30. Mateo
30
MATEO
I let Lila walk away without saying anything. What can I say? I know what she must think of me, the monster I am. Nothing we've shared together, nothing I've done for her matters in light of what she's found.
I was hired to kill her. Emilio Costa put a bounty on her head and my father signed off on it. Keep her away from Anton and the family will have less drama . They wanted her dead, and all I could think of was my own mother and what they did to her. How they hurt her. I wouldn't let this innocent woman be a victim too.
I'm glad I didn't pull that trigger, but I didn’t bury the evidence, either. Don't ask me why I couldn't throw it out—maybe because she was my one failure. Or maybe because every time I looked at that picture, I'd feel human. It tethered me to normalcy, made me feel like I was more than a killing machine, that I did have a conscience.
Pressure pulses behind my eyes. I rub the bridge of my nose. I can't let Lila think I'm that man, the one who will drop an innocent, sinless person simply because I was paid to. I got us into this situation because I'm not that person. Because I saw my brother's widow about to be cornered and caged and I acted, not out of spite or malice or a need to control my nephew, but out of compassion. I saved her once, and it's proof that I'm human. Letting her die now would only prove that I've been kidding myself.
I take the stairs two at a time, rising to head to my bedroom. When I reach the hallway, I know before I even open the door that she’s packing. A sliver of anger creeps up my spine, but I try to squash it before it makes me enraged. I know it's a defense mechanism. I don't have control of something I want control of, and I can't pretend I can control her.
The bag on the bed is halfway zipped, her movements clipped and controlled. She doesn’t look surprised to see me in the doorway—doesn’t pause, doesn’t flinch. She glances up at me and keeps folding clothes with clinical precision, like she’s done this before.
“I’m taking Lev,” she says, voice flat. “We’re going somewhere safe.”
“Safe where?” I ask. My tone stays level, but I already know I won’t like the answer.
“Not to my mother,” she says. “Not to anyone you know. You won’t be able to track us.”
She looks at me then—really looks. There’s no fire in her eyes, no anger. Just distance. That’s worse. She’s already gone. Her body just hasn’t caught up yet.
“If you leave,” I say carefully, “I can’t protect you.”
Her hands still for half a second. “I don’t trust you.” Her head drops, like she can't even look at me. The words hit like a slow crack through ice, splintering everything underneath.
I want to argue. I want to tell her that she’s wrong, that I’ve spent months protecting her, that I’ve killed for her, that I’ve rebuilt an entire security perimeter around her. But I know none of it matters. She saw the truth buried in my desk, and no amount of bloodshed in her name will erase the fact that once—on paper—I was supposed to be her end. I have been the enemy, much the same way the Bianchis are now. She feels safer trying to defend herself.
So I don’t say a word.
I nod once and step back, giving her space. If I were the man she thinks I am, I’d stop her. Lock the door. Call Rafe. Turn this into a standoff. But I’m not. And if I try to keep her here, then maybe I become the monster she’s convinced I’ve always been.
She zips the bag, lifts it without help, and brushes past me like I’m just furniture. Her shoulder grazes mine, and it’s the only thing she gives me.
I should grab her wrist, tell her Lev stays, but what sort of message would that send? Of course I want her here. Of course I am screaming inside for her not to leave, not to take the only family I've ever truly had. But I watch her walk out, hear her call to Lev. I hear the patter of his feet, the confusion in his voice, the whine when he realizes they're leaving. His soft tears destroy me, and still I stay planted there.
My hand hovers over my phone, poised to send a message to Rafe to have them followed until they truly are safe. I know Lila. She could probably get away with vanishing into thin air and truly hiding, but that actually terrifies me. The one thing I'm scared of and it isn't death—it's never seeing her or Lev again. I send the message, but I know what she'll think, how she'll feel when she knows I'm having her followed.
When she’s gone, I stand alone in the doorway, staring at the dent in the mattress where her bag was sitting.
I didn’t kill her. I could’ve. I was supposed to. I didn’t pull the trigger because I saw Lila and I saw everything I swore I’d never become. I couldn’t kill her. Not for the money. Not for the politics. Not even for my father.
And I couldn’t do it to Anton. He loved her, even if he never said it right. She carried his son. That alone should’ve been enough to spare her. I don’t know how close I came to doing it, but I know the exact second I decided I wouldn’t.
And now she’s walking away because I didn’t tell her. Because I let the truth rot in a drawer, thinking silence was safer. Maybe it was. Until it wasn’t.
Twenty minutes pass like fog. I pace the upstairs hall with the same five steps, again and again, palms burning from how tightly I’m clenching them. Every time I stop myself from calling her, I end up staring at the front door, waiting to hear it open. The weight in my chest doesn’t ease. It thickens.
Then my phone rings.
It’s Rafe.
Rafe's voice hits like a slap, abrupt and stripped of any attempt at gentleness. There's no code phrase, no soft entry—just blunt force over the line, the way he only speaks when it's already gone to hell. I can hear engines and raised voices in the background, the disjointed chaos of a scene spiraling out of control, and still, his tone never changes.
“She was hit. A few miles from the estate.”
Everything inside me stills, not in that calm, surgical way I’m used to, the kind of stillness that lets me map out an attack, weigh my odds, set a trap. This is something different. It’s the kind of quiet that comes before collapse, before your legs forget how to hold you up and your lungs stop trusting the air. The space around me narrows, like the whole hallway is closing in. My hand tightens around the phone. “Is she alive?” My voice comes out thinner than I want it to, stripped bare of command.
“Yeah. Bruised, shaken, bleeding, but Mateo…” I already know. I already know what he’s about to say. “Lev’s gone.”
There’s a roaring in my ears. For a second I think it’s traffic, or the line crackling—but it’s me. My pulse is beating so hard it’s blurring the edges of sound. I don’t remember ending the call. I don’t remember how I get downstairs or out the door. The next thing I’m aware of, I’m behind the wheel, gripping it so hard the leather creaks.
My foot slams the gas, hard enough that the tires squeal as I launch down the driveway. I barrel onto the street without looking, without thinking, weaving between traffic like the world doesn’t have rules anymore. Every red light blurs past like a dare I don’t bother answering, the city flying by in a streak of metal and shadow. I don’t stop for lights, or sirens, or anything that dares get between me and that intersection a few miles from home.
The scene is cordoned off with two Rossi men trying to hold back pedestrians. Sirens wail in the distance, echoing off the buildings with a pulse that feels too slow for what’s just happened. The sedan Lila took is crushed on the driver’s side, riddled with holes. Smoke curls up from the engine like it’s exhaling. There’s blood on the hood. Glass all over the street. One of ours lies face down in the median, already covered by Rafe’s jacket.
And in the middle of it, I see her.
She’s on her knees, hair wet from something—rain, blood, I can’t tell—and her arms are out like she doesn’t know what to do with them. She’s not screaming. She’s not moving. She’s just shaking.
I don’t feel my feet hit the ground.
I cross the street, eyes locked on the second vehicle—the one that hit her from behind. It’s riddled with rounds. The door’s ajar. I can see a man inside, still alive, trying to crawl out, clutching his side like it hurts, like he’s still trying to cling to life with hands that already lost their grip.
I draw my pistol and shoot him in the head.
One clean shot. No hesitation. He drops halfway out the door, body twitching once before it goes still.
Lila flinches at the sound.
I grab her by the face before I can stop myself. My hands are shaking and rough, and I hate the way her skin feels under my fingers—cold and sticky with blood. Inside, I’m coming apart. Not with panic—but with something hotter, meaner. A kind of terror so sharp it feels like rage, like my bones are rattling from the pressure of holding it in.
“Where did they take him?” I ask, but my voice is a growl. “Where the fuck did they take him?”
She gasps, eyes wide, pupils blown. “I don’t know—I didn’t see—they came so fast, Mateo, they were already pulling him—” Her voice cracks. “I tried to hold on. I tried.”
She’s crying harder now, blood mixed with tears. I let go of her like I’ve been burned.
The street tilts under me. I put a hand to my face, not even sure what I’m wiping away—sweat, rain, her blood. My breathing’s wrong. I can’t get a full breath. My vision tunnels and tunnels and then snaps into focus all at once.
I call Alessio. When he picks up, I don’t give him time to speak. “Open bounty. Anyone who lays a finger on the boy dies screaming. Anyone. You hear me?”
“Loud and clear,” he says, already moving.
I hang up and turn away from the carnage. Rafe approaches, but he doesn’t say anything, doesn’t try to stop me. He sees what I look like right now—what I’ve become in the last five minutes—and he knows better than to get in front of it.
This isn't business. It's not protocol. It's not strategy anymore.
This is blood for blood.
I disappear into the rain, the sky still spitting cold drops as the clouds hang low and mean above the street. There’s no plan, no map, no direction. Just instinct and fury. Just the certainty of one thing.
Lev is mine.
And whoever took him has no idea how far I’m willing to go to get him back.