“I love you,” she whispers.
“I love you too. Now let’s go get our son.”
I step out of the SUV into the cold morning air. Around me, my men are assembling, weapons drawn and ready.
The cathedral stands in the distance.
Time to end this.
28
SCARLETT
I’ve never been this scared in my entire life.
And I’ve been scared plenty of times. Scared when I watched Antonio bleed out on that office floor six years ago. Scared when I realized I was pregnant and alone and running from a man who could find anyone. Scared every single time Luca got sick or hurt or cried out in the night, and I had to figure out how to fix it by myself because there was nobody else.
But this is something else entirely. This is a fear so deep it has settled into my bones, and it’s even scarier because I’ve never been in this situation before or had firsthand experience to navigate it.
The SUV stopped two blocks back and now we’re walking. Walking toward the place where my son is being held hostage. Every step feels like a death wish, like walking right onto the inevitable.
But I have no other option. I’d walk into the lion’s den without a second thought if that’s where my Luca is being held.
Snow is falling, and I try to let myself get distracted. Soft white flakes drift down from a grey sky, landing on my shoulders, on my eyelashes, and on the barrel of the gun strapped to my hip.
It’s the first snow of the season. Three days ago, Luca was begging me to take him to the park if it snowed enough. He wanted to build a snowman and catch snowflakes on his tongue and make snow angels and drink hot chocolate with extra marshmallows afterward.
I’d promised, and said I’d bring him.
Now he’s somewhere inside that church with a gun to his head, and I’m walking through the snow to either save him or die trying.
The cathedral is getting closer with every step. St. Sebastian’s. I’ve never seen it before today. I’d only heard about it in the research I did years ago when I was trying to understand the family that wanted me dead. It used to be beautiful, probably. There are hints of what beauty it once had in the architecture, the tall arched windows and the carved stone details and the spires reaching up toward heaven.
Now it just looks sad and abandoned. The windows are dark and broken, the stone covered in graffiti and cobwebs, the whole building sagging like it’s tired of standing. Like it’s been waiting to fall down for decades and nobody cared enough to either fix it or put it out of its misery.
And my son is in there. My baby is in that rotting building with a traitor who probably will not hesitate to harm him if he doesn’t get what he wants.
I want to throw up. I want to sit down in the snow and cry until someone tells me this is all a nightmare and I’m about to wakeup. I want to be anywhere else, anyone else, living any other life but this one.
But I keep walking because Luca needs me to keep walking.
Dante’s men are spreading out around us, forty of them moving with expertise that tells me they’ve done this before. They’re splitting into groups just like we planned, the main force heading for the front doors while Marco takes his team around to the catacombs and the snipers climb to their positions on nearby rooftops.
All those hours in the war room, all those plans and backup plans, are now serving their purpose.
I stay close to Dante as agreed, so close I can smell the gun oil on his hands and feel the tension emanating off him.
He’s different this morning. The man who held me last night, who told me he loved me, who promised we’d build a life together after this, he’s gone. Locked away somewhere deep inside. The person walking beside me now is someone else entirely. Someone harder and capable of doing terrible things without flinching.
I need that person right now. I need him to be exactly what he is because that’s the only person we need to get our son back.
We stop about fifty feet from the entrance and Dante’s hand finds my arm, squeezing once. A reminder. Stay close. Don’t move unless he says. Don’t shoot unless there’s no choice.
I know. He’s told me a hundred times. But I nod anyway because I can see the fear underneath his mask, the desperate need to know I’ll be okay no matter what happens in there.
The doors are massive. Old wood that has seen decades of weather, iron hinges rusted orange.
They swing open with a creak that echoes through the empty street as we push in. Inside, the church is destroyed.
