I close my eyes. I bury my face in her hair. I inhale the scent of warm amber and soft musk.
The boy who went quiet in the hallway is finally still. The ghost in the machine has found a reason to come back.
There is only the man, holding his woman, ready to burn the world to ash to keep her safe.
I keep my arm locked around her waist. Her hand rests over mine. Her body pressed against mine is a physical anchor, grounding me to reality in a way nothing else ever has.
The quiet settles over us, but it is no longer the suffocating, oppressive silence of trauma. It is peace.
Tomorrow, the war will demand my attention. Tomorrow, I will have to hunt down the physical proof of where the leak truly lives. I will have to face Dominic, Matteo, and Dante. I will have to unleash the lethal violence I have held back all these years to protect my family from the impending Bellanti strike.
But tonight, the war can wait.
I press my lips to the crown of her head. The possessive fury in my blood settles into a deep, unbreakable resolve.
She is mine. She is safe.
9
Imani
A suffocatingwarmth pins my hip to the thin mattress beneath us. The scent of clean linen and raw ozone overpowers the sterile, metallic hum of the cooling fans. We are stretched across a thin mattress in a subterranean, windowless bunker tucked beneath a fortified limestone mansion on the North Side of Chicago.
My ex-boyfriend stole sixty grand to fund a catastrophic sports-betting addiction three days ago. That was the peak of my week's tragedy. Now I am wrapped in a mafia ghost’s flannel over my sweater, trapped in his underground bunker, serving as a human anchor for a man who hasn't touched another living soul in eight years.
My life has officially derailed.
The weight around my waist shifts. A tattooed arm tightens, pulling me flush against the lean, corded wall of his chest. Vincenzo holds himself still beside me with the discipline of a predator at rest. Zero wasted motion.
His face is buried in the curve of my neck, his steady exhalations ghosting over my collarbone. His short, dark hair catches the erratic blue blinks of the server tower LEDs. A thickgold chain rests against my skin, the cross pendant pressed between our bodies.
He breathes in. The movement is slow, deep, deliberate. The quiet scratch of his stubble drags against my shoulder.
He is awake. He was probably awake before I was.
His hand slides up from my waist, calloused fingertips tracing the line of my throat. His palm settles against the hollow beneath my jaw, the pad of his thumb pressing just below my ear—warm, grounding, a slow claim settling into my skin. His touch curls against my neck, a desperate verification that I am real, that I am here, that the warm amber scent filling his sterile room belongs to a living woman and not a hallucination.
His eyes open. They are clear, stripped of the dead-channel hush that usually clouds them. He stares at me, mapping the dimensions of my face in the dim light of the data monitors.
"Morning," I whisper. The word sounds loud in the hush of the bunker.
"You're here." His voice has the low, sand-rough register of a man who has not used it in hours.
"I'm here. You practically welded me to your side. Escaping would require a blowtorch."
The corner of his mouth twitches. It isn't quite a smile, but on Vincenzo Costa, a microscopic twitch is the equivalent of a marching band. He doesn't loosen his grip. He just shifts his weight, pinning me more securely to the mattress. He is an enormous, lethal weapon, and he is currently hoarding me like a dragon on a pile of gold coins.
"The data," he murmurs, his gaze snapping to the black screens of his terminal across the room. The softness vanishes. The lethal, calculating operator snaps back into place, locking down his features. The transition is violent.
“The clone caught enough before you severed the cable,” I say. “Access fragments, routing tables, and part of the ghost-signatory directory map. Not the whole ledger, but enough to prove the architecture exists.”
He sits up. The sudden loss of his body heat makes the freezing temperature of the underground room painfully obvious. I pull the collar of his shirt up to my chin, burying my nose in the scent of him. He runs a hand over his close-cropped hair, his broad shoulders bunching with tension. The gold cross pendant resting against his chest stretches over corded muscle. Every line of his body screams violence.
He stands up, moving silently on bare feet, and walks over to the terminal. He hits a single key. The wall of screens flickers to life, illuminating the room in harsh, unforgiving white light. Lines of encrypted code reflect on the glass. The digital footprint of a decades-long mafia war scrolls across the monitors. Timestamp anomalies. Routing protocols. Clearance nodes.
The pattern circles inward—toward someone with two decades of unchecked access to the Costa compound. He won't say more. He won't even let the shape of a name finish forming.
The shape of it hangs in the air between us, toxic and unfinished. We both know the math. Numbers lack the capacity for loyalty. They just expose the rot. He refuses to chase it further. I refuse to push him. The unspoken question sits between us, too heavy to lift.
