Chapter 6
Fabio
The iron door stays sealed. The freezing damp of the stone means nothing to me anymore. Heat radiates from the woman sleeping on the narrow cot. My body takes up most of the cot. My muscles ache from the cramped angle. I don't care. She's tangled against my chest.
Her warmth is the only counterweight to the violence in mine. The rough woolen blanket covers us both. She breathes deep and even. Her scent sinks into my blood. Ripe figs. Dark honey. Mine. It's the only thing keeping me on the ground.
She's a Bellanti. The enemy. The blood my family has warred against for two decades. None of that matters. She belongs to me. The claim is final. It's bone-deep, blood-deep, louder than every tactical protocol Dominic ever drilled into my head.
The burner phone vibrates on the wooden crate beside the cot.
The mechanical buzz is loud in the silence.
It grates against the dripping water echoing from the far corner of the tunnel.
My jaw tightens. The same sharp line I inherited from my mother locks down hard when the outside world threatens this sanctuary.
I don't want to answer it. I want to smash the device into dust and keep us buried in this hole forever.
The vibration persists. It's the encrypted Costa intel channel. Emergency override.
I carefully untangle my limbs from hers.
The cold air bites at my sweat-slicked back.
I shift my weight off the protesting springs of the cot.
She murmurs in her sleep. Her hand reaches out, fingers brushing the empty space where my chest just was.
My chest aches with a phantom pressure. I pull the blanket up over her bare shoulders.
I step away. The stone is freezing against my bare feet.
I grab the phone from the crate. The screen glow is blinding in the pitch black. I turn my back to the cot to shield her from the harsh blue light.
The message is a raw packet. It's flagged red from the Costa compound server. I open the text string. The words form a blade in the dark.
It's a broadcast intercept. A blast sent across the Bellanti secure network.
The text is short. Clinical. Lethal.
"Asset Catalina Bellanti successfully deployed. Infiltration of Costa territory proceeding according to protocol. She is a loyal soldier of the family. Do not engage. Allow the Trojan horse to breach the gates."
My blood turns to molten iron.
The air in my lungs evaporates. The damp tunnel shrinks.
The stone walls bear down on me. The iron door sits there like a verdict.
They're claiming her defection is a lie.
They're telling the entire syndicate she's a plant.
A fake defector sent to infiltrate my family. A weapon aimed directly at our throats.
The rage is instant. It doesn't ignite. It detonates.
Every muscle in my back strings tight as steel wire. My fist clenches around the plastic casing of the phone. I am twenty seconds away from crushing the device into shrapnel.
I force my eyes to scan the rest of the data. I need tactical clarity. I need to know how much danger she is in.
I scroll down to the raw packet metadata. The routing information blinks in harsh white text against the black background.
The timestamp catches my attention.
The numbers are wrong.
I stare at the digits. I run the chronological sequence in my head. The math is broken.
The packet registered on the main Costa intel stream at nine. It hit our internal servers hours before Catalina even walked out of the shadows and made contact with me. Before she ever stood across from me in the dark and offered me her life.
That is impossible.
If the Bellantis were broadcasting a reactionary cover story for her disappearance, they would have sent it after they realized she was gone.
If it was a real-time recovery operation, the timeline would match her flight from the South Side.
But this data hit our servers before she even breached the perimeter.
The data moved faster than reality.
The broadcast was sitting inside our stream before any of this should have been possible.
The implication lands with the force of a round between my ribs. There is a breach in the channel. The intel arrived too early. It bypassed the normal filtration protocols. Either the Bellantis have a backdoor into our servers, or something on our end is wrong.
The broken timing screams at me. It's a wound in the system. I stare at the screen. The numbers do not change. They refuse to align with the laws of physics and time.
I don't know what it means. I can't make it make sense. The tactical side of my brain tries to put it together. It fails. Something's missing.
I file it away. I shove the broken timing to the back of my mind for later. It's a single unresolved thread. I can't afford to pull it right now. The immediate threat is the broadcast itself. The message it carries.
If this broadcast is in the Costa stream, Dominic has seen it. Matteo has seen it. Santi has seen it.
My family thinks the woman sleeping a few feet from me is a Trojan horse. They think she is an assassin.
They'll demand her head. In my mind, I see it already. A strike team rolling on this speakeasy. The expectation that I step aside and let them put a bullet in her brain.
A low sound tears out of my throat. It's the sound of something snapping inside me.
I toss the phone onto the wooden crate. It clatters. I don't care about the noise.
I begin to pace.
I cannot stay still. The violence in my body demands an outlet. The damp tunnel is too small for the violence boiling in my veins. My bare feet thud against the rough stone.. The sound echoes off the rusted iron door.
I keep my distance from the cot. I won't risk getting close to her right now.
I'm volatile. A lion pacing a perimeter that's too small to hold me. The muscles in my forearms bunch every time my fists clench.
I don't reach for her. I can't touch her right now.
If I put my hands on her soft skin while this rage is tearing me apart, I will break something. I'm built for war. Dominic kept me on a tight leash for years, even when I was at the front. He knew the grief in me had never burned itself out. It only sharpened into a need to retaliate.
Now there's nothing holding me back. The target is painted on the back of the woman I claim as mine.
The urge to hunt is overwhelming. I want to walk out of this tunnel, cross the Chicago River, and slaughter every Bellanti breathing air. I want to burn their warehouses to ash. I want to sever the heads of anyone who dared type her name into that broadcast.
I pivot sharply at the far wall. The stone is slick with condensation. I drag my knuckles against the rough surface. The pain grounds me for a fraction of a second.
I turn back toward the center of the room.
Catalina is awake.
She's sitting up on the narrow cot. The rough woolen blanket is clutched to her chest. Her dark hair is a wild mess around her shoulders. Her lips are still swollen from mine. The room thickens with her.
She doesn't speak. Doesn't scream. Doesn't shrink away from me.
She watches me pace. Her eyes track my movements. She sees the violence coming off me in waves. She sees the monster the Costa family uses to terrorize the Chicago underworld.
She does not run.
I know what she's been taught. To fear men who can't keep their violence on a leash. Her own aunt was executed for stepping out of line. She knows what men like me are capable of when the rage takes over.
Yet she sits still. She anchors herself to the mattress. She holds her ground inside the radius of my anger and waits.
Her bravery hits me square in the chest. It quiets something raging under my skin.
I stop pacing. I stand rigid in the center of the room. The space heater hums loudly in the silence. The orange coils cast a demonic glow across the lower half of my body.
My breathing is ragged. Each pull of air burns going down.
"What happened?" Her voice is steady. The sharp tone she usually wears is gone. There's nothing between us now but what's real.
I stare at her. I catalog every curve hidden beneath the blanket. I memorize the shade of her eyes. I am burning her image into my brain because the entire city is about to try and erase her from existence.
"They broadcast it," my voice is a harsh rasp. It doesn't sound like mine.
She blinks once. The intelligence behind her eyes processes the data instantly. She is a Bellanti defector. She knows the operational playbook.
"To the syndicate?" she asks.
"To everyone," I reply. The words are heavy stones dropping onto the concrete between us. "It was intercepted on the Costa encrypted channel."
She processes the implications. Her spine straightens. The blanket slips slightly, revealing the pale curve of her shoulder. I catch the movement. My muscles twitch with the violent need to cover her up, to shield her from the phantom eyes of the enemy.
"What did it say?" she demands. There is no tremor in her tone.
I point a finger at the burner phone sitting on the crate.
She swings her legs off the cot. The freezing air hits her bare skin.
She ignores the cold. She wraps the blanket tightly around her body like a crude toga.
She walks barefoot across the gritty floor.
She does not hesitate to approach me. She steps directly into my space.
The heat radiating from my skin washes over her.
She picks up the phone. She reads the screen.
Her face goes blank. The Bellanti mask slips firmly into place. It is a survival mechanism. She shuts down every emotional tell. She becomes a statue of pale skin and black hair.
She reads the message twice. She stares at the glowing text.
"A Trojan horse," she whispers to the empty room.
"They're branding you a loyal soldier," I state the obvious. The rage is thick in my throat. "They are telling my family that your defection is a sanctioned operation. A trap."