Page 144 of The Cost of Silence

My stomach turns.

I answer. “Domenico.”

“Ah,” he says, pleased. “Still quick, ragazzo.”

“Where is she?” I ask, skipping past the games.

“With me,” he replies lightly. “Safe. For now. You can rest easy. I’m a gracious host.”

“If you’ve touched her, I’ll rip out your guts through your teeth.”

“Relax,” he says. “I’m not Orlov. I don’t waste assets. Yet.”

Matteo steps closer, eyes narrowed, trying to catch whatever he can in the one-sided conversation.

“You’re a dead man,” I tell our uncle. “You know that, right? Whatever’s left of our blood tie snapped the second you stepped into this building.”

He chuckles. “Dramatic. I thought you’d outgrown that.”

“You tried to kill my woman, and you almost killed my oldest friend,” I say. “You brought war into my home. There’s no path back from that.”

“Well,” he says, “you might want to reconsider that stance if you ever want to see her again.”

Silence stretches, taut. “What do you want?” I ask.

“A meeting,” he says. “Just us. Well, you and your brothers. Myself and a few associates. We should talk about the future of our family. About legacy. About what you owe me.”

“I don’t owe you anything.”

“Don’t be childish,” he chides. “Enzo owed me, which means you do too. But let’s be practical. Your girlfriend is a lovely bargaining chip. So, here’s the offer, ragazzi. You come to the docks, the old place on the east side, no outside guards, no police, no clever snipers, and we negotiate. You don’t come, or you come with extra baggage, and I send you what’s left of her.”

Matteo’s hand curls into a fist at his side.

“You hurt her,” I say, my voice dropping to something low and lethal, “and there’ll be no negotiation. There’ll be no talk. There’ll just be me, and a very slow end for you.”

“Always so sentimental,” Domenico sighs. “You sounded just like your father before he got boring. Think about it, Nico. You have, what, eight hours until the night tide makes that warehouse very inconvenient? Don’t be late.”

He hangs up.

The office feels smaller.

“He wants the old dock,” Matteo says. “Of course he does.”

“He expects us to walk in blind,” I say. “Just the three of us. No backup.”

“So we don’t walk in blind,” he replies. “We walk in smart.”

“We’re not losing her,” I say.

He looks me dead in the eye. “We’re not. But we go in together. All three of us. No lone heroics. Adi will be here in ten. We’ll plan. We’ll take him apart piece by piece.”

The part of me that wants to go alone, to put a gun to Domenico’s head and pull the trigger before he finishes his first monologue, snarls against that.

But I see Isabella’s notebook on the desk, her handwriting tracing the patterns we’ve been too slow to read, and I hear her voice in the bathroom asking me to be smart, not just hard.

“We plan,” I say, forcing it out. “But first, I call her mother.”

Matteo winces. “You sure?”