"And if you die?" The question came out raw.
"Then I die knowing I fought. Knowing I chose it." I moved closer. "Knowing it was mine. That's more than I've ever had, Dante. That's everything."
He reached for me, and I let him pull me against his chest. His hands shook slightly as they settled on my back.
"I'm terrified," he whispered into my hair.
"I know." I pressed my face against his shirt, breathed in the scent of him—expensive cologne and something underneath that was just Dante. "That's how I know you actually care."
We stayed like that for a long time, standing in the study with the Medusa painting watching us, both of us trying to figure out how to love someone in a world that was built to destroy them.
Later, alone in my room, I pulled out the notebook I'd been keeping hidden in the lining of my mattress.
I'd started it the week after Dante brought me here. Notes on security rotations. Layout modifications. Personnel movements. The kind of information a spy would gather.
But I wasn't gathering it for Lorenzo.
I was gathering it for myself.
I flipped to the back pages, where I'd been mapping something else entirely. Not the compound or operation, but the patterns of Corsica's movements based on the fragments of information I'd overheard in meetings.
They were professional. Methodical. And they believed they were hunting someone who was hiding.
They weren't prepared for someone who was hunting them.
I picked up a pen and started to write, mapping out the first phase of a plan that would keep me visible enough to draw them out, protected enough to survive it. Dante wanted me to work with Marcos. Fine. But I'd do it on my terms.
If I was going to stop hiding—and I was—then I wasn't going to hide inside the compound either. I was going to move through this city like I owned it, and I was going to make sure Lorenzo understood that his daughter wasn't a commodity anymore.
She was a threat.
And threats didn't hide. They hunted.
CHAPTER 13
Dante
The security reports made my blood pressure spike.
I sat in my office at three in the morning, bourbon untouched beside me, reviewing the encrypted files Marcos had compiled. Lorenzo's men had narrowed Julietta's location to the financial district. They'd bribed two of my security contractors and were building a case for a full-scale siege.
My fist connected with the mahogany desk hard enough to crack the veneer.
I pulled up her file again. Julietta Altieri, age twenty-three. But my eyes kept drifting to the other file. The one I'd compiled eight weeks ago, before I'd ever pulled that trigger.
Elena Marchetti. The Rose. Target eliminated March 15, 2008.
I'd known before I took her. Known that Lorenzo had murdered her mother. Known that he'd planned to murder her too. I'd told myself that knowledge justified the kidnapping—I was saving her life.
But the truth was uglier. I'd have taken her regardless. The information about Elena just gave me an excuse to act on an obsession that had nothing to do with justice and everything to do with the fact that I couldn't breathe when I thought about her belonging to anyone else.
I closed the file and stared at my reflection in the darkened window. Thirty-four years old. Built an empire from nothing. Commanded respect through fear and strategy.
And still that eight-year-old boy lived somewhere inside me—the one who'd watched his mother die in a basement apartment because she couldn't afford the medication that would have saved her. The one who'd been shuffled through foster homes like unwanted cargo. The one who'd learned that powerlessness was the only sin that mattered in this world.
I'd sworn I'd never be powerless again.
Every territory I'd claimed, every rival I'd eliminated, every dollar I'd accumulated—it was all armor against that terrified child who'd understood too young that the world would devour anyone weak enough to let it.
