Chapter 2
Emilio
Her initials burn across the screen like a brand. Mara Vale. The woman who vanished from my bed three years ago without explanation, leaving nothing but questions and a void that surveillance footage couldn't fill.
She's back in New York. And she warned me about the attack.
My fingers hover over the keyboard, torn between gratitude and fury. She saved lives last night—Leo might be dead without her intelligence. But she's working for Chase Callahan, has been for years, building God knows what kind of relationship with our enemies while I've been...
While I've been what? Mourning her? Building digital monuments to her absence? Transforming healthy obsession into something darker, more consuming, more pathological with each passing month?
The facial recognition alert chimes softly, dragging me from thoughts that lead nowhere productive. A hit from the city's surveillance network—not random, but flagged because I've programmed every camera in Manhattan to watch for one specific face.
Her face.
The image loads with HD clarity: Mara walking down Madison Avenue, dark hair shorter now, professional attire that speaks of money and careful presentation.
She looks... different. Harder. The soft edges I remember have been refined by whatever she's endured in Europe, shaped by experiences I wasn't there to witness or protect her from.
But she's beautiful. Christ, she's still so beautiful it makes my chest ache.
I enhance the image, studying micro-expressions with the same intensity I apply to enemy intelligence.
She's nervous—tension in her shoulders, the slight compression around her eyes that means she's processing stress.
Her head turns constantly, scanning her surroundings with hypervigilance that speaks to someone who's learned to expect threats.
What happened to her in those three years? What did Chase Callahan's organization do to transform my soft, trusting Mara into this careful predator?
The algorithm continues tracking her movement, cameras handing off coverage as she navigates toward the Upper East Side. Standard surveillance until she stops at a café on 74th and Lexington.
My blood turns to ice.
Through the window, I can see her target. Silver hair, expensive suit, the kind of controlled menace that built criminal empires through systematic violence. Chase Callahan himself.
Not a subordinate meeting or intelligence handoff. A personal audience with the man who ordered my family's destruction.
I pull up additional camera angles, activate directional microphones, and route everything through enhancement protocols that turn distant surveillance into intimate eavesdropping. Every resource at my disposal focused on the woman who saved my brother's life twelve hours ago.
The conversation is too quiet for standard pickup, but lip-reading software fills in the gaps. Chase's accusations about divided loyalties. Mara's careful denials. The photograph he slides across the table that makes her face go pale.
Connor Callahan. Chase's nephew. The man responsible for coordinating European operations, money laundering, and enough human trafficking to earn multiple death sentences.
The man Mara will be dating tomorrow night.
Rage builds in my chest like molten steel, white-hot fury that makes rational thought nearly impossible. She warned me about Pier 17, and Chase's response is to parade her in front of other men? To use her as bait in whatever psychological warfare he's planning?
I access Bautiste's reservation system with casual illegality, confirming what I already know.
Table twelve, VIP section, tomorrow at eight.
Connor Callahan and guest. The same place where I took Mara three years ago, where she laughed at something I whispered and looked at me like I was worth falling for.
Now she'll sit there with my enemy, performing whatever role Chase has assigned, while I watch from digital shadows and slowly lose my mind.
The lip-reading software catches Chase's final threat: Seduce the Ghost, or become one yourself.
They're using her. Not just as an asset or intelligence gatherer, but as bait designed to exploit whatever feelings might remain between us. Chase knows about our history—has always known—and now he's weaponizing it.
My hands shake as I close the surveillance window, pulling up architectural plans for Bautiste instead. Sight lines, security protocols, escape routes—everything I need to ensure tomorrow night doesn't end with Mara's blood on marble floors.
She doesn't know I'm watching. Thinks she's walking into this trap alone, that she'll have to navigate Chase's demands and my potential reaction without backup.
She has no idea that every camera in Manhattan has become my eyes, that I've been tracking her movements since the moment she set foot in the city.
The woman who saved my family thinks she's unprotected. She's wrong.
I pull up her file, the one I've built over three years of absence, a digital shrine to the spirit who haunts me.
Location data fragments from Europe. Financial trails that disappear into cryptocurrency exchanges.
Surveillance captures from CCTV networks I had no business hacking.
All the breadcrumbs I've collected like a man possessed, trying to understand why she vanished.
The pieces never fit. Until now.
My phone vibrates. Leo, from his sick bed.
"Tell me you found her," he says, voice rough with pain medication.
"I found her."
"And?"
"She's with Callahan." The words taste bitter. "Setting up some kind of play with Connor."
Leo's silence speaks volumes. He knows what this means—that Mara's either been working for our enemies all along, or she's trapped in something she can't escape. Neither option erases the betrayal, but one might justify it.
"You going to kill her?" Leo asks with characteristic bluntness.
"I don't know yet."
"Bullshit. You know exactly what you're going to do. You're going to save her stupid ass, even if she's the one who put us in the crosshairs."
I don't respond. Don't need to. Leo knows me too well, knows that even as my brain calculates threat assessments and contingency plans, my heart is already committed to a different equation.
“Don’t tell the others. Don’t tell Dom. I’ll handle it, okay. Promise me.”
The silence down the line has me digging crescents with my fingernails into my palms until he finally speaks. “I’ll keep quiet for now. But remember, if she's playing both sides, it's not just your life on the line. It's all of us."
After we disconnect, I sit in the darkness of my suite, surrounded by screens and the cold blue glow of intelligence I shouldn't possess. Three years ago, I would have trusted her without question. Now, I trust nothing but the data.
I pull up the facial recognition timestamps from the past week. Mara's been in New York for two days. Long enough to set up the Pier 17 warning, but also long enough to have orchestrated the attack itself. The timeline works either way. Savior or saboteur.
My security system pings. Someone's entered my wing of the Rosetti manor. I switch to internal surveillance and freeze.
Matteo. My twin.
He steps into my suite without knocking, all bravado and big dick energy. Unlike him, I carry my darkness on the outside, all sharp edges and calculated menace.
"Hiding in your cave again, little brother?" Matteo smirks, helping himself to my scotch without asking. "Always with your computers while the rest of us do the real work."
"I'm minutes younger than you," I reply flatly, minimizing Mara's surveillance feeds before he can see them. "And some of us prefer solving problems with our brains instead of our dicks."
He laughs, but there's no warmth in it. "Still bitter about Barcelona? That blonde chose me, Milo. Not my fault you were too busy hacking traffic lights to notice her signals."
"I'm busy," I say, ignoring the bait. "What do you want?"
Matteo sprawls in my chair, deliberately invading my space. "Dom wants an update on who hit us at Pier 17. Says you've been locked up here for hours with nothing to show for it."
"I'm working on it."
"Work faster." He drains my scotch and sets the glass down with unnecessary force. "Or is this another situation where you're too deep in your own head to be useful to the family?"
The reference to my breakdown after Mara disappeared isn't subtle. Matteo never approved of how I handled it—my obsession, my refusal to let her go. He called it weakness. Maybe he was right.
"Some threats require patience to unravel," I say carefully. "Unlike your approach of shooting first and never asking questions."
His eyes narrow. "At least I get results. When's the last time you stepped away from your screens and got your hands dirty? You think you're better than the rest of us because you work clean, but you're just a coward hiding behind technology."
"And you're just a thug with our father's last name," I snap back. "There's a reason Sal comes to me for strategy and sends you to break kneecaps."
Matteo stands, looming over my desk. "Watch yourself, brother. When this family faces real danger, it won't be your algorithms that save us. It'll be men willing to bleed."
"Get out of my space," I say. I need to focus, and his presence is a distraction I can't afford right now. "I'll have information for Dom by morning." I turn back to my work, trying to signal that the conversation is over.
"You found her," he says, not a question, but a statement. His eyes search mine for confirmation, trying to read the truth in my expression.
I wait long seconds before answering, debating how much to admit.
Leonardo was the only one I told that Mara was back in town, and only because I felt guilty looking at him lying in bed, recovering from his gunshot wound.
I didn't want my brothers, or worse my sister, knowing she was back in town because they thought I acted illogically around her.
The last thing I needed was Matteo throwing his charm around and convincing Dom or Sal to go after Mara.
"How did you know?" I finally say.
No point denying it. I can hide any secret from any person in the world except my damn twin. He reads me like I’m a fucking newspaper.
Matteo moves to the window and looks down at the garden like he's considering which parts to burn. "Because you're here instead of hunting Callahan's men. Because you've got that look."
"What look?"
"The one that says you're about to do something stupid for a woman who left you bleeding." He picks up a drive from my desk and turns it over in his hands like he can read the data from the outside.
I stand, snatching the drive from his hand. "You don't know what you're talking about."
"I know exactly what I'm talking about. You're compromised, Milo. Always have been when it comes to her. The quiet, brooding twin, so desperate for connection he fell for the first pretty face that looked twice at him."
"Fuck you," I say, the words low and dangerous.
Matt's laugh is sharp-edged. "What's your plan? Save her? Bring her home like a stray? Maybe she can sleep in your bed while she feeds information to Callahan."
"Get out."
"Not until you promise me you won't do anything stupid. This isn't one of your chess games where you can predict every move. This is real life, and she's a real threat."
I turn to face him fully, my voice dropping to the quiet register that even Matteo knows to fear. "You think I don't know that? You think I haven't run every scenario, calculated every risk? I'm not the one who thinks with his dick, Matt. That's your specialty."
"At least I know who I'm fucking," he fires back. "You? She had you so twisted you couldn't see straight. And now she's back, and you're right back to being her puppet."
"I said get out."
Matt steps closer instead, invading my space. "Make me. Or are you too busy planning how to betray your family for a woman who never loved you?"
The blow lands exactly as intended. For all his social intelligence, Matt has always known precisely where to place the knife. I turn away, not trusting myself to respond.
He lingers, deliberately pushing the boundary of my patience. "You know what your problem is, Milo? You think because you can see everything through your cameras that you understand everything. But you don't see shit. You never have."
After he leaves, the silence feels charged. I wonder, not for the first time, how two people sharing identical DNA could become such different men. Where I seek patterns, Matteo seeks power. Where I calculate, he dominates.
I turn back to the screens, to Mara's face frozen in mid-conversation with Chase Callahan. Maybe Matteo's right about one thing—seeing isn't the same as understanding. I've watched Mara for three years without comprehending why she left.
Tomorrow night, I'll do more than watch. I'll finally get