Elio
The safehouse feels too small with this many men packed inside it, despite being big enough on paper to pass for comfortable.
It is one of our family properties kept off the books and behind shell corporations that run deep enough to cross most accountants’ eyes.
A raised-ranch type structure tucked deep enough into the trees three hours outside of town that no passing stranger would clock it for what it really is.
From the outside it looks laughably ordinary. The outside is weathered with a gravel drive leading up to the front of the property, looking old enough that it could belong to any middle-aged couple who likes privacy and off the grid living.
Inside, it is another thing entirely.
Reinforced doors, security feeds glowing in the master-sized room, weapons cache at the back of the house.
Men are stationed at every window and entrance, covering every blind spot possible. Bootsteps thud faintly down the hall behind me, murmured updates drift from the main room.
Somewhere in the kitchen, a radio crackles with an incoming message and then goes silent again.
I stand outside the reinforced door of one of the two secured rooms this place has, my arms crossed over my chest and my jaw locked so tight, it aches all the way into my temples.
I have been in this exact stance for long enough that the muscles across my shoulders have gone tight from the tension my body is carrying.
Still, I refuse to move.
Through the small, one-sided observation window, I watch the woman I have been hunting for years.
Isabella.
Not Marina Hayes, the careful, soft-spoken receptionist she has been pretending to be for almost six years. Not the single mother her neighborhood knew her as with her neutral sweaters and tied-back hair and small-town, friendly attitude designed to disappear into a crowd at first glance.
Those were all masks, brilliant ones. Convincing enough to keep her hidden far longer than anyone in our world should have been able to stay hidden.
The woman on the other side of the door is the one person who has haunted me for over half a decade, now twenty-seven and forged into something harsher than memory ever managed to preserve as her.
For a long time, all I had were fragments of her. After she vanished, those moments I could recall suddenly turned cruel with their details, the pieces of them jagged as they cut deep within me.
A bright laugh from across a banquet room, her chestnut hair spilling over white pillows.
Honey-gold eyes looking at me like I was still something worth saving. That furious light in her face the last time I saw her before everything completely crumbled.
For years, that was all I had—a half-dozen images I kept revisiting over and over to punish myself.
The woman inside the room in front of me is nothing like those memories. Even now with a bruised cheek and wrists reddened from the restraints we cut off the second she was shoved inside this room, she looks the complete opposite from frightened.
There are new angles to her now that I hadn’t been expecting upon breaking into her house and seeing, for the very first time, what the last eight years have done to her.
Motherhood and hiding have stripped away whatever remnants of innocence she still had when I last touched her. What remains is a woman built from the fires that forced her to leave in the first place.
Yet… some part of me still recognizes her all the same.
She paces the length of the room like a wild animal, checking the walls and the corners of it over and over, presumably for cameras. Her eyes focus on the only exit available at every pass, narrowing as they sweep over the door.
Ever the daughter of the strategist who taught her how to see and exploit weaknesses long before the rest of us even realize there were any on the board at all.
That is a Russo if I ever saw one.
Her father would have been proud to see her this composed.
Proud that even furious and frightened, she is still collecting information instead of wasting all her energy on panicking.
Amos Russo built his empire out of patience and coordinated attacks.
He taught men twice his age how to play the game and taught his daughter those same lessons too, even if he never anticipated her using them.
My chest tightens every time she turns her head just enough that I catch a full glimpse of her face.
She is beautiful in a way that makes a man forget, for one fatal second, how badly he could bleed if given the right opportunity.
I have no doubt in my mind that if I were to let my guard down for one second, she would take that and use it to her full advantage.
She would take the softness that we both know still lingers inside my chest and gut me with it because she always knew where to dig the knife the deepest.
I nearly sigh.
I should not be thinking like that now.
Not with my men running security detail on the man who visited her less than a week ago.
Combing through camera footage, burner phone pings, vehicle routes, tailing known associates to find Davide Bianchi has been more than a chore since all of this started.
He is not one to make casual house calls to the daughters of past acquaintances, especially those who have vanished off every map possible. If he went to her himself, there is a reason for it, and I will find it.
I should be in the operations room reviewing the latest intel, deciding whether Bianchi’s sudden appearance in Isabella’s orbit has something to do with our civil war.
What I should be preparing for is retaliation from our last explosive interaction and making sure every man in this house understands exactly how quickly this disagreement between our families can turn into a bloodbath if one careless move reveals our hand.
Instead, I am standing outside her door like an idiot watching her pace.
My eyes slip from the window for a single moment, tracking down the hall to the other secured room.
Under guard and under a light sedative, her son is asleep two doors down. Our medics had insisted on sedating the kid after he fought so hard, he nearly made himself sick.
He had screamed until his throat went raw, then kept fighting even after his body started to shake from pure exhaustion.
Two of my men came out of that van bleeding from scratches they had no business getting from a small seven-year-old, and a bite bad enough to leave a crescent-shaped mark on one of their hands that I have no doubt in my mind would eventually scar.
He fought like he understood, on some animal level, that he and his mother were about to be pulled into a situation neither of them signed up for.
Isabella’s son.
Those words still unsettle me to think.
It would be easier if the boy remained an abstract concept I had no face to put to. If he were just another variable sitting outside my peripheral, one more complication on a sheet of paper or in a briefing file, I would know exactly where to place him in my mind.
I would slot him where all the other collateral lives go.
Protected if possible, moved if necessary. Regrettable, maybe, to lose, but manageable if it were to happen. Distance makes almost anything digestible.
That is the ugly truth of this life.
Plenty of innocent people have gotten caught in the syndicate world since the dawn of time—children, wives, siblings who wanted nothing to do with blood money or territory disputes or legacy by sharing the wrong last name.
We do not build our empires on the backs of willing men alone. The unwilling are always there too, ground into the foundation whether anyone wants them to be or not
I know how to compartmentalize. I learned it young.
You do not rise in my world without learning how to look at disaster and sort it by priority instead of horror.
You learn how to decide what gets protected first and why, how to measure the cost of every choice in lives, money, leverage, and optics.
Guilt is a luxury best indulged in private, if at all, because hesitation kills faster than cruelty ever could. When innocent people get dragged into something they never signed up for, you assess, contain, minimize, and move on.
I suppose it is not exactly unexpected for Isabella to have moved on with her life after fleeing her family.
Eight years is enough time for anyone to build a new life, to fall in love again.
To marry and have a child with another man and bury old feelings until they were nothing more than abstract concepts long forgotten.
It is rational.
Healthy, even, to expect that.
Normal people do that. Surviving people do that. Women abandoned by men like me should absolutely do that.
I know all of this. But all the rationality in the world does not stop the slow, ugly twist in my gut every time I picture her having a child with some nameless, faceless man.
Jealousy is too simple a word for it. It suggests something almost petty and youthful, some sour flare of possessiveness that should have burned out years ago. What sits inside me is worse than that. Darker and much more humiliating.
A visceral revulsion at the idea of another man in a space I used to imagine was mine. Another man hearing her laughter in the kitchen of that little blue house, knowing what she sounds like when she whispers a name instead of speaks it.
Another man being there for the life I forfeited before I even knew what I had before it was gone.
I hate that even now, after all the time that has passed and the blood that has stained my hands since, some primitive part of me still bucks hard at the thought of her building a life with anyone else.
I drag a hand over my mouth and force myself to step away from the door before I do something monumentally stupid such as opening it.
It is ridiculous to be jealous over a man clearly not in the picture.
I have done enough research to know there is no obvious husband or boyfriend moving in and out of that house, no steady male presence attached to her routines and to her child to suggest a father figure.