEO's Disgraced Husband Is the Sea God's Commander

9

The woman pressed her back against the alley wall, still trembling, watching the three men groan in a crumpled heap near the warehouse. Her torn dress was soaked through and her bare feet were bleeding from the wet concrete, but her eyes were locked entirely on Dante.

"How did you do that?" Her voice came out breathless, caught somewhere between terror and pure disbelief. "You kicked them like they weighed nothing."

Before Dante could respond, the scarred leader dragged himself out from under the pile. Blood dripped from a gash on his forehead and one of his arms hung at a wrong angle, but his eyes burned with unhinged fury.

"You think this is over?" He spat a mouthful of blood onto the pavement and reached for a phone in his back pocket with his good hand. "I have got twenty men within five minutes of here. Every single one of them is going to come down on you like a freight train. You just signed your own death warrant, you stupid fool."

Dante looked at him the way someone looks at a barking dog behind a fence. Mild interest. Zero concern.

Within minutes, footsteps echoed from both ends of the alley. More men poured in, some carrying pipes, some carrying blades, all of them moving with the aggressive confidence of hired muscle that had never met real resistance.

"There he is!" The leader pointed at Dante with his broken arm, wincing through the pain. "Put him in the ground! All of you, at once! Do not let him walk out of here alive!"

They rushed him from every direction.

Dante stepped forward.

What happened next did not qualify as a fight. It was closer to a man walking through a field of tall grass, bending every stalk as he passed. Each movement was precise, effortless, almost lazy. A knee driven into a stomach that folded a man in half. An elbow that cracked against a jaw and dropped its owner like a sack of wet sand. A palm thrust that sent two bodies tumbling backward into three more.

The God of War's combat instincts did not just give him strength. They gave him geometry. Every angle of attack was visible to him before it arrived, every opening glowing like a lit doorway in a dark hallway. He moved through the crowd the way water moves through rocks, flowing around resistance without ever being stopped by it.

In under a minute, every single one of them was on the ground. Some groaning. Some unconscious. The scarred leader lay face down in a puddle with his phone cracked in half beside him.

Silence returned to the alley.

The woman stared at Dante with her lips slightly parted, her chest rising and falling rapidly. Tears had cut clean lines through the dirt on her cheeks. She pushed herself off the wall and moved toward him on unsteady legs.

"Thank you." Her voice shook with raw emotion. "You saved my life. I do not even know your name, but you saved my life. If you had not been here, I would be dead right now, or worse. I owe you everything."

Dante glanced at her briefly, then looked past her toward the far end of the alley where the street opened up under working lights.

"You do not owe me anything." His tone was calm, almost disinterested. "I was passing through and they were in my way. They brought this on themselves."

He stepped over one of the fallen men without looking down and walked toward the street. No backward glance. No dramatic pause. Just a man continuing on his path like nothing had happened.

The woman watched him disappear around the corner. She did not call out again. 

But her eyes traced every detail of his face into her memory, the sharp jaw, the dried blood near his temple, the flat calm in his stare, and she locked it all away in a place where she would never forget it.

Dante made it back to the motel, peeled off his soaked jacket, and collapsed onto the thin mattress. Sleep found him faster than he expected. 

His body was different now, recovering from exhaustion the way an engine cools after being turned off. Quick. Efficient. Complete.

Morning light crept through the stained curtains and his phone screamed to life on the nightstand.

He cracked one eye open and looked at the screen. Ginevra. Of course.

He let it ring three more times before answering.

"Where are you?" Ginevra's voice came through sharp and clipped, irritation already fully loaded into every syllable. "I brought Luca back to the villa this morning and there is literally no one here. No coffee. No breakfast. Nothing prepared. Where exactly did you disappear to in the middle of the night?"

Dante sat up slowly, leaning his back against the headboard. A small, genuine smile pulled at the corner of his mouth.

"Did you just call me to ask why there is no breakfast ready for you and Luca?"

"Do not twist my words, Dante. You know I cannot cook and Luca is still recovering from last night. His nerves are completely shattered because of your little stunt at the door. The least you could do is come back and make something for us. A decent husband would not even need to be asked."

The smile on Dante's face widened. It was the kind of smile that comes when something you once found painful suddenly becomes genuinely, absurdly funny.

"Is there anything else?" His voice was light, almost amused.

"I am serious, Dante. If you come back right now and handle breakfast properly, I am willing to forgive your behavior from last night. All of it. The dramatic entrance, scaring Luca half to death, that awful look on your face. I will put it all behind us. But you need to come now."

Dante held the phone away from his ear for a second and looked at it. Really looked at it. He wondered how he had spent an entire year married to this woman without ever noticing that she lived in a completely different version of reality.

"Ginevra." He brought the phone back to his ear.

"What?"

He hung up.

He set the phone face down on the nightstand and stared at the ceiling for a long moment. The temptation to block her number pulled at him, but he pushed it aside.

 Not yet. He still needed her signature on that divorce agreement sitting on the dining table.

That was the only reason she still existed in his phone.