"You're thinking with your dick."
I didn't look up from the monitor. "Get out."
"You took the girl to leverage her father. That was a smart strategy. That was the Dante I know." He moved closer, his voice dropping into the register he used when we were alone—when he could forget to be afraid. "But you're keeping her for something else. Something personal. And that's a liability."
"I'm keeping her alive."
"You're keeping her because you couldn't stand the thought of her in another man's bed." Vince's jaw was tight. "I've watched you for eight years. I've never seen you lose focus like this. Never seen you compromise a play for a woman."
The anger hit fast and clean. I turned from the monitors and fixed him with a look that made most men reach for their guns. Vince held steady.
"Obsession makes kings weak," he continued, each word deliberate. "It makes them sloppy. And sloppy gets them killed. Or worse—it gets the people they care about killed."
The silence stretched between us, heavy with everything we both knew. With the bodies I'd stacked to build this empire. With the ruthlessness required to keep it.
With the fact that he might be right.
I poured another bourbon instead of answering. The ritual of it—the weight of the glass, the burn of the liquid—gave me something to do with hands that wanted to hurt him for speaking the truth.
"You need to decide what she is," Vince said quietly. "Leverage. Or something else. But you can't keep her locked in that penthouse and pretend it's about strategy. Not to me. Not to yourself."
He left before I could respond. Smart move.
I stood alone in my office, watching the monitors. Julietta had stopped moving. She stood at the window of the guest bedroom, staring down at the city like she could will herself out into it.
My phone buzzed again. This time it was Marcos, heading my intelligence division. The message was terse:Intel drop. Conference room. Now.
I took the stairs down to the sublevels where we conducted business that required absolute privacy. No windows. No phones. No way for the city to listen in.
Marcos spread encrypted communications across the steel table. Cartel chatter. Altieri family correspondence. Voice recordings and intercepted calls spanning the last six months. The kind of intelligence that required money, connections, and men willing to die for classified information.
"Lorenzo's network is fracturing," Marcos began, spreading intelligence across the table. "The Suarez family is in chaos after Miguel's death. They're blaming each other, blaming Lorenzo, blaming us. His allies are getting nervous."
I studied the intercepts. Financial transfers. Encrypted communications. Territory disputes flaring up across the eastern seaboard.
"He's vulnerable," I said.
"More than that. He's desperate." Marcos pulled up a voice recording—Lorenzo's voice, cold and precise. "This was intercepted threedays ago. He's trying to negotiate with the Corsini family for protection. Offering them discounts on his distribution routes."
Lorenzo Altieri, negotiating from weakness. The man who'd built an empire on fear and intimidation, now scrambling for allies.
"He's looking for his daughter," Marcos continued. "But he's also looking for revenge. The extraction embarrassed him. Made him look weak. He won't stop until one of you is dead."
I'd expected that. Counted on it, even. Lorenzo's pride would demand retaliation.
"What about the girl?" I asked. "Is she still valuable as leverage?"
Marcos hesitated. That pause told me everything.
"She's valuable to you," he said carefully. "Whether she's valuable as leverage is a different question."
"Anything else?"
"Lorenzo's accelerated his timeline. He knows Miguel's dead. Knows someone extracted his daughter. He's putting out the contract himself now. Two million for her location. Two million for her head." Marcos paused. "The entire underworld is hunting her."
I left the room without responding. Didn't trust what would happen if I stayed. Didn't trust the fury that was building in my chest—a fury that went beyond strategy, beyond obsession, into territory that was purely, primitively protective.
The elevator climbed back to the penthouse in silence. I watched the numbers ascend and tried to reconcile the man I'd been forty-eight hours ago with the man I was now.
