Chapter Twenty-Six
ROCCO
I zip-tie Marco Bellini’s wrists behind his back with a strip I pull from the go-bag under the bed.
The go-bag was Adrian’s idea. He packed it three weeks ago—first aid supplies, a change of clothes, two spare magazines, zip ties, a flashlight, a burner phone.
I told him he was being paranoid. He told me that paranoia was a clinical term for a pattern-recognition system operating at elevated sensitivity, and that given our history, elevated sensitivity was the baseline.
The bag sits under the bed. Marco Bellini lies on the floor. Adrian is right about everything, always. I’m never going to tell him that.
I gag Bellini with a strip of torn bedsheet. His eyes are open now. The concussion is clearing. He sees me above him. He sees the Glock in my hand. He sees Adrian standing by the door with the suppressed Sig.
Bellini’s eyes are defiant. Not afraid. Defiant. Practiced. He believes in what he’s doing.
I pull the gag down.
"Who sent you?"
He spits. The saliva hits my bare chest and runs down the Madonna. I don’t wipe it away. The contempt is personal. This isn’t a hired gun—this is a believer.
"The old ways are coming back," he says.
His voice is steady. Rehearsed. The words have the polished surface of a phrase said in whispered circles, in back rooms. "Your brother made the family weak.
The marriage. The Irish. The faggot surgeon playing doctor in our house.
Salvatore understood what the family needed. Salvatore—"
I push the gag back in. I’ve heard enough.
The name is a detonation charge buried in the foundation of everything I’ve built.
Salvatore. Our father. The man who ran the family into the ground with brutality and short-sightedness. The man whose exit—quiet, clinical, administered by the family council with Alessandro’s blessing—was supposed to end the old regime and begin a new one. The man who is supposed to be dead.
Or exiled. Or contained. Or whatever sanitized verb Alessandro used when he told me the problem had been handled.
The old guard. The soldiers who served under Salvatore before Alessandro took the chair.
The men who watched a young Don restructure their world—alliances with the Irish, a marriage to a Kavanagh, tolerance of things the old regime would have punished with pliers.
They decided that the new ways were a cancer and the cure was a bullet in the bedroom.
I look at Adrian. He’s processing the same data I am. His face is the clinical mask—but the eyes behind the lenses are doing the rapid, lateral computation of a man who has just realized that the house he lives in is a body riddled with tumors he can’t see.
"How many?" he asks. How many soldiers in the compound are Salvatore loyalists. How many nods in the corridor were genuine. How many “Doc”s were spoken by men who were planning to kill the Doc’s lover in his sleep.
"I don’t know," I say. "And that’s the problem."
We can’t use the radios. The compound’s internal communication system runs through a central hub in the security office—a room staffed by two soldiers on the night shift. If either of those soldiers is compromised, broadcasting on the system announces our survival and our position simultaneously.
We can’t use the phones. The landlines route through the same hub. The cell signal inside the compound is deliberately suppressed—Alessandro’s security protocol. The suppression that protects us from external threats now seals us inside with internal ones.
We can’t walk the corridors. The night rotation puts six guards on the interior—two in the east wing, two in the west wing, two on the residence floor. Any of them could be Marco Bellini. Any of them could be holding a Sig from the armory with our names on the round.
I dress. Jeans, boots, the black henley.
Adrian dresses—dark pants and a dark shirt, the sartorial camouflage of a man preparing to move through hostile territory.
He tucks the suppressed Sig into his waistband.
The gesture is practiced now. Six weeks ago he asked me how a shotgun worked.
The distance between that man and this one is measured in bodies.
"Alessandro’s suite is on the third floor," I say. "West wing. Two corridors, one staircase. The staircase is a choke point—one guard on the landing, line of sight down both approaches."
"Do we know the guard?"
"I know all of them. That’s not the same as trusting them."
I crack the bedroom door. The corridor is dim—night lighting.
The sconces are turned low. The limestone walls cast long shadows.
I listen. The compound breathes around me—the ventilation, the settling of old stone, the distant hum of the generators.
No footsteps. No voices. The silence of a building that is either sleeping or waiting.
We move.
The corridor is forty feet long. Adrian is behind me—close, his hand on my back, the same stabilizing contact from the Connecticut house.
I carry the Glock in a two-handed grip. The rebuilt left hand is wrapped around the right.
The fingers hold steady. Every door we pass is a variable.
Every shadow is a silhouette that might resolve into a threat.
Every nod I’ve received in this hallway replays in my memory with the new filter applied—was that loyalty or reconnaissance?
We reach the staircase. The landing is empty.
The guard position is vacant. The chair is pushed back.
A coffee cup on the windowsill is still warm.
The guard has left his post. Whether he left to join the conspiracy or to use the bathroom is a question I can’t answer.
The inability to answer it is a blade in my gut.
We climb. The stairs are marble—cold, loud. Every footfall echoes. I take them two at a time. Adrian matches my pace. His breathing is controlled—counted. The surgeon’s rhythm.
Third floor. West wing corridor. Alessandro’s suite is at the end—a reinforced door.
The only door in the compound with an independent locking system.
Alessandro insisted on the redundancy when he redesigned the compound.
Paranoia runs in the family. Tonight, the paranoia is the only thing keeping us alive.
I reach the door. I knock. The pattern is specific—three short, two long, one short. The family code, established by our father.
The lock disengages. The door opens two inches. A green eye appears in the gap—sharp, feral, the pupil dilated. Not Alessandro’s eye. Killian’s.
The door opens. Killian Kavanagh stands in the entrance in a t-shirt and tactical pants.
A pistol is in his right hand. His left hand is braced against the door frame.
He’s barefoot. His posture is rigid—rigid, combat-ready—he heard the suppressed shots two floors below and has been standing at this door with a loaded weapon since.
"In," he says.
We go in.
Alessandro’s suite is a command center that became a bunker in the time it took us to climb two flights of stairs.
The curtains are drawn. The overhead lights are off—a single desk lamp illuminates the room.
The cone of light falls on the desk where Alessandro sits with a laptop open and a phone in his hand.
He sees me. He sees Adrian. He sees the blood on my hands—Bellini’s blood, from the choke. His eyes scan us—rapidly, comprehensively.
"Marco Bellini," I say. "Suppressed Sig from our armory. He shot through our pillow. He’s alive, zip-tied in our bedroom."
"He said the old ways are coming back," Adrian adds. His voice is level—the medical report. "He mentioned Salvatore."
Alessandro’s face doesn’t change. The mask holds. But something happens behind his eyes—a rapid, violent restructuring. A demolition and reconstruction happening simultaneously. The mental equivalent of watching a building collapse and designing its replacement before the dust settles.
"How many?" Killian asks. He’s positioned himself by the window—a sight line to the east garden, the perimeter wall, the guard rotation visible under the flood lights.
His body is still recovering. He leans against the wall, distributing weight away from his abdomen.
But his hands are steady and his eyes are lethal.
"Unknown," I say. "Could be one. Could be ten. Could be half the house."
"It’s not half the house." Alessandro’s voice is quiet.
Controlled. The Don’s tone—the one that makes decisions that kill people.
"Bellini is part of a faction. Six men, possibly eight. I’ve had reports—whispers, nothing concrete.
Old soldiers who served under my father and resented the restructuring.
I should have acted on the reports sooner. "
"Why didn’t you?"
He looks at me. The answer is in his face—the same face I’ve been reading my entire life. The answer is because acting on whispers means purging loyal men based on suspicion. And purging loyal men based on suspicion is what our father did. And Alessandro is not our father.
He doesn’t say it. He doesn’t need to.
"Elena," Adrian says.
The name cuts through the strategic calculus like a scalpel through fascia. Direct. Precise.
"Guest wing," Adrian continues. "Ground floor. East side. Her room is two corridors and a staircase from our position. If Bellini was the first move, the next move is leverage. Elena is the highest-value non-combatant in this building."
He’s right. Bellini was the surgical strike—kill the shield, neutralize the surgeon.
With us dead, the faction moves on Alessandro.
But if the strike fails—and it has—the contingency is leverage.
A hostage. A bargaining chip. A twenty-two-year-old girl who plays Chopin and has already been held at knifepoint once this month.
Alessandro reaches for the desk drawer. He withdraws a tablet—the compound’s independent surveillance system. He swipes through camera feeds. East wing corridor. Guest wing hall. Elena’s door.