“Girl. In the residential wing. Not one of ours.” A beat. Nico’s voice is wrong. Flattened in a way I’ve never heard from him. “She’s different. Not cooperating.”
“Handle it and catch up.”
Static. Then sounds of a scuffle. A woman’s voice, harsh and guttural, words I don’t understand. Then Nico, speaking the same language back.
Russian. Fluent Russian I didn’t know he had.
She goes quiet. Silence on the line.
“Nico?” Dante, sharp.
“I’m fine. She’s fine.” A loaded pause. “I’ll find you after.”
Dante and I exchange a look. Later. That’s a problem for later.
We descend.
The basement level is a different world. Emergency lighting only, red-tinted, casting everything in the color of something wrong. The air drops ten degrees and picks up something underneath the cold. Disinfectant, or worse. Something organic and terrible. My skin crawls. I’ve been in places like this before. Warehouses. Shipping containers. Rooms with locks on the outside and rings bolted to the walls.
This is where they keep them.
The women. The product. This is where Sofia Vitale spent three years. This is where Isabella is right now, in the dark, waiting for me.
The thought is a blade between my ribs. Cleaner than the bullet. Harder to ignore.Damnher for making me feel this.
I’m so close. Hold on.
“Main room ahead,” Marco says. “That’s where Flavio’s been running operations from. If he’s anywhere, he’s there.”
Flavio. The man whose phone call I answered three hours ago. Who told me she was with him.Safe, for now.Enjoying their conversation. The voice that orders expensive wine and death warrants with the same inflection.
We stack on the entry. This time I don’t wait for Dante’s signal.
I kick it open and move.
The room is larger than expected. A command center. Screens on one wall, maps on another, the infrastructure of a trafficking empire spread out like a war room. And in the center, surrounded by his last remaining guards, stands Flavio Benedetti.
He looks smaller than I expected. Older. A man of money and strategy and distance, not blood and proximity. The guards around him number six, weapons raised, but the math isn’t in their favor and they know it. The calculation is visible in the way they’re holding themselves. Still fighting but already anticipating the end.
“Santoro.” Flavio’s voice is steady. I’ll give him that. “You came.”
“Where is she.”
He tilts his head. Studies me the way he probably studies everything. With the mild curiosity of a man who’s already figured out the angle. “She refused me, you know.” Every muscle in my body goes rigid. “I offered her everything. Her sister. Herfreedom.” He spreads his hands. “All she had to do was give me what she had on your family. Security codes. Financial records. Vulnerabilities.” He pauses. Lets it sit. “She said no.”
The words land somewhere below the ribs.
She refused. Even in the dark, even after I locked her up and took her choice away, even with her sister’s life on the table. She refused to betray me.
“She said you’d come.” Flavio shakes his head, something like genuine wonder crossing his face. “I didn’t believe her. The Santoro enforcer, tearing through a fortified compound for a hacker he’s known a few months.” A short laugh. “She was certain. I was not.”
She was alone in the dark. With every reason in the world to hate me. And she bet her life on me showing up.
“But here you are,” Flavio says. “Tearing my compound apart like the devil himself. All for her.”
My grip on the gun is white-knuckled. The polymer creaks.
“Where.” My voice comes out barely human. “Is. She.”
