"You were supposed to protect them. That was the only job." I gripped the steering wheel. "And now Matteo has my son."
"We're mobilizing now. Full tactical response. We'll get them back—"
"You're damn right you will. Assault formation. Heavy weapons. I want every available operator at the Morrison building in twenty minutes."
"Understood. And Cassian? We won't fail twice."
"You'd better not." I hung up and stared at the building.
Dmitri's team hadn’t been there. Had failed to engage.
Which meant Matteo had come, knowing what he'd face.
This had been planned meticulously. Somehow, he'd known they’d be vulnerable and could take them.
But he wouldn't keep them. Not if I had to burn Brooklyn to the ground to get them back.
After hanging up, I forced myself to breathe, to think past the rage that threatened to consume rational thought. Matteo had my son. My child. The boy who'd looked at me with complete trust, who'd called me big, who'd smiled when I promised to build castles with him.
If he hurt Leo—if he so much as made him cry—there wouldn't be enough left of Matteo to bury.
My phone buzzed with a text from an unknown number:
Check your email. You have 24 hours. -M
I grabbed my laptop from the passenger seat, fingers shaking with fury as I navigated to my encrypted email account. One new message, no subject line. An attachment labeled"Terms.mp4"
I clicked it.
Leo's face filled the screen. Tears streaked his cheeks, his eyes red and swollen. He clutched his dinosaur and looked so small, so frightened, that something cracked open in my chest.
"Mama?" he whispered. "I want Mama."
The camera panned back to show him on a couch. Clean. Unharmed. But terrified.
Then Matteo's face appeared. "Hello, cousin. I believe I have something that belongs to you."
I watched the rest of the video in silence, every word carving itself into my memory. The demands. The threats. The twenty-four-hour deadline. The promise to send back pieces of my son if I didn't comply.
When it ended, I sat motionless in the driver's seat, staring at the frozen image of Matteo's smug face.
He'd made a mistake. A fatal one.
He thought taking my son would make me weak. Make me desperate enough to hand over everything I'd built.
Instead, he'd just removed the last restraint on what I was willing to do.
I forwarded the video to Marco with a single word:Analyze.
Then I pulled back onto the road and headed for the Morrison building, my mind already calculating every move, every contingency, every way this could end.
Only one ending was acceptable.
The penthouse felt wrong without them. Empty in a way it never had before.
I moved through the rooms, seeing evidence of their presence everywhere. Leo's toys were scattered across the playroom floor. Isla's book lay on the coffee table, a receipt marking her place. The half-finished castle we'd built together, the tower still leaning precariously.
I stopped in Leo's room. His bed was unmade, sheets tangled from where he'd kicked them off in his sleep. His favorite blue jacket—theone with the dinosaurs—wasn't in the closet. He'd likely been wearing it when they took him.
