The world goes white.
Not metaphorically. My vision actually blanches, the color washing out of everything. The interior of the SUV, the laptop screen, Emilio's face in the rearview. All of it drains to pale grey, and I can't hear anything except a high, thin ringing in my ears.
Emilio is speaking. His mouth is moving but the words aren't reaching me. I stare at the phone in my hand and watch my fingers tighten around it until the case creaks.
"Leone." Aurelio's voice, cutting through the static. "Did you hear me?"
"I heard you."
"Come back to the compound. Now."
I hang up.
"Turn around," I tell Emilio.
He looks at me in the mirror. Whatever he sees makes him slam the brakes, wrench the wheel, and execute a U-turn that throws me against the door. He doesn't ask questions. He drives.
I call Claudio. "Abort the convoy. Get back to the compound."
"What happened?"
"They took her."
Silence. Then: "How long ago?"
"Fifteen, twenty minutes."
"That's not enough time to get her out of the city. If we move now—"
"I know. Move."
I hang up and open the laptop. My hands are steady. My mind is clear. The white-out has passed, replaced. Something cold and sharp and utterly focused. The way the world looks through a rifle scope. Everything extraneous falling away until only the target remains.
They took her.
They came to my compound, killed my men, and took the woman I love.
The word surfaces without permission. Love. I haven't said it to her. Haven't said it to anyone since Dahlia. But it's there, hard and undeniable, sitting in my chest like a second skeleton. Structural. Load bearing. Remove it and everything collapses.
I love her. And someone took her from me.
I'm going to get her back. And then I'm going to kill everyone involved. Not quickly. Not cleanly. I'm going to take them apart the way they tried to take apart my life, and I'm going to make sure the last thing they see is my face.
The compound is chaos.
Two guards dead at the east gate. Clean shots, suppressed weapons, double taps to the head. Professional. The two men assigned to my quarters are crumpled in the hallway outside the door, same execution-style kills. Whoever did this moved through the compound like ghosts. Four minutes. In and out.
I crouch beside the first guard. Ricci. Twenty-six. Wife and a daughter. I assigned him to this post personally because he was steady, reliable, the soldier who followed protocol without needing to be reminded. He's lying on his side with his hand still on his holster. He never even drew.
The second guard is face down. Santos. Older, ex-military, a man who survived three tours overseas and ended up dying in a corridor because I wasn't here to stop it. The entry wounds are precise. Whoever pulled the trigger was trained to kill quickly, cleanly, without wasted motion. Military background. Possibly private sector. The operator a tech and weapons company would have on retainer.
I step over their bodies and push open the door.
The room hits me like a fist.
The desk is overturned. Documents scattered across the floor, pages torn, her coffee cup shattered against the wall. The coffee is still warm. I press my fingers to the puddle spreading across the hardwood and feel the heat, and the sensation travels up my arm and settles in my chest like a coal.
She was here. Thirty minutes ago she was sitting at this desk in my shirt, pen between her teeth, muttering about shipping manifests. Alive and sharp and brilliant and mine.
