Chapter 2
Fabio
Cold iron bites into my palm. The deadbolt grinds into place with a sickening scrape of rusted metal.
She is on the other side. Locked in the damp dark of the River Speakeasy tunnel.
I'm on the outside. Breathing hard. Fucking spiraling.
The air in this subterranean corridor reeks of old river sludge and rotting limestone. Doesn't matter.
The only thing punching through the damp decay is ripe figs and dark honey.
Her. It clings to the collar of my jacket and drags its claws down my spine, settling low and heavy in my gut.
A Bellanti. The enemy. The blood we have been hunting for two decades.
Standing in my territory, demanding a space heater and coffee like she owns the fucking place.
My jaw locks. The muscles in my neck pull tight enough to snap.
I pivot away from the heavy door. The stone stairs leading up to the decommissioned utility office are steep and slick with condensation.
My boots slam against the steps. Each impact echoes in the narrow shaft. I need space. I need air.
I need her out of my fucking head. She's a defector. A liability. A weapon handed to me in the dark. I can't figure out if I want to pull the trigger or lock her behind me and hide her from the world. Both instincts crash into each other. The result is adrenaline that whites out my vision.
The utility office sits just below street level.
Water stains map the concrete ceiling. A single bare bulb swings from a frayed wire.
It casts harsh, jagged shadows against the peeling paint.
I rip my tactical jacket off. The seam at the shoulder tears.
The heavy canvas hits the metal desk with a dull thud.
My shoulders crowd the cramped walls. I'm built for one purpose. Violence. I catch my reflection in the cracked mirror hanging over the rusted utility sink. Short-cropped dark hair, silvered at the temples in the Costa wayn. My father's dark eyes staring back at me. Deep. Restless.
Dangerous. My mother's sharp jawline, locked so tight the bone threatens to crack under the pressure. The roaring lion inked into my skin borders my left bicep. The thick gold chain with its medallion rests heavy at my throat, catching the pathetic light. A monster in a cage. That's what I am.
I yank the encrypted burner phone from my pocket. My thumb punches in the sequence. Three rings. Santi picks up. No greeting. Just the hollow static of a secure line.
"43rd street docks," I bark. The words tear out of my throat like shattered glass. "Run a sweep. Deep scan. Tell me what the Bellantis are moving through terminal four. Do it now."
Santi does not ask questions. The line clicks dead. That's the beauty of my brother. We don't need to speak to go to war.
I toss the phone onto the desk. It spins on the scratched metal. I pace. Three steps to the concrete wall. Pivot. Three steps back to the door. The walls press in. I can't stand still. The blood roars in my ears. She gave me the docks. She offered the intel like a shield, daring me to test it.
If the intel is fake, she's bait. A trap set by her family to draw us out.
And if that's true, I get to kill her. The thought should bring me peace.
It brings me the kind of rage that scares me.
The idea of snapping her neck makes my stomach heave.
The idea of anyone else touching her makes my vision go black at the edges.
The damp cold of the speakeasy seeps into my bones. It feels like the rain. The rain on the night that broke us. The memory claws its way up from the dark, tearing through the scar tissue I spent two decades building over it. I was seventeen.
The house was quiet. Too quiet. A storm battered the windows, throwing rain against the glass like handfuls of gravel. I sat on the edge of my bed. Waiting. I didn't know what I was waiting for, but the air in the house was wrong. Thick. Suffocating.
Then Matteo's voice bled through the drywall.
It was a low, fractured sound. A sound a man only makes once in his life. The night he loses everything. He was on the phone. The words were muffled, but the tone was unmistakable. Total devastation. Uncle Carlo was dead.
Lured to a warehouse. Executed. Dumped in an alley six blocks away like trash. They found him in the rain. The county morgue called the house the next morning. Our parents were hit the same night. A coordinated slaughter.
The silence that followed Matteo's call was worse than the scream. It swallowed the entire house.
Then came the sound of something breaking. Glass shattering. Furniture splintering. Matteo tearing the study apart with his bare hands.
I sat on my bed. Seventeen years old. The silence ringing in my ears. Grief didn't come. No tears. No mourning. The sadness bypassed my heart and crystallized into rage. A need to retaliate. To burn the city to the ground. To find the monsters who did this and rip their throats out with my teeth.
But Dominic didn't let me. My oldest brother stepped into the blood and took the crown.
He became the boss. And he leashed me. For two decades, Dominic kept me close to home.
He handed the deepest infiltration runs to Santi and Dante, gave the strategy to Enzo, and reserved me for the work that wouldn't put a bullet between my eyes.
He kept me on a short leash, assigning me to guard duty, to logistics, to shadows.
I hated him for it. I spent twenty years furious at my own blood.
I thought it was distrust. I thought Dominic looked at my rage and saw a liability, a loose cannon, a brother who couldn't be trusted to execute a clean hit.
The resentment festered in my gut like a disease.
I raged against the man keeping me locked away.
Then the truth came out. Dominic confessed. The full scope of the war against the Bellanti family. The reason behind the hits. The scale of the enemy we were fighting. When he finally laid the cards on the table, I went pale. The fury did not disappear.
It redirected. Every cage Dominic built around me was love. He kept me off the front lines because he could not bear to lose another piece of his family. He smothered my violent potential because he was trying to keep me alive.
Love is a suffocating iron trap. I don't want it. I don't know how to live inside it.
And now, the enemy is locked inside my tunnel.
The burner phone vibrates against the metal desk. The harsh buzz yanks me back to the present. I snatch the device.
"Speak."
Santi's voice is flat. Clinical. "Perimeter team logged a torch attempt at the river grate. Three strokes, then they pulled back. Sentries are on it now. The grate held."
I breathe out once. Clean. The probe Catalina heard from the grate end of the tunnel. Real. Contained.
"Terminal four," I prompt.
"Terminal four is hot. Four shipping containers.
Manifest says industrial machinery. Thermal imaging shows irregular heat signatures.
Guards are heavily armed. Bellanti tactical gear.
The shift rotation matches a high-value asset transfer.
The intel is solid, Fabio. This is a hit they'll feel for years. "
The line goes dead again.
The phone drops from my hand. It hits the desk.
She told the truth.
Catalina Bellanti told the fucking truth.
My hands grip the edge of the rusted desk.
The metal digs into my palms. I lean forward.
My chest heaves. She handed me her family.
She defected—ripped herself out of the blood-soaked machine of her ancestors and walked straight into the jaws of the beast. The courage it took to stand in that tunnel, staring up at me, demanding a space heater while offering me the keys to a major Bellanti route.
My blood boils. A fierce, possessive roar echoes in my skull.
Catalina.
The name tastes like danger. It tastes like war.
She defected. She is alone. She has nowhere to go. Her family will hunt her. The Bellanti strike teams will tear the city apart looking for the traitor who gave up terminal four. Catalina knows the stakes. She knows what happens to defectors.
A low growl vibrates in the center of my chest.
No. They will not.
They won't touch her. They won't look at her or breathe the same fucking air as her.
Because she is mine.
The realization snaps into place with terrifying certainty.
Zero hesitation. Zero logic. Just pure territorial instinct.
She's mine. I don't care about her last name, the feud, or the secrets she knows.
I don't care that she smells like the other side.
She walked into my speakeasy, surrendered to me, challenged me.
Mine.
The word bounces off the concrete walls of my skull. It settles in my marrow. My woman.
I'm not going to use her as bait. I'm going to build a fortress around her, stand at the gates, and slaughter any Bellanti ghost who dares to approach. Dominic locked me away with love to keep me safe.
I am going to lock Catalina inside violent obsession to keep her breathing. She thinks she made a business deal. Asylum for intel. She is wrong. She signed her soul over to a monster who has been starving for twenty years.
The pacing stops. Purpose replaces the chaos in my veins. My movements become sharp. Decisive. I grab my tactical jacket and shrug it on. The scent of her hits me again. This time, I don't fight it. I breathe her in until the sweetness coats my lungs. She belongs to me now.
I move to the storage locker in the corner of the office.
The metal hinges scream as I yank the door open.
I bypass the weaponry. I bypass the spare ammunition.
I grab a small, heavy-duty space heater, black metal with an industrial coil, and a wool blanket from the top shelf.
Then I send one order to the perimeter team.I pour the sludgy, boiling black coffee into a steel thermos.
She demanded a heater and coffee. She gets what she asked for. And she gets me.