Marco.
The name arrived in my mind like a flare in the dark — bright, certain, carrying with it a cascade of understanding that assembled itself faster than conscious thought. Marco, who knew everyone. Marco, who collected relationships like currency.
Then, a gunshot.
Not in this room. Below. Far enough that the sound arrived compressed by walls and floors and distance, flattened into something that could have been a car backfiring if you'd never heard gunfire before. I'd grown up in a Moretti household. I knew the difference.
The second sound was bigger. A concussive thud that traveled through the floor and up through the bed frame and into my spine — deep, percussive, the particular vibration of something structural being removed from existence. The breaching charge hit the service entrance with enough force to rattle the crystal vase on the nightstand. I heard the orchids topple. Water splashing across wood. The vase rolling, hitting the carpet.
The guards' hands changed.
The fingers around my wrists shifted from restraint to something else, the grip loosening as the men holding me redirected their attention from the woman on the bed to the war erupting beneath them.
Half a second. That's all it was. A fraction of a breath where the pressure on my right wrist dropped from immovable to merely firm.
I ripped my arm free.
The motion was graceless, desperate. It was a full-body wrench that tore my wrist from the loosened grip and sent my elbow driving backward with the momentum. I didn't aim. Couldn't see. Just felt the impact — the point of my elbow connecting with something soft and vital, the specific yield of a throat beneath bone, the wet choking sound that followed.
The guard's other hand released my left wrist. I heard him stagger back — the scrape of shoes on hardwood, the strangled gasp of a man whose airway had just been compressed by a woman he'd dismissed as a task.
Below us, the house was coming apart.
Automatic gunfire — rapid, controlled, the distinct rhythm of men who knew their weapons and were using them with purpose. Shouting in Italian and English and something that was just rage without language. Doors kicked open in sequence — one, two, three — the methodical percussion of a room-by-room clearance that advanced through the ground floor like a wave. Each door was a small explosion of wood and metal. Each room was searched in seconds. The pattern was relentless. Professional.
Santo's work.
Enzo's voice cut through the chaos. He was somewhere near the door — I couldn't see him but I heard the sharp, clipped cadence of a man issuing orders into a radio, his composure partially rebuilt, his voice carrying the particular authority of someone who refused to acknowledge that authority was being challenged. Commands in rapid Italian. Frequencies. Positions. The logistics of a defense being mounted against an assault he hadn't expected this soon.
He moved. I heard his shoes on the hardwood—fast now, no longer unhurried, the mask of patience stripped away by the simple reality of men with guns coming up through his house. One set of heavy footsteps followed him. The guard who could still breathe.
They were gone.
The firefight below was getting louder. Closer. The clearance team was moving through the house with the steady, inevitable progress of something that couldn't be stopped, and the defenders were falling back — I could hear it in the changing acoustics, the way the gunfire's origin shifted from distant to immediate, the sounds of retreat compressed into tighter and tighter spaces.
Then: boots on the stairs.
Not the measured tread of Enzo's men. These were heavy and fast and ascending with a particular urgency that had nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with a single, specific purpose. Taking the steps two at a time. Three at a time. The sound of a man climbing toward something that mattered more than caution.
The bedroom doorway filled with shadow. A figure — broad, large, moving with the coiled energy of someone who fought the way other people breathed. A torch beam snapped on and cut the darkness like a blade, sweeping the room in one practiced arc.
It found me in two seconds.
I couldn't see his face behind the light. But I didn't need to. The width of his shoulders.
“Gemma?”
It was Santo.
“It’s me!”
He didn't reply.
Didn't ask if I was hurt, didn't tell me it was going to be okay, didn't waste a single syllable on anything that wasn't the immediate business of getting me out of this room and down those stairs and away from this house. He crossed the floor in three strides, his free hand closed around my upper arm — firm, impersonal, the grip of a man who was holding a package he'd been sent to retrieve — and he pulled me toward the door.
We moved.
The corridor was a gauntlet of closed doors and deep shadows, and Santo moved through it like he'd memorized the floor plan.
