Page 63

"Perimeter alert." Fabio's voice is clipped. The voice of a man who failed once and will cut his own throat before he fails again. "Camera twelve. Two figures approaching from the industrial corridor."

The mug hits the counter. Coffee splashes across the marble and I don't wipe it because nothing in this kitchen matters except the seven steps between me and the front door.

I move.

Four strides to the hallway. Three to the door. Every step carries five days — scrubbed warehouses, dead-end corridors, Nova's hand on my arm at three AM saying we will find him with the voice of a woman who has been holding the world together since she was eighteen.

Through the glass panel the porch light throws yellow across the walkway.

Dante.

Walking. Upright. Alive.

My hands start shaking. Not adrenaline — I've lived on adrenaline for five days. This is the devastating release of a body that's been bracing for the worst and just got told the worst didn't come.

My brother is alive.

The relief hits my chest like a freight train. My eyes burn. The green goes wet and I don't blink because blinking means losing sight of him and I've spent five days without sight of him and I won't lose another fraction of a second.

I open the door.

My hands find his face before my brain gives the order.

Both palms. Against his cheeks. Five days of stubble rough against my skin. Dried blood at his right temple — a dark line running from hairline to cheekbone. Bruising beneath his left eye. The jaw is the King's jaw — the same bone, the same architecture that made Giovanni the most recognized face in every room he entered.

But the eyes are Dante's.

Clear. Steady. Carrying something I've never seen in my youngest brother — a calm that has nothing to do with control and everything to do with a man who walked through the worst thing that ever happened to him and came out holding certainty instead of wreckage.

My hands shake against his skin. I don't stop them. I don't perform steadiness the way I perform everything else — the charm, the grin, the loaded ease of a man who runs an empire on instinct and covers the terror with a smile.

"You look like shit," I say. My voice cracks on the last word.

"You look worse." His mouth almost curves. Almost.

Three seconds of my hands on my brother's jaw and my eyes stripped raw and every wall I've built demolished by the simple, devastating fact that he is breathing.

Then my hands drop.

Because I see the second figure. And the second detail.

Dante's left hand. Holding another hand. Fingers laced through fingers belonging to a woman standing one step behind him with her face in the porch light and the posture of someone who has spent twenty years entering rooms where weapons get pointed at her skull.

Isadora.

The relief still wet on my face collides with recognition so violent it tastes like metal. I know that face. I've been hunting that face across five days of warehouse sweeps and dead ends scrubbed clean. That face belongs to the woman who chained my brother in a concrete room. Who held him. Who drugged him and cuffed him and kept him in the dark while I tore this city apart.

And my brother is holding her hand. On my front porch. Under my porch light. While Tomás's sun watches from the kitchen and every instinct I own screams two things at once — she took him and he brought her home.

"She is with me."

Four words. Quiet. The voice of a nineteen-year-old who has made his choice and will not be moved from it.

I stare at the hand. At his face. At the green eyes that carry the specific, terrifying conviction of a Rivas who has chosen.

"Romeo." His voice drops. "I said both of us. You said you'd open the door."

The phone call. Bring him home. Both of us. I will open the door.