And I’ve been too fucking angry to see the pattern until now.
“The docks,” I say, my mind racing. “He’s been pointing me toward the waterfront this whole time. Which means?—”
It hits me. The one location that would make perfect sense to Romano. The place that would complete his revenge.
The warehouse at Pier 19.
Where I found Marco’s body three years ago.
“Pier 19,” I breathe, as the final puzzle piece settles into place. “That’s where he has her. It’s the same place Marco died. He’s been leading me there all along because he thinks it’s poetic. Full circle.”
Viktor’s pale eyes widen in shock and his mouth opens and closes a few times before he straightens up. “Then we go in with overwhelming force—” he starts to say but I stop him.
“No.” I shake my head. “This is between me and Romano. He took her to that warehouse because he wantsme, not an army. If I show up with your men, he kills her out of spite.”
“That’s suicide,” Viktor says flatly. “You walk in there alone and you die.”
“Then I walk in alone.” I check my gun, ensuring it’s loaded. “You can follow at a distance if you want. But I’m going in first. I’m ending this.”
Viktor’s jaw clenches so tightly I can see a muscle ticking. “You’re throwing away everything we talked about,” he says sharply.
I shrug, uncaring. “I’m saving the only thing that matters.”
I leave before he can argue further and before Danny can try to stop me.
Romano wants poetic justice?
Fine.
I’ll give him an ending he’ll never forget.
26
GIULIANA
The pain comes in waves.
At first, it was sharp and immediate—a burning, tearing sensation in my chest that made it impossible to breathe without screaming. But hours—days?—later, it evolves into something deeper. More insidious. A constant, throbbing ache that radiates outward from the wound, spreading through my ribs and into my shoulder, my back, myeverything.
I try to focus on breathing. Just breathing. In and out. Shallow breaths because anything deeper makes the pain spike so intensely that black spots dance across my vision.
The warehouse ceiling swims above me, exposed beams crisscrossing against concrete that’s water-stained and crumbling. I’m lying on something hard, I think? A cot, maybe, with a thin mattress that does nothing to cushion the cold seeping up from the floor. My wrists are zip-tied to the metal frame, tight enough that my fingers are going numb.
How long have I been here?
I try to piece together the fragments. The fake doctors wheeling me away from Luca in the emergency room. The van. The rough hands loading me inside. Romano’s face appearing above me, that cold smile as he pressed something over my mouth and nose…
Then darkness.
When I woke up, I was here. In this warehouse that smells awful. I think we’re by the water because I can hear the lapping nearby. A doctor, if you can call him that, has already stitched the wound. I remember screaming, the way consciousness kept slipping away and coming back in jagged pieces. The sting of the needle pulling thread through torn flesh. The detachment in the man’s eyes as he worked.
“Try not to move too much,” he’d said in accented English. Eastern European, maybe Russian. “The bullet went through. You’re lucky that no major organs hit. But you’ve lost a lot of blood.”
Lucky. What a fucking joke.
He’d bandaged me, given me something for the pain that barely touched the edges of it, and then disappeared. That was…wait, how long ago was it? Hours? Weeks? The light filtering through the grimy windows has changed, so maybe it’s the next day. Or the day after that. Or longer than that.
I don’t know anymore.
