5. Amara
AMARA
The blue glow from the laptop screen bleeds into the grime of the printing press floor, cutting Alessio’s face into sharp, jagged planes..
My stomach does a slow, sickening roll as I stare at the grainy image.
It’s the compound. Not just the north gate we drove through an hour ago—an interior hallway too, both rendered in stuttering pixels.
There is a timestamp in the corner, white and blinking, matching the watch on my wrist down to the second.
They aren’t just tracking the gates. They have eyes inside the compound.
“We have to go.” Alessio’s voice isn’t a whisper; it’s a low-frequency vibration that hits me in the center of my chest. He doesn’t look at me.
His eyes are fixed on the screen, his jaw so tight I expect to hear his teeth crack.
The calm, steady surgeon I met in the clinic is gone.
This is the man who has carried eleven years of evidence under his skin, and right now, every buried thing in him is awake.
“Alessio, wait. If they have a live feed, they know we’re here.
” I reach for his arm, my fingers curling around the heavy wool of his coat.
My pulse is a frantic bird trapped in my throat.
I’ve spent ten years looking over my shoulder, but I’ve never seen the person looking back.
Now, the realization that the enemy is already inside the house—inside the fortress I thought was safe—makes the air in this warehouse feel like lead.
He snaps the laptop shut with a violent crack. “I know.”
He moves before I can blink. One hand lands between my shoulder blades, firm enough to steer me, his body already moving between me and the dark. He’s guiding me, shielding me, his body a wall of solid muscle between me and the yawning darkness of the printing press.
The smell of ink and old oil is thick enough to taste, clogging my lungs as we weave through the massive, silent machines. These metal giants look like sleeping beasts in the shadows, their rollers dripping with black sludge.
We’re halfway to the loading dock when the first shot rings out.
The sound is a physical punch, a deafening crack that shatters a window high above us.
Shards of glass rain down like diamonds in the dark, tinkling against the concrete.
Alessio doesn’t flinch. He dives, taking me with him, his weight slamming my shoulder into the side of an industrial paper cutter as glass rains down across my upper arm.
My shoulder hits the cold steel, and a sharp, hot sting flares up my arm, but I don’t have time to process it.
“Stay down,” he snarls. It’s not a request. It’s a command from a man who has decided the world ends before I do.
He’s out from behind the machine before I can protest—drawing their fire away from me, putting himself between the muzzle flashes and the paper cutter.
I’ve seen men be violent. I’ve seen the aftermath of what the Bellantis do.
But I have never seen a man move with the sheer, lethal grace of Alessio Costa when he’s been pushed past his limit.
He uses the machines like a surgeon uses bone and angle, cutting across the floor only when the gunmen give him the opening.
Two shadows emerge from the far end of the warehouse, their muzzle flashes illuminating the rows of paper stacks.
Alessio doesn’t even slow down. He fires twice—steady, rhythmic pops that sound clinical compared to the frantic spray of the gunmen.
The first shadow drops like a stone. The second tries to duck behind a pallet of newsprint, but Alessio is already there.
I watch, frozen, as he closes the distance.
He doesn’t just shoot the man. He becomes a whirlwind of controlled rage.
He catches the barrel of the guy’s gun, twisting it upward with a sickening snap of bone, and then he’s on him.
It’s not a fight. It’s a controlled takedown, brutal and fast enough to keep me breathing.
My heart is hammering against my ribs, a frantic rhythm that matches the thud of Alessio’s boots on the concrete.
He kills to get us out alive. The thought should make me run.
The fact that it doesn’t scares me more.
It should make me want to run to the next city and disappear under another name.
But as I watch him stand over the bodies, his chest heaving, his eyes scanning the rafters for more threats, all I feel is a fierce, primal heat.
Nobody has ever stood between me and the dark before.
My brother tried to stand between the truth and the men burying it, and he died for it.
Alessio turns back to me, his face a mask of cold stone. “Amara. Move. Now.”
I scramble to my feet, ignoring the throb in my arm.
We sprint for the side exit, the one that leads to the alley where the black SUV is idling.
My boots skid across the floor, slipping on a patch of spilled ink.
For a split second, my eyes snag on a shipping code at the bottom of a manifest clipped to a nearby desk—a routing number I know by heart.
I stop. I shouldn’t stop. The world is ending around us, but my eyes lock onto a name at the bottom of a manifest clipped to the desk.
Alvarado Vane.
Or someone wants me to think so. A blue-ink signature, still wet enough to shine.
“Amara!” Alessio’s voice is a roar.
I fold the manifest once, ink side out, and slide it into the inner pocket of my jacket, diving through the door just as another volley of bullets chews up the wood of the doorframe.
Alessio is there, his hand catching me by the waist, hauling me into the back seat of the SUV before I can even find my footing.
He slams the door, the armored glass muffling the chaos outside, and shoves me across the back seat before climbing in beside me. The Costa driver hits the gas, tires screaming as the SUV peels out of the alley.
Inside the armored SUV, the gunfire drops to a dull percussion, and the quiet between us turns surgical.
Alessio is breathing hard, his hands resting on his knees. His knuckles are split, dripping a slow trail of red onto his dark slacks. He looks like a surgeon who has just used violence as a scalpel, every line of him too controlled to be calm.
“Are you hit?” He reaches for me, his hands hovering over my shoulders, my waist, my legs. He’s looking for blood, for holes, for anything that might take me away from him.
“I’m fine,” I say, my voice sounding more steady than I feel. “Just a bruise. I hit the machine when we went down.”
He doesn’t believe me. He grabs my chin, tilting my face up into the dim light of the streetlamps passing overhead.
His eyes are dark, the pupils blown wide with adrenaline and something much more dangerous.
“If you are lying to me, I will check every inch of you before we reach the gate. Do not make me guess about blood loss.”
The possessiveness in his voice is a physical weight.
It’s not just about the mission anymore.
It’s not about the ledger or the dead-man’s switch.
It’s about me. Somewhere in the middle of the slaughter, his protection stopped feeling like a threat and started feeling like a line I could stand behind.
“I’m not lying,” I whisper, though the sting in my upper arm is getting louder, a persistent throb that feels like more than a bruise.
I tuck my arm closer to my body, hiding it in the shadows of my jacket.
I can’t be the broken thing right now. Not when we just found out the house is compromised.
“Alessio, the paper. I found something.”
I pull the crumpled manifest from my pocket and smooth it out on my lap. The light from a passing neon sign—a garish, buzzing pink—washes over the signature.
“He’s here,” I say, and the words feel like a curse.
“Not offshore. Not behind ten shells. Here.” Either he was there recently, or someone wants us to chase the idea that he was.
But the signature is close enough to hurt.I’ve studied his handwriting for ten years, Alessio.
I know every loop, every arrogant slant of his pen. He’s in Chicago.”
Alessio takes the paper, his fingers brushing mine. The contact sends a jolt through me, a reminder that we are both still alive, still breathing, despite the world’s best efforts to stop us. He stares at the name, his mouth thinning into a hard, cruel line.
“He’s close,” Alessio says, the words tasting like ash. “And he’s feeding the Bellantis our movements from inside our own walls.”
“We can’t go back,” I say, the panic finally starting to claw its way up my throat. “If they have eyes inside the compound, going back blind is how we walk into the knife.”
“No,” Alessio says, his voice dropping into that terrifyingly calm register he uses right before he does something drastic.
“We go back. Dominic and the war room are reasons we're going back, and if anyone inside those walls is supplying Vane, I want every exit secured before he realizes we've identified him. We go back, and I find out who is holding the camera.”
He looks out the window, his profile etched in the shifting city lights. He looks lonely. Even with a car full of men and a family that would die for him, he looks like a man who has been carrying a mountain on his back for eleven years. And now, I’m standing on that mountain with him.
“You should have left me at the clinic,” I say softly. “I’m just more weight for you to carry.”
He turns his head, his gaze locking onto mine with a ferocity that steals the air from my lungs.
He leans in close, his scent—expensive soap, gunpowder, and the metallic tang of blood—filling my senses.
His thumb traced the line of my jaw as he reached out, his touch unexpectedly tender for someone who had just broken a neck.
“You aren’t weight, Amara,” he rasps. “You are the only reason I’m still standing under it. If you go, the mountain falls. Do you understand me? You stay. Stay in my line of sight. You stay where I can keep your heart beating.”