Chapter 37
Chapter thirty-seven
Carlo
Dante’s warehouse feels like the center of the universe right now, all concrete walls and industrial lighting and the absolute privacy that lets a man plan the impossible without interference.
I’ve been pacing for the better part of an hour while Dante sits calmly at his desk, making calls and taking notes like we’re planning a business merger instead of a jailbreak.
I stop pacing long enough to look at the crude map he’s sketched out on the whiteboard behind his desk. Roads marked in black, potential intercept points circled in red, escape routes highlighted in blue. It looks simple. Clean. The kind of operation Dante could probably execute in his sleep.
“Traffic patterns?” I ask, forcing myself to focus on the technical details instead of the growing panic in my chest.
“Rush hour works in our favor,” Dante replies, consulting his notes. “Convoy moves slowly, plenty of cover vehicles. We can position ourselves at this roundabout here.” He taps a red circle on the map. “Natural bottleneck, easy to create a delay that looks like normal traffic congestion.”
“Security response time?”
“Depends on the nature of the incident. If it looks like an accident, mechanical failure, something non-threatening, they’ll probably wait for backup before moving. That gives us maybe ten minutes.”
Ten minutes to extract Ginni from an armored prison van and disappear into London traffic. It sounds impossible when he puts it like that, but I’ve seen Dante pull off operations with tighter margins and higher stakes.
But it’s not happening until Friday. Four days away.
Four days of Ginni alone in that hellhole with God knows what kind of animals circling him like vultures.
“We can’t wait that long,” I say for the tenth time in the last hour. My voice is getting more strained with each repetition, the words feeling like gravel in my throat.
“We don’t have a choice,” Dante replies with the patience of a man who’s used to dealing with irrational colleagues. “The courthouse transport is our only viable option. Trying to break him out of the prison itself would be suicide.”
“There has to be another way.”
“There isn’t.” Dante’s voice is flat, final. “I’ve looked at every angle. The only time he’s reachable is during transport. Friday is the earliest we can move.”
I resume pacing, my hands clenched into fists at my sides.
The warehouse floor is going to start showing a path where I’ve been wearing it down with my restless movement.
Four days. Anything could happen in four days.
Ginni could be hurt, brutalized, broken beyond repair while I’m sitting here making plans and waiting for the perfect opportunity.
“What about inside?” I ask desperately. “Someone we can buy, threaten, whatever it takes to keep him safe until Friday?”
Dante shakes his head. “Already checked. None of our people are in his wing. Different classification, different security level. The guys we know are all in the high-security blocks with the serious criminals. Your boy hasn’t been sentenced yet, so he’s in remand with the petty thieves and drug dealers. ”
Which should be safer, in theory. Less violent, less organized. But it also means less predictable, less controllable. At least with professional criminals, you know the rules. With desperate amateurs, anything can happen.
“I’m working on it,” Dante continues, his voice gentler now. “Got feelers out to see if anyone has connections in that wing. Guards we can lean on, inmates who owe favors. But it takes time to establish contact, longer to build trust.”
Time we don’t have. Time Ginni might not have.
The irony isn’t lost on me that I’m sitting here worrying about Ginni’s safety when I was the one who put him in danger in the first place.
If I’d acted sooner, if I’d gotten him away from his awful family and into that lovely institution I had lined up.
If I had gotten him proper help instead of letting him spiral into whatever desperate state led to that stabbing. ..
I sink into the chair across from Dante’s desk and bury my face in my hands.
The rational part of my mind knows he’s right.
Knows that rushing in without proper planning will only get us all killed or arrested.
But the rest of me is screaming that every minute we delay is another minute Ginni is in danger.
“Tell me about him.”
Dante’s voice cuts through my spiral of anxiety. I look up to find him studying me with those dark, unreadable eyes.
“What?”
“Ginni. Tell me about him. Help me understand why Carlo Benedetti is willing to risk everything for one boy.”
The question catches me off guard. In all the frantic planning and desperate strategizing, I haven’t actually explained much about my relationship with Ginni beyond the basics.
The heavily edited basics, carefully scrubbed of anything that might make me sound like I’m completely irrational for loving him.
“We’ve been... seeing each other,” I say carefully. “For a few months. His family doesn’t approve. Too worried about their reputation to accept that their son is gay and feminine.”
It’s not entirely a lie. The timeline is wrong, and I’m leaving out some rather crucial details, but the basic emotional truth is there. His family does disapprove. They are worried about their reputation. And I do care about him far more than is sane, sensible or safe.
“So you’ve been sneaking around,” Dante observes.
“Something like that.”
“And then?”
I pause, searching for a version of events that doesn’t involve kidnapping and attempted murder-suicide and escape from a basement prison that had started to feel like a sanctuary.
“I got freaked out about my own reputation. About Marco’s reaction… and I broke it off.”
“And he couldn’t handle it.”
“No.” That part, at least, is absolutely true. “He’s not... he’s sensitive. Emotional. The thought of being separated from me... he snapped.”
Dante nods slowly, as if this all makes perfect sense. “So he stabbed a cop to get arrested. Force your hand. Make you choose between him and your comfortable life.”
The cold delivery of his assessment makes my chest tight. Is Dante right? Were Ginni’s actions less about escaping his family and more about getting my attention and forcing me to act?
Is that really what Ginni was thinking? That I needed to be forced to choose him? That he had to create a crisis dramatic enough to prove my feelings were real?
If so, he was right. Without this incentive, I would have kept hiding, kept making excuses, kept telling myself I was doing the right thing until I shipped him off to an expensive institution and never saw him again.
But now… now the thought of Ginni in danger has blown away all of my denial. I can’t escape my feelings when they are clawing at me like this. Ginni is in prison and I can’t eat, can’t sleep, can’t think of a single other thing.
“I remember him,” Dante says suddenly, his voice startling me out of my spiral. “From Christmas. At Dario and Molly’s.”
The memory hits me hard. Christmas dinner, not so long ago but also an entire lifetime ago. Ginni sitting quietly beside me with that carefully controlled intensity radiating off him like heat.
“You brought him,” Dante continues. “Said he was Marco’s little brother, needed somewhere to spend the holiday because his family had gone back to Italy without him.”
I nod, not trusting my voice. I remember that evening with painful clarity. The way Ginni had watched everyone with those assessing eyes, how he’d only really come alive when Molly started talking about wedding planning.
“He barely spoke,” Dante observes. “Just sat there watching, taking everything in. Most people would have called him sullen, antisocial.”
“But not you.”
“No. Not me.” Dante’s smile is sharp and knowing. “I recognized it. That stillness, that way of cataloguing threats and opportunities. He wasn’t being rude. He was hunting.”
The word sends a chill down my spine because it’s so accurate. That’s exactly what Ginni was doing that night, even in a room full of my friends. Assessing, calculating, deciding who was safe and who wasn’t.
“Didn’t seem weak to me,” Dante continues. “Quite the opposite, actually. Takes a special kind of control to sit in a room full of predators and never show your throat.”
I look up sharply, surprised by the insight. “You think he’s strong?”
“Don’t you?”
The question forces me to really consider it. Ginni, strong? My beautiful, fragile boy who falls apart when there is a power cut?
But then I think about everything he’s endured.
His family’s rejection, their attempts to institutionalize him, years of being told he’s broken and wrong and fundamentally unlovable.
The fact that he survived all that with his capacity for joy intact, his ability to love still fierce and uncompromising.
And then there’s the fact he managed to abduct me and keep me prisoner for two weeks.
“Yes,” I say slowly. “He is strong. Stronger than I gave him credit for.”
“Then why are you so worried about him in prison?”
The question cuts right to the heart of my terror. “Because he’s strong, not invincible. And his grip on reality...” I pause, trying to find a way to explain without revealing too much. “It’s fragile. When he gets desperate, when he feels cornered, he doesn’t always make rational choices.”
“Like stabbing a policeman.”
“Like stabbing a policeman,” I agree. “And in prison...” I trail off, unable to voice my worst fears.
“You’re worried he’ll snap again,” Dante finishes. “Do something that gets him hurt or killed.”
“He’s entirely capable of stabbing the wrong person,” I say quietly. “Someone who’ll retaliate in ways that...” I can’t finish the thought.
Dante leans back in his chair, considering this. “The boy who charmed Molly with his wedding planning ideas?”
“The same boy who put a kitchen knife between a constable’s ribs in broad daylight,” I remind him.