She slips through my compound like smoke, avoiding every camera, timing the guard rotations perfectly. She's done this before. Multiple times. Right under my nose while I sat in my study, arrogant enough to think I had her contained.
Clever girl.
Through the service entrance. Alarm disabled. Into the freezing Chicago night.
She's barefoot. The detail catches me, makes something twist in my chest. Her feet leave prints on the damp concrete first, faint and barely visible, then—
Blood.
The asphalt shredding her soles, and she never slows. Never limps. Just keeps moving with that same deadly grace I saw in the training room, leaving dark smears on pale concrete.
Who the fuck are you really, Sofia Rosetti?
I follow at a distance, keeping to shadows. A parking garage, one mile from the compound. Level three, northwest corner. A black SUV waits, lights off.
I watch from across the street as a man unfolds from the driver's seat. Six-two, military bearing, dark hair buzzed short. One of her brothers. Has to be.
She embraces him. Brief but fierce. Hands him something. Paper, folded small. They talk with heads bent together, intimate, familial. I'm too far to hear words, but I see the concern in his body language, the way he keeps trying to check her for injuries.
She's been feeding them information this whole time.
My hands shake with the urge to cross the street. Put a bullet in his head. Drag her back by her hair. Make her pay for this betrayal.
I don't.
Patience. You shape things slowly over years.
Instead, I follow her back. Watch her re-enter the compound through the same route. The bloody footprints are darker now, more pronounced. She's leaving pieces of herself all over my compound, and she doesn't even know I'm watching.
Back in my study, I pour vodka with unsteady hands. The Barone information, my carefully laid trap. Is that the information she passed on to her brother? Or was it something else?
I should kill her. Should have killed her the moment I saw her pass that paper.
Instead, I'm thinking about those bloody footprints. The iron will it must have taken to walk a mile on shredded feet without flinching.
She's magnificent.
And I'm going to make her pay for it.
Seven AM. I let her think she got away with it. Let her believe she's won.
The guard lets me into her suite without knocking. She's awake, sitting up in bed, watching me enter like she wasexpecting this. Dark circles under her eyes say she hasn't slept either.
I claim the chair by her window, morning light streaming through the bars. The tower of designer boxes I had delivered sits beside me, waiting.
"Good morning, kotyonok. Sleep well?"
Her face gives nothing away. "Well enough."
"I thought we'd do something different today." I open the first box, revealing red-soled Louboutins. "You've been wearing those rough cotton things for a week. It occurs to me I've been a poor host."
She doesn't move from the bed, blanket pulled high. Her wariness fills the room like perfume. Good. She should be wary.
"I had some things brought for you. Clothes. Shoes." I lift one heel, examining it. "I thought you might like to try them on."
Her body language screams danger, but she swings her legs over the edge of the bed anyway. The cotton dress falls to her knees as she sits.
"Give me your foot."
