Page 65 of Read This Before the Villain falls in Love with You

He puts the car in gear. The gate starts to roll open. Somewhere in the house Nonna is probably still holding that spoon, waiting for all of us to come back so she can yell about the salt again. I watch the dark road ahead of us and feel the leftover heat of him still humming under my skin.

Prime leverage. Fine. Let Bellini bring whatever he's got.

I negotiate for a living. I have never lost a fight I intended to win.

Chapter 25

LUCA

We are ten minutes out from the Bellini docks when the world comes apart. I have one hand on the steering wheel of the SUV, watching the coastal road wind into salt-soaked darkness, running through the strike plan in my head. We are supposed to burn Vincenzo's warehouse tonight. Nora sits in the passenger seat beside me, quiet and watchful, her arms folded over her chest as the headlights carve up the asphalt.

My phone vibrates against the console, followed a heartbeat later by the scream of tires behind us.

In the rearview mirror, high beams flood the back window. Adrian's black SUV skids around the curve, tires screaming as smoke rolls off the rubber. The back end swings wide, slides across the road, and cuts straight toward my rear bumper before he stomps the brake, stopping two feet from my car and throwing up a spray of gravel.

Nora grabs the dash with both hands as I slam my foot on the brakes and bring the car to a halt. "What the hell is his problem?"

I throw the car into park and shove my door open into the cold night air. Behind us, Adrian's SUV door flies open. Adrian leaps out before the engine even dies, stumbling once on the loose gravel before sprinting toward me. His face is completely drained of color, his weapon forgotten at his hip. Behind him, Matteo and Enzo scramble out of the passenger doors, both of them yelling at once.

I step out into the gravel as Adrian reaches the hood of my car. "Talk." I keep my voice flat, but the hair on the back of my neck rises. Adrian does not panic. Adrian does not run like a dying animal. "Why the fuck are you braking across oncoming traffic?"

Adrian slams both trembling palms against the hot metal hood, gasping for breath. "It's Sofia. Her tracker cut out forty minutes ago on the coastal stretch. The transponder went black. The driver is not picking up. Nothing. Absolute dead silence."

Matteo sprints up behind him with Enzo right at his heels. "Did you try her second line? The burner in her cosmetics bag?"

"Straight to voicemail!" Adrian's voice cracks violently down the center. He drags both hands down his pale face, shaking like a wire under high voltage. "I tried four times. Five times. I blew through two red lights chasing your tail. Luca, her line is completely dead."

Matteo runs a shaking hand through his hair, pacing in a tight circle on the road. "She was going to see the physical therapist. Ankle thing from the fall last week. She does it everytime, she never takes an escort because it's ten minutes down the road and she hates being babysat."

I stare at the empty road on the screen. "She should have taken an escort."

"I know that!" Matteo snaps. He winces and drops his head, rubbing his temples like his skull is cracking open. "I'm sorry. I know that."

Enzo steps forward, his eyes dark with immediate violence. "Turn the cars around. We go back to the estate, pull every man off the dock run, and lock down the perimeter."

"We're not raiding the docks tonight," I state, the words like lead in my mouth. "Turn around. Now."

We kill the dock assault on the spot. Nora climbs into the back without asking questions, her face set in tight, sharp lines as we race back toward the estate at double the speed limit, Adrian's headlights pinned to our bumper the entire way. By the time we skid into the mansion and hit the command center, the coastal road feeds are already burning on the main wall.

Adrian lunges at the main console, his fingers slipping across the keyboard with clumsy, terrified speed before he wrenches the coastal camera feed onto the main wall. The screen flickers with grainy footage. The road sits half swallowed by deep tree shadow. Then a second car swerves across the center line at high speed, boxing Sofia's sedan against the ditch so hard the tires throw thick white smoke across the blacktop.

I step forward until my chest nearly hits the display. "Freeze it."

Matteo taps the screen with a trembling index finger. "Right there. Look at the angle of that bumper. That was deliberate."

Adrian slams his fist onto the spacebar, stopping the frame so hard the monitor rattles. His breath comes out in ragged, ragged gasps, his chest shuddering as if someone just kicked him in the ribs. Two masked men in dark jackets are already tearing Sofia's passenger door open. The sight hits my gut like an iron bar, but Adrian looks entirely hollowed out, staring at the frozen pixels like a man watching a guillotine fall.

"Bellini," Matteo mutters, his fingers digging hard into the edge of the workstation desk.

"We don't have confirmation yet," I counter, though my gut tells me otherwise.

"You know it's him," Matteo presses, palms wiping hard over his damp face. "You've known it since we saw that second car."

I glare toward the blinking tracking logs. "We don't act on assumptions. Assumptions get people killed before we even pick up our weapons."

Enzo paces like a caged dog behind the console. "Assumptions keep people alive when the other side doesn't play by rules."

He's right, and I hate that he's right, and I hate more that saying it out loud makes it real in a way the footage hasn't quite managed. I run the timestamp again. Forty-one minutes. In forty-one minutes a car can go anywhere. A boat can leave a dock. A phone can be dropped in a storm drain three towns over.