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“Viktor plans to test us within the week. He’ll stage a confrontation or lob a genuine threat at you to see if I respond like a man working a job…or a man protecting the woman he loves.”

I open my eyes wide. “What should I expect?”

His lengthy pause frays my nerves. When he speaks, his voice is akin to boots on gravel. “A test.”

I don’t ask how he knows. I’ve learned that Marco Santori doesn’t make declarations like that without first preparing for them.

Somewhere beyond these stone walls, while I wait for sleep, a dog barks once and falls silent.

Chapter 8

Marco

I wake up at five fifteen in the morning.

Lucia lies asleep on the left side of the bed, her dark hair loose across the pillow with an abandon she would never allow if she thought anyone was looking.

I cross the room soundlessly, a habit that’s been drilled into me for years. At the dresser, I pause to gaze again at her sleeping form, and my jaw tightens.

I slip out to the gym, and minutes later, I’m working up a sweat by lifting the bar I’ve loaded to one-eighty. Nico finds me here at six thirty, as he always does when he wants to deliver some news in a controlled environment.

He holds two cups of coffee from the compound’s kitchen. As I’ve told him more than once, the brew tastes like a cross between motor oil and cyanide.

Even so, Nico drinks his without complaint. Nico can handle a lot without complaint, a fact I’ve always found mildly unsettling.

After handing me one of the cups, he pulls up surveillance videos of the Bratva on his tablet. I watch between my reps, noting their increased activity around the hospital district before Nico drops the real reason he’s here.

He tells me the word on the street is that the Volkovs are expecting an important shipment in two days. That makes the number of men they have watching Lucia’s hospital strange. If they’re gearing up for a major operation, then wasting soldiers on surveillance duty suggests they rank Lucia as a higher priority than we realized.

I set my coffee down as Nico offers one last detail. He found ties between Bruno Caruso and a Volkov shell company holding a registered address two blocks from Ashford County Hospital.

I stop mid-rep, and the bar hovers at my chest for half a second before I rack it. “We need to check this out.”

Nico watches me, unsurprised. He knew exactly how I would react to this. He nods once. “That’s why I brought it to you so early.”

Before Nico goes, I tell him to put Gio’s crew on the shell company address. Gio’s always been someone I want at my back. He runs his own outfit now, legitimate contracts and clean money, but when I need someone I trust, I call him.

Nico doesn’t argue. He knows what Gio and I are to each other.

After thanking him, I towel off and head back to my quarters to shower. The next part of my day involves what I hate most. Hours of sitting at my desk going through documents, reports, and the other paperwork that Enzo insists comes with enforcer duties and managing security lies ahead of me. In the padrino’s words, the job requires as much brains as it does brawn.

Brawn has always been my currency, and the only time I tended to use my brain was to outwit an opponent in the ring. Before this promotion, my mental gymnastics rarely included decoding encrypted business jargon.

I’m chewing on the end of my third pencil of the day—I have no actual use for it because I communicate digitally, mostly through text—and at eight forty-seven, in the midst of my mental breakdown, Lucia walks into our quarters. I’m at my desk by the window, files spread everywhere.

Her worn jeans hang low on her hips, and her soft gray sweater has grown thin at the cuffs. She has her hair pulled into a low ponytail, some strands already loose, and she carries a notebook under her arm like an extension of her spine.

Lucia sits across from me and opens to a page with folded edges. She glances up, her gaze direct and assessing.

“I found a clue this morning.” She tilts her chin up defiantly. “When you were in the bathroom, I went through Nico’s file.”

I hold her gaze. “You did?”

“Yes. The one you left on the desk. And I’m not sorry.”

Considering she accessed restricted information without clearance, her admission should irritate me. Instead, I’m impressed by her single-minded motivation.

We cluster around the coffee table and spread out documents, hoping we can somehow connect something Matteo left behind to any detail in my Volkov file.