Chapter One
Four Years Ago
The room smelled like blood and bleach.
Not fresh blood.Not the sharp, metallic kind that meant something had just ended.This was old blood—soaked into concrete, dragged across tile, scrubbed until someone gave up and poured chemicals over it instead.The kind of smell that never really left.It lingered in the back of the throat, in the lungs, a reminder that whatever happened here didn’t stay contained in the past.
Luca Moretti sat cuffed to a steel chair bolted into the floor.
He’d been brought in two nights ago—snatched off the street after a job that had gone wrong in exactly the way it always did when he chose people over profit.He’d interfered.Stepped in where he wasn’t supposed to.Broken another crew’s rules by pulling a girl out of the back of a van and leaving two men breathing when they probably shouldn’t have been.
They’d called it theft.Assault.Interference with business.
Luca called it attempted rape.Only attempted because he stepped in and stopped it ...and made it impossible for either man to do it again.Sure, he left them breathing, but he certainly did not leave them capable.
His wrists were numb.His shoulders screamed every time he shifted, which wasn’t often.He’d learned early that stillness conserved energy.Thirty-six hours without sleep had stripped his thoughts down to their barest edges.Pain was constant now, no longer sharp enough to shock, just deep and grinding and everywhere.
His shirt was gone.His ribs were a constellation of purple and black bruises, one cracked clean through.Each breath scraped.One eye was swollen shut, the other burned every time he blinked under the merciless overhead light.
They’d wanted names and locations.
He didn’t have any left to give.
Mostly, they wanted him to beg.
They were about 15 years and countless beatings too late for that.That part of him that would have begged had been beaten out of him years ago.
“You’re quiet,” one of them said.The man leaned against the wall, baton loose in his hand, casual, as if this were a break room instead of a holding cell.“That usually means those in your situation are giving up.”
Luca lifted his head slowly.Every movement sent a white-hot pulse through his chest, radiating outward until his vision speckled.He swallowed blood and smiled anyway.
“Usually,” he rasped, “it means I’m waiting.”
The man snorted.“For what?”
“For you to get bored.”
The baton came down across his collarbone.
Pain detonated.Something cracked wetly beneath the impact, and Luca bit down hard to keep the sound inside his mouth.His body jerked against the restraints, metal biting into his wrists.
Still, he didn’t scream.
They hit him again.And again.
The questions didn’t change.The answers didn’t either.
He thought of the kid who’d cried when they dragged Luca away in cuffs years ago.Thought of the motel bathroom where a stranger had stitched his side with shaking hands and stolen vodka.Thought of the one truth he’d learned the hard way and never forgotten.
No one was coming to save him.
You survived—or you didn’t.
The door at the far end of the room opened.
The air shifted.
It was subtle, but every man in the room felt it.The baton lowered.One of them straightened without realizing he’d done it.Another glanced toward the door, jaw tightening.
