My jaw locks so tight my teeth grind together. I stare at the sterile, typed font. The man who just laid me bare on those sheets, who claimed me with an intensity that defied all logic, built the entire foundation of our relationship on a risk-assessment matrix.
I slam the file shut. The sharp smack echoes in the quiet room.
I push away from the desk, ready to tear the door off its hinges, ready to scream at Turi, ready to pack whatever dignity I have left and walk out into the storm. I survive. That is what I do. I do not let men turn me into collateral.
But the file sits crooked on the desk.
Enzo Costa does not leave things crooked. The man aligns his pens parallel to his keyboard. He shuffles cards without looking, squaring the deck every time.
I stare at the misaligned folder. A second folder sits beneath it, hidden until my angry shove exposed the edge.
This one has no typed label. The tab is covered in thick, aggressive black marker. It simply reads:N.K.
My breath stalls in my throat. I step back toward the desk. My hand trembles slightly as I reach for the second folder. I pull it open.
Chaos spills out.
The sterile spreadsheets are gone. This folder is thick with loose papers, sticky notes, torn margins, and heavily annotated floor plans. The pristine logic of the fixer is absent.
I pick up the first sheet. It is a copy of the original fake engagement contract. The one I signed. The legal document detailing the parameters of our public relationship. But the text is barely legible beneath a sea of furious red ink.
He crossed out the phrasePublic performances only. In the margin, his sharp handwriting dictates:Cancel restriction. She attends all events with me. No exceptions.
He crossed out the clause regarding my separate living quarters. The annotation reads:Unacceptable. Move her to the compound immediately. Secure the east wing.
I flip to the next document. It is a security threat assessment dated yesterday. The day he forced me into his armored SUV and brought me here. He told me the Bellantis were tracking me. He told me I was in immediate, lethal danger. The background check stapled behind it is dated six months earlier—he has been mapping my life since long before Il Corvo. I keep flipping. The next page stops my heart. It is a corporate filing for one of his West Loop shell companies, Delaware LLC, registered six months ago. My firm is listed as legal counsel of record.My bar number sits in the metadata. My digital signature—my real signature, pulled from the firm's secure portal—is on the formation paperwork. I do not remember this client. Of course I do not remember this client. The retainer was blind. The partner handed me a stack of boilerplate corporate filings six months ago and told me to clear them by Friday. I never asked who the end client was. Junior associates do not ask. He did not need to forge anything. He hired my firm. He let the partner assign me to his paperwork. He buried me in his crimes before he ever walked into Il Corvo, and the worst part is that every signature is legitimately mine.
The threat assessment matrix is blank. The Bellanti activity log for my neighborhood reads:Zero.
He lied.
There was no active threat that day. There was no tactical reason to move me. He moved me because he wanted me here. He fabricated a security crisis to trap me in his sanctuary. The realization hits me with the force of a speeding train. The cold, unfeeling mafia prince threw out his own operational playbook just to keep me under his roof.
My fingers fly through the pages. The evidence of his madness piles up.
A floor plan of Il Corvo, the restaurant where we had our first meeting. Red lines dissect the room. They do not point to the exits for retreat. They point from the table to the kitchen, calculating the exact distance required to throw me behind the steel counters in case of an ambush.
A diagram of the Bellanti charity gala from last night. The event where we supposedly played our roles. The margin notes are frantic.Do not let her speak to the Bellanti underboss. Position body between her and the west doors. Block line of sight from the mezzanine.
He wasn't plotting the infiltration. He was plotting my protection.
I find a stack of printed communication logs from his encrypted burner phone. He intercepts and logs his own calls. I scan the timestamps. Earlier tonight, just before dinner. The exact time we were sitting in Matteo's kitchen, pretending to be engaged for Gemma and Dante. The log shows three missed calls from a Costa lieutenant regarding a weapons shipment.
The notes beside the log read:Ignore. She is laughing.
My knees hit the oak chair. I collapse into the leather, staring at the paper.Ignore. She is laughing.
The man who treats human lives like chess pieces ignored a lethal weapons shipment because I made a joke about Dante's cooking. The magnitude of the shift shatters my remaining defenses. The cynical lawyer vanishes, leaving only a woman staring at the raw, bleeding heart of a monster.
He stopped treating this as a cover the second I walked into Il Corvo. Maybe he never treated it as a cover at all. The spreadsheets in the first folder were just his desperate attempt to rationalize an obsession he could not control. He needed a logical excuse to bring me into his world, so he drafted a contract. But the moment I put the ring on, the logic failed.
I pull the final document from the back of the folder.
It is a heavily redacted ledger from the West Loop transit hub. Jeff's numbers. The numbers that just sent Enzo out into the night to commit murder. I study the columns. My legal training takes over, analyzing the flow of the illicit cash. The Bellanti laundering scheme is evident, but the margins of this ledger contain something else.
A list of names. A list of Bellanti enforcers.
Next to Rourke's name, Enzo wrote a single directive.If he speaks her name, every Bellanti asset on this ledger becomes a casualty by morning.
