Chapter 24 When Enzo Feels Unworthy #4
Her stare went to his mouth again, like she was listening for the lie in his cadence. Like she couldn’t trust how his voice shaped words anymore.
Enzo’s chest tightened. He remembered the handler using his recordings. The way the command had been delivered with his rhythm, his certainty, the same clipped authority he used when protecting her. He remembered how his men had obeyed because it sounded like him.
And now her fear was obeying her, too.
Valentina’s phone was gone - he realized that with a jolt. Earlier she’d been holding it up like a weapon, feeding the courtroom trap into the air. Now it wasn’t in her hand, not visible on her body.
“What happened to your phone?” he asked.
Valentina’s eyes flashed. “You don’t get to ask me that like I’m your employee.”
Enzo exhaled through his nose. “I’m asking because it matters.”
“It matters to you,” she corrected.
The words stung because they were true. It mattered to him because her phone had been the bridge between the sealed pact and the broadcast. If someone had used it to trigger the trap, then someone could have used it to capture more than just sound.
He swallowed again, fighting the urge to grab her by the shoulders and shake the doubt out of her. He didn’t move closer. He kept his distance like discipline, like respect. Like fear.
Valentina’s gaze dropped to the marked page. “This isn’t part of the chain-of-custody binder.”
Enzo felt the floor tilt. “How do you know that?”
Her eyes lifted, cold and steady. “Because I checked. While you were busy - ” She stopped, like she’d almost said something she couldn’t afford.
Enzo’s fingers curled around the paper. He wanted to crumple it. He wanted to tear it. Instead he forced himself to keep it intact, because the evidence was the only thing that could still speak for him when his mouth couldn’t.
“I wasn’t busy,” he said. “I was trying to find Donato.”
Valentina’s lips parted, and the air between them sharpened. “You couldn’t find him.”
“No,” Enzo admitted. “I couldn’t.”
The admission made her flinch, and that was the problem. She wasn’t punishing him because she didn’t care. She was hurting because she thought she’d been right to distrust him.
A car engine coughed somewhere in the garage. Headlights flickered across the concrete, casting their shadows long and warped.
Valentina turned her head toward the sound, as if she expected footsteps to appear out of the dark. When she looked back at Enzo, her eyes were glassier, but her voice stayed hard. “They’re going to finish the job.”
Enzo’s pulse beat hard in his throat. “Who is ‘they’?”
“Don’t play dumb.” Her voice lowered. “You already know what’s written in that confession. You already heard what was engineered to make you look like the mastermind.”
He felt heat rise behind his ribs. “I didn’t engineer it.”
“I didn’t say you did.” She stepped forward then - close enough that he could smell her expensive perfume over the damp stone and cold air. “But it was your voice. Your methods. Your access pattern. And I watched you freeze when the wrong person showed up.”
Enzo’s jaw tightened. He hadn’t frozen. He’d been calculating. He’d been trying to determine whether the person in the corridor was a threat to her or a part of the larger conspiracy. He’d been trying to keep her safe.
But she couldn’t see his mind. She could only see the outcome: his failure to stop the raid, his inability to protect the narrative, his inability to keep his name clean.
He forced himself to speak slowly. “Elena wasn’t the one who - ”
Valentina’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t bring her into this.”
Enzo stopped. He hadn’t meant to defend Elena. He’d meant to correct a piece of the story that was getting swallowed by someone else’s lies.
But now he understood the real trap: every time he tried to explain, she’d hear an attempt to manage her emotions, to control her decisions, to pull her back under his authority.
That was what the mastermind had been doing from behind the scenes - turning his protection into a cage.
Enzo stared at the marked page in his hand. He could see the ink lines as if they were fresh. He could almost feel the weight of the sealed pact case they’d guarded, the resin cradle that held the agreement like a living thing.
If he told her the truth about the confession and the voice recordings - if he showed her the chain of evidence - she might believe him.
Or she might decide the truth didn’t matter because the stain was already in place.
“Valentina,” he said, and this time his voice sounded rougher, stripped down by exhaustion. “I need you to understand something. The sealed pact isn’t just - ”
“Don’t.” Her command cut through him. “Don’t start with the speech.”
He blinked. The garage echoed faintly as a distant door shut.
Valentina’s gaze flicked to the ceiling. To the cameras that he knew had blind spots - tampered, rerouted, made unreliable by someone with inside access. She was always watching, always scanning for the next threat.
And yet she believed the threat was him.
Enzo’s chest tightened again, and he hated how quickly the feeling turned into self-loathing. He’d spent his life believing he was built for control. For loyalty. For the kind of protection that looked like possession to anyone outside the Shadows.
Now his control had become evidence against him.
He looked at her and said the one thing he’d been avoiding since the trapdoor broadcast. “I feel it.”
Valentina’s brow furrowed. “Feel what?”
“The moment something is about to break.” His voice went quieter. “It’s like… like you can hear the resin cradle before it opens. Like the pact is waiting for the wrong signature.”
Her expression changed - just a flicker. Confusion. Concern. Then suspicion again, because she refused to let herself hope.
Enzo pressed on before he could lose courage. “When I heard your confession through my voice recording, I knew it wasn’t just blackmail. It was a test. They wanted to see who would react like a man in charge.”