Chapter 5
Raze
I sat alone in my office with a glass of untouched whiskey, the glow from my screens washing the room in cold light. My people were spread throughout the property—monitoring cameras, checking perimeters, locking the house down tight. No one came close to the property without me knowing.
On the tablet in front of me was the file my tech had sent over.
Her file.
I started with her name.
Isotta Ferraro.
What an unusual name, I thought. For a very strange girl.
Aside from that, there was nothing. He found no aliases and no false identities buried under layers of paperwork. I scrolled slowly, reading every line, every note. There was not much on her, either good or bad.
I ran her face through everything I had—official databases, gray-market systems, and a few places that didn’t exist on paper at all. Places that only stayed open because the right people had access to them.
Still nothing.
No criminal record or strange money trails. She didn’t have any unexplained travel patterns. There was no handler hovering just out of sight, waiting for her to surface or fail.
She didn’t exist the way assets usually did. Which narrowed it down to two possibilities.
She was either a genius plant—so clean it made my jaw tighten. Or she was a civilian idiot with spectacularly bad timing.
Both options were lethal. And both kept my attention longer than they should have.
I leaned back in my chair and let out a slow breath, the kind that burned on the way out. Someone had been sniffing around my operations lately. Not enough to be alarming, but enough to warrant caution.
It was amateur work, but I didn’t believe in coincidences. Not in my world. Which meant I had to keep a close eye on things.
If she was connected, then she was bait—pretty, expendable, meant to draw my eye while something sharper moved in the dark.
And if she wasn’t?
Then she was an unfortunate accident waiting to happen.
I turned back to the wall of screens, my gaze finding her without effort.
I’d given her permission to wander around the house, hoping that might give me insight to who she was; what she wanted.
She was in the kitchen now, barefoot on cold stone, moving about with careless confidence.
She opened cabinets, closed them again, frowning like the space had failed her somehow.
She stopped in front of the espresso machine, studied it for a long moment, then scowled.
Actually scowled. As if it had personally offended her.
A smile tugged at my mouth before I could stop it. Small. Unwanted. Gone as quickly as it came.
She moved wrong for this world.
Too open. Too loud in ways that had nothing to do with volume. She touched things without asking. Leaned into doorframes. Looked out windows like she expected the view to give something back to her. Demanded of one of my men—dead serious—to know if the house was haunted.
Haunted.
Idiots didn’t last long around me. Curiosity got people killed. So did comfort. So did the assumption that you were safe just because no one had hurt you yet.
And yet, there she was.
Alive.
Breathing.
Unbroken.
I watched her pace the kitchen, fingers trailing across the counter, eyes sharp, taking in details she shouldn’t have been noticing.
That was the problem. That was the thing that scratched at the back of my skull.
She wasn’t stupid. She wasn’t na?ve. She was…
misplaced. Like someone had dropped her into the wrong story and she was trying to read the rules off the walls.
Magnetic. That was the word for it. Annoyingly so.
She drew attention without trying. Pulled focus just by existing. I hated that kind of person. People like that disrupted systems. Bent rooms around themselves. Made other people careless.
She opened the knife drawer.
I leaned forward without realizing it.
She lifted one, testing its weight, her grip sure, evaluating the piece. Her head tilted slightly, expression thoughtful, like she was filing the sensation away for later.
Something warm and unfamiliar twisted low in my chest. Interest, sharp and unwelcome.
A knock came at the door.
“Nothing.” I waved my man into the room. “She’s clean. Frustratingly so. No digital footprint worth mentioning. No known associations. No money trails. No ghosts.”
I nodded once. A clean history meant nothing in my world.
“Keep digging.”
He hesitated. I could hear it in the way his breath caught, the way he didn’t move right away. “You think she’s worth the trouble?”
I looked back at the screen.
She’d put the knife back—precisely where it belonged—and was now leaning against the counter, arms folded, eyes narrowed at nothing at all. Thinking. Like she could feel the house watching her and didn’t care.
Worth the trouble. Trouble was my business.
“Yes.” I was more certain than ever. “I do.”
Because bait or not, accident or threat, she had already done the one thing no one had ever managed to do.
She’d made me curious.
And curiosity, in my line of work, was far more volatile than fear.
When the door closed again, I stood and crossed the room, the soles of my shoes tapping against the marble floor. I stopped at the window and looked out over the perfectly manicured grounds, lights blinking in the distance as the city settled in for the night.
Life went on out there. Loud. Oblivious. Untouched.
I’d learned a long time ago that the city didn’t mourn.
It barely noticed. You could lose everything—your wife, your unborn son, your future—and traffic would still crawl forward the next morning.
Coffee would still be poured. People would still complain about weather and prices and delays, unaware that the wrong man had survived and the right people hadn’t.
The explosion hadn’t even been meant for her. That was the part that never loosened its grip. It had been meant for me.
I could still see it when I closed my eyes. The flash. The violence of it. The sound that wasn’t just sound—it was pressure, force, intent. The way the air itself had turned against them. One second she was alive, annoyed with me for being late, one hand on her stomach as she told me to hurry up.
The next, she was gone.
So was my son.
Survivor’s guilt was too soft a phrase for what followed.
Guilt suggested reason. Balance. What I’d felt had been feral and bottomless.
A need to punish myself for being alive when they weren’t.
A reckless hunger for danger that bordered on suicidal.
I’d driven too fast. Drunk too much. Walked into rooms knowing there might be guns and not caring if one of them found me.
The guilt alone would’ve killed me eventually.
My cousin Marcello had known that. He had dragged me out of it by the collar, figuratively and otherwise.
Put structure back into my days. Gave me work again.
Purpose. Something to aim my anger at that wasn’t myself.
He hadn’t tried to soften the grief. He’d sharpened it.
Told me if I was going to live, I’d better make it mean something.
I owed him my life.
What stayed with me—what never loosened—was the obsession.
Explosives.
I learned everything there was to know about them.
Not just how they were built, but how they failed.
How they were hidden. How they were disguised as normal, everyday things.
Cars. Doors. Phones. Gifts. I studied blast radii and triggers and timers.
I memorized patterns. Learned the signatures men left behind without meaning to.
Knowledge didn’t bring them back. But it kept me alive. And it gave me purpose.
I never got into the same car twice. Ever.
I picked vehicles at random, sometimes switching keys at the last second just to throw off anyone watching.
I kept a mechanic on retainer—one I trusted with my life—who maintained every car personally, locked down parts, logged everything.
No one touched my vehicles without my knowing.
No valet. No borrowed rides. There were no exceptions.
I’d learned that lesson the hard way.
I turned from the window and went back to the screens.
She was still in the kitchen, and she looked too comfortable for someone who should be terrified.
I watched her tilt her head, studying the room like she could feel the weight of the house pressing back. She wasn’t wrong. Places like this absorbed things. Secrets. Violence. Trust. She should have felt it crawling under her skin.
Instead, she looked… almost comfortable.
That was new.
Most people shrank under surveillance, even when they didn’t know they were being watched. She didn’t. She expanded. Took up space. Claimed it without permission. It was irritating. Magnetic. Merciless in a way I couldn’t immediately define.
She caught sight of her reflection in the darkened glass of a cabinet and paused, expression sharpening. For a split second, something harder surfaced. Self-awareness. Then it was gone, replaced by that same infuriating calm.
I leaned back against the desk, folding my arms.
I didn’t trust calm.
Calm was either earned or manufactured.
Curiosity gathered in my chest, the same way it had when I’d first started dissecting bombs, peeling them back layer by layer just to see what made them tick. That need to understand. To know every wire. Every motive. Every possible outcome.
She’d already slipped past the perimeter I guarded more viciously than any compound or convoy. She had my attention. And in my world, that wasn’t necessarily a good thing.