“Don’t move.” The voice. Low, smooth and deadly. Matteo.
I freeze, pulse rocketing as I hear the metallic click of a gun behind me.
“I didn’t think you’d be ballsy enough to stick around, Trigger,” he murmurs, and I can practically feel his shit-eating grin. “Didn’t strike me as the sentimental type.”
My mind spins, calculating options. I could turn around and try to talk my way out. But that means giving him a better look at my face.
The mask. The lips. The voice. And then it’s over.
The worst thing is that a part of me wants him to remember. How can he not? How could I have meant so little to him?
I lunge forward.
“Shit—hey!” Matteo shouts.
Boots scrape behind me as I sprint down the alley, heart hammering. I vault over a toppled trash can, duck past a chained-up motorbike, and tear through the maze of concrete and shadows like the devil is on my heels.
Because he is. A wicked devil by the name of Matteo Rossi.
“Stop!” he shouts behind me. “Who the hellareyou?”
I don’t answer. I don’t look back.
The sound of his footsteps is close, too close, but I’ve always been faster.
I duck through a side street and leap a low fence into a tiny courtyard, slipping between laundry lines and trash cans. My breath burns in my lungs. My legs ache. But I don’t stop until I hear nothing behind me but the distant hum of traffic.
And finally, endless minutes later, silence.
Only then do I collapse into a crouch behind a parked bicycle, panting and trembling. I peel off the mask slowly and let it fall into my lap.
The cool night air touches my skin, and it feels like a scar being exposed. It’s like a wound I’d stitched up years ago just got ripped open again.
I failed. Months of planning gone to shite.
And if I want another shot at him, I’ll have to be smarter. Colder.
Crueler.
Because Matteo Rossi won’t be caught off guard twice.
So I vow next time, I won’t miss.
CHAPTER 2
QUINLAN FALLOUT
Matteo
The video footage at the Velvet Vault doesn’t lie, but it also doesn’t tell me a damn thing I want to know. So much for my incredible hacking skills. A lot of fucking good they’re doing me right now.
I lean in closer, elbows on my desk, rewinding the grainy camera angle for the eighth time tonight. After losing my would-be assassin in the Meatpacking district somewhere, I doubled back to the Vault. And I’ve been sitting here for hours. The club’s main hallway flickers in black and white on the screen, timestamp blinking red in the corner. I watch it play out again:
21:07 – She slips past the bouncers like smoke.
21:09 – Enters my office.
21:10 – Gun out. Confrontation.
