Page 49 of Accidental Alliance

Somewhere in the kitchen, a radio crackles with an incoming message and then goes silent again.

I stand outside the reinforced door of one of the two secured rooms this place has, my arms crossed over my chest and my jaw locked so tight, it aches all the way into my temples. I have been in this exact stance for long enough that the muscles across my shoulders have gone tight from the tension my body is carrying.

Still, I refuse to move.

Through the small, one-sided observation window, I watch the woman I have been hunting for years.

Isabella.

Not Marina Hayes, the careful, soft-spoken receptionist she has been pretending to be for almost six years. Not the single mother her neighborhood knew her as with her neutral sweaters and tied-back hair and small-town, friendly attitude designed to disappear into a crowd at first glance.

Those were all masks, brilliant ones. Convincing enough to keep her hidden far longer than anyone in our world should have been able to stay hidden.

The woman on the other side of the door is the one person who has haunted me for over half a decade, now twenty-seven and forged into something harsher than memory ever managed to preserve as her.

For a long time, all I had were fragments of her. After she vanished, those moments I could recall suddenly turned cruel with their details, the pieces of them jagged as they cut deep within me.

A bright laugh from across a banquet room, her chestnut hair spilling over white pillows.

Honey-gold eyes looking at me like I was still something worth saving. That furious light in her face the last time I saw her before everything completely crumbled.

For years, that was all I had—a half-dozen images I kept revisiting over and over to punish myself.

The woman inside the room in front of me is nothing like those memories. Even now with a bruised cheek and wrists reddened from the restraints we cut off the second she was shoved inside this room, she looks the complete opposite from frightened.

There are new angles to her now that I hadn’t been expecting upon breaking into her house and seeing, for the very first time, what the last eight years have done to her.

Motherhood and hiding have stripped away whatever remnants of innocence she still had when I last touched her. What remains is a woman built from the fires that forced her to leave in the first place.

Yet… some part of me still recognizes her all the same.

She paces the length of the room like a wild animal, checking the walls and the corners of it over and over, presumably for cameras. Her eyes focus on the only exit available at every pass, narrowing as they sweep over the door.

Ever the daughter of the strategist who taught her how to see and exploit weaknesses long before the rest of us even realize there were any on the board at all.

That is a Russo if I ever saw one.

Her father would have been proud to see her this composed. Proud that even furious and frightened, she is still collecting information instead of wasting all her energy on panicking. Amos Russo built his empire out of patience and coordinated attacks. He taught men twice his age how to play the game and taught his daughter those same lessons too, even if he never anticipated her using them.

My chest tightens every time she turns her head just enough that I catch a full glimpse of her face.

She is beautiful in a way that makes a man forget, for one fatal second, how badly he could bleed if given the right opportunity.

I have no doubt in my mind that if I were to let my guard down for one second, she would take that and use it to her full advantage.

She would take the softness that we both know still lingers inside my chest and gut me with it because she always knew where to dig the knife the deepest.

I nearly sigh.

I should not be thinking like that now.

Not with my men running security detail on the man who visited her less than a week ago.

Combing through camera footage, burner phone pings, vehicle routes, tailing known associates to find Davide Bianchi has been more than a chore since all of this started.

He is not one to make casual house calls to the daughters of past acquaintances, especially those who have vanished off every map possible. If he went to her himself, there is a reason for it, and I will find it.

I should be in the operations room reviewing the latest intel, deciding whether Bianchi’s sudden appearance in Isabella’s orbit has something to do with our civil war.