I pull back, my breath hitching in my throat. I look at her, and the feral, possessive urge to lock her in a room and burn the rest of the world down is almost overwhelming. But I know she wouldn’t let me. She’s a runner who decided to stay, and I have to trust that she’s staying for the fight, not just for me.
“We go at 03:00,” I say.
She nods. “I’ll be ready.”
I turn back to the monitors, but my mind is already moving ahead. I need to coordinate with my brothers. I need to make sure the teams are in place. And I need to do it all while keeping the secret of the mole buried.
The weight of the leadership, the weight of the secrets, is a physical pressure on my chest. I think of Dominic, of the trust he placed in me. I think of the lie I told him.
A leader has to make the hard choices. That’s what Turi always told me. A leader has to decide who lives and who dies, and he has to be willing to carry the guilt of those decisions until his dying day.
I didn’t realize until this moment that Turi was describing himself.
The thought is a cold spike of dread. If Turi is the mole, if he’s the one who’s been feeding information to the enemy, why? Why save us? Why raise us? Why feed us tips that keep us alive?
The pieces don’t fit. A traitor sells you out and disappears. A traitor doesn’t stay for twenty years to watch the orphans of his victims grow into men.
Unless the betrayal wasn’t about hate. Unless it was about something else.
I pull up a file I haven’t looked at in years. My mother’s file. Riza Costa. She was beautiful, with dark hair and eyes that saw everything. She was the heart of the family. She survived the first betrayal only to be taken years later by the same war.
I look at a photo of her and my father, standing with Turi at a celebration months before my father was taken. They are laughing. They look happy. Turi is looking at my mother, and there’s a look in his eyes that I recognize. It’s the look I see in the mirror when I think about Amara.
Obsession. Devotion. A love that borders on madness.
My stomach turns. If Turi loved her… if the choice he made opened the first door and the war took her later because of it…
I shut the file down. I can’t think about it. Not now. I have a mission. I have a switch to dismantle. I have a partner to keep alive long enough to finish the switch.
I spend the rest of the night checking and re-checking the gear. We load the SUV with tactical vests, silenced sidearms, and the high-speed bridge Amara built. The compound is quiet, butit’s the quiet of a coiled spring. My brothers are in their own wings, preparing their own teams.
I see Turi in the hallway as I’m heading to the garage. He’s standing by the window, looking out at the rain-slicked courtyard. He looks old. Older than he did yesterday.
“Alessio,” he says, his voice soft. He doesn’t turn around.
“Turi.” I stop, my hand tightening on the strap of my tactical bag.
“Be careful tonight,” he says. “The world is full of ghosts, and they don’t like to be disturbed.”
“I’m not afraid of ghosts, Turi. I’m afraid of the living.”
He turns then, his eyes searching mine. There’s a sadness in them that goes down to his bones. “The living are the ones who break your heart, boy. The ghosts just remind you that it was ever whole.”
He reaches out and touches my arm, a brief, fatherly gesture. “You’ve done a good job, Alessio. You’ve kept this family together when it wanted to fly apart. Your father would be proud.”
I can’t breathe. The lie I told Dominic feels like a physical weight in the air between us. I want to ask him. I want to scream the question at him until he tells me the truth. Did you do it? Did you sell them out?
But I don’t. I just nod, my throat tight.
“Get some rest, Turi,” I say.
“I’ve had enough rest for several lifetimes,” he says, turning back to the window. “Tonight, I think I’ll just watch the rain.”
I walk away, and every step feels like I’m leaving a piece of my soul behind. I find Amara waiting by the SUV. She looks at me, sensing the tension, the raw, jagged edge of my nerves.
“You okay?” she asks.
“No,” I say, opening the driver’s side door. “But it doesn’t matter. We have a job to do.”
