Chapter 3
Rodrigo was on his feet before the jet shuddered to a final stop in a private hangar at Atatürk Airport. He bypassed customs, a privilege bought with a name that was its own passport.
On the tarmac, the air coiled around his throat, thick with plane fuel, brine from the distant Bosphorus, and the city's endless, simmering tension.
Dario was waiting beside a blacked-out Mercedes sedan, leaning against the passenger door. He wore black jeans and combat boots, a stark signal that he was ready for business. His face was a grim mask, his usual easy energy replaced by the razor-sharp focus of a soldier.
He straightened as Rodrigo approached. His eyes, a shade lighter than Rodrigo's, were full of an anger that he kept leashed.
"Thank you for coming so soon," Dario said, opening the rear door for him.
"You owe me an explanation," Rodrigo replied and slid onto the cool leather. The sterile, air-conditioned quiet was a soothing contrast to the roaring in his own head. Dario got in behind the wheel and drove from the hangar.
"Leo is onto it with Iz," Dario replied, his voice low and even, cutting through the silence. He drove with practiced aggression, weaving through the chaotic Istanbul traffic as if the other cars were mere obstacles in a training course. "They are tracking Giana and might have something."
"I can't believe you left eyes on her," Rodrigo said, begrudgingly grateful, and added, "Thank you."
"We did enough to her. I couldn't just let her go without knowing she was going to be okay. You promised you wouldn't watch her, but she extracted no promise from me."
That was Dario for you. He played the charming, easy-going Colleoni, but underneath it, he was as morally gray and vicious as the rest of them.
Rodrigo stared out the window, but he didn't see the ancient mosques piercing the skyline, the apartment buildings stacked on top of each other, or the ruins of the ancient Roman aqueduct.
He saw Giana. Afraid in the hands of some faceless enemy. Vulnerable. Alone. It was his fault.
Rodrigo's voice was rough. "What did Leo and Iz find?"
"They got a ping of a signal an hour ago. It held for a minute before going dark again," Dario replied, not taking his eyes off the road.
What had that minute cost her? Rodrigo cut the thought off, strangling it before it could take root. Emotion was a liability. Fear was a traitor. He needed ice in his veins, not fire. The fire could come later when he had someone to take it out on.
Giana was smart, tough, and resilient. She had dealt with Gabriella's tormenting passive aggression for years. She could hold out until he found her.
Rodrigo forced his mind into the familiar grid of tactical assessment. Kidnapped in Bodrum, straight off the street. Risky and dangerously obvious. Why? Ransom? Leverage against whom?
The Sorrentinos were old money, but their influence had waned. They were ghosts. Giana was now a civilian, not a mafia princess.
Unless someone knew what she was to him.
The thought landed like a stone in his gut. Impossible. No one knew how he really felt about Giana. To the outside world, she had been a Colleoni pet. Not to be touched unless they wanted Gabriella to crush them the way she had crushed the Sorrentinos.
Dario turned off the main thoroughfare, plunging into a labyrinth of industrial streets near the port. They passed rows of shipping containers stacked like monstrous, rusting tombs.
The car slowed, turning into a narrow alley that ended at a monolithic wall of corrugated steel. No signs. No windows. Just a single, reinforced door that slid open silently as they approached.
Dario drove into the cavernous space. The door sealed behind them, and Rodrigo felt a little bit better.
Kon Zalam's Istanbul residence was less a warehouse and more a private armory and operations center. A kitchen was off to one side, and an immense library of books and artifacts was somehow contained and arranged amongst the racks of deadly and beautiful weapons.
In a corner of the vast floor, a ring of high-powered workstations glowed, casting an ethereal blue light on the faces of Rodrigo's brother and the woman beside him.
Leo looked up, his expression a mixture of relief and anxiety. He was the youngest, the one who had found a life outside their world with Dante Hill, but blood was blood.
Now that their mother was dead and their brotherly bond had been forged anew, when Rodrigo needed him, Leo would answer his call for help.
"Buonasera, fratello," Leo said, getting up to kiss his cheeks and hug him. He was the affectionate one after their father had died, and the only person that Rodrigo and Dario really accepted it from.
"Leone, please tell me you have something," Rodrigo replied, trying to keep his worry from his voice.
Beside them, Izabella Silversmith didn't even look up.
Her focus was absolute, her fingers a blur across a keyboard.
Her dark curls were pulled back in a messy ponytail, her sharp, intelligent features illuminated by lines of code scrolling across the main monitor.
The Edgeworths were excellent mercenaries, and both Iz and Leo were their digital weapons.
"She's smart, your girl," Iz said finally.
It was high praise coming from the legendary Silver Lady herself.
"Burner phones were a dead end. She cycled through three of them in the past seventy-two hours.
Wiped and dumped, but people always have attachments to certain objects. Anchors. And this was hers."
She made a few quick clicks, and a new window expanded on the massive screen that dominated the wall. It was a spec sheet for a laptop. Custom-built, encrypted.
Rodrigo recognized it instantly. He had commissioned it for Giana himself through a third party two years ago.
It was another of the secrets they shared. He had given her the laptop and a way into the Colleoni system. It had been meant to be the key to her freedom from Gabriella.
Rodrigo thought Giana would have gotten rid of it after he had freed her. The thought that she had kept it and still used it made something soften and hurt inside his chest.
"Her laptop seems to be her life's work," Iz continued. "Her research, her notes, her entire academic career, photos of paintings she's completed. She wouldn't ditch it unless she had no other choice, and they let her keep it."
"A mistake," Dario murmured from behind him.
"A fatal one," Iz agreed with a grin. "She must have powered it on after she was taken, somehow. Just for a moment. Long enough for it to connect to a public Wi-Fi network. The signal bounced through three different proxies, but I cracked it."
A map of Turkey filled the screen. A pulsating red dot appeared on the coast, far north of Bodrum.
"Izmir," Leo said, pointing. "A district called Karsiyaka. The ping is gone now, but we have the origin point."
Rodrigo's eyes locked on the dot. Izmir was a sprawling port city. Easy to disappear. Easy to ship cargo or people out. The knot in his chest tightened.
"Is that all you have?" he asked, his voice dangerously soft.
"No," Iz replied and typed another command. The map was replaced by a grid of sixteen grainy, black-and-white video feeds. "I got the Wi-Fi network's location and piggybacked into the local municipal CCTV feeds from the surrounding area. I've been scrubbing through the last hour of footage."
"There," Leo said and pointed. A black van, a standard commercial model, appeared on one of the screens, pulling to a stop in a narrow, cobblestoned alley.
Rodrigo's breath caught. The world narrowed to that single, monochrome square. The van's side door slid open. A man got out, broad-shouldered and ordinary. He reached back inside.
They pulled Giana out roughly. Her hands were bound in front of her, a dark hood pulled over her head, but it was her.
Rodrigo knew the line of her shoulders, the proud way she held her spine even when being forced forward. He knew the cascade of dark hair that fell over her shoulder as one of the men shoved her toward a nondescript doorway.
She stumbled, a deliberate move, her shoulder checking the man beside her, throwing him off balance for a split second. The man grabbed her arm and threw her over his shoulder.
Rodrigo's hands clenched into fists at his sides, his nails digging into his palms. A low growl built in his chest, a primal sound of pure rage. Dario's hand rested on his shoulder, a silent warning.
"Respira," Dario whispered.
How could he breathe when they were laying their filthy hands on her? Rodrigo forced his lungs to work, and the red cleared from his vision.
He watched the man carry Giana away, memorizing his height, build, and gait. He would find him and take those hands.
Another man followed them out of the van. He paused, turning slightly toward a different camera. For a second, his face was almost clear. Slavic features. A jagged scar bisected his left eyebrow. He looked familiar, but Rodrigo couldn't place him. The van pulled away, and the alley was empty again.
The world rushed back in. The hum of the servers. The smell of coffee brewing in the warehouse kitchen. The frantic beating of his own heart. He was fighting not to have a panic attack.
They are hurting her.
Rodrigo had built a fortress around his heart, brick by impenetrable brick, but Giana had always been the one crack in his walls.
A fissure he had ignored for years, pretending it wasn't there.
Now, fear for her was prying it open with a crowbar, and the fury he kept locked away was about to pour out.
"Izabella," he said, trying to keep his voice steady. "Can you isolate the face and run it against every database we have? Interpol, FSB, MI6, CIA. Your private network. I want a name."
"Already on it," she said, her fingers flying again.
"I need a strike team."
"I'll make the call," Dario said immediately, pulling out his phone. "Our best unit is on standby in Cyprus. We can have them in Izmir in four hours."
"No."
"Rodrigo," Dario said carefully. "They are Colleoni men and are the best."
"They are," Rodrigo agreed, his gaze still fixed on the still image of the alleyway, "which is why they are currently deployed protecting shipping routes for a client, a fact that is not public knowledge."
He turned to face them, letting them see the frozen calm that had settled over him at last.
"Giana was taken from a café in Bodrum with a professional crew. They knew her schedule and that she had no security to reach her in time. They moved her north to a major port city, a known hub for smugglers. This is not a random kidnapping for ransom."
He let the implication hang, heavy and poisonous.
"This was an inside job," Dario breathed, the realization dawning on his face. "You think someone in our organization sold her out?"
Rodrigo gave a sharp, definitive nod. "You were watching her, Dario, and using our people to do it, which means a Colleoni asset gave Giana's kidnappers the intel, whether it was intentional or not. We can't trust a Colleoni team to bring her back right now."
Rodrigo looked at Leo, whose connection to the Edgeworth family through his engagement to Dante Hill was now his best chance of getting Giana back. "I'm not using our people. I'm…asking for your help. Please, Leone. Help me get her."
Leo's eyes widened slightly. He understood the magnitude of what Rodrigo was asking. To request the Edgeworths was to admit a vulnerability and incur a debt.
Leo's assassin smile flickered. "You're asking nicely. This must be serious. Should I warn them we might be dealing with more than just guns?"
"I don't know yet. That's what scares me." Rodrigo hated to admit weakness, even to his brother. "If it does involve magic of some kind, I'm going to need people who can handle that too."
"Okay, I'll wake up Dante," Leo said, getting to his feet with a grin. "He's crashed out in the spare room."
"No. Get me Silas, if you can. He's the boss." Rodrigo knew this was not a request he could delegate. He liked and respected Silas, and this was a debt he would own personally.
Iz's hands paused over her keyboard. She looked from Rodrigo to Leo, her expression unreadable but for the flicker of understanding in her sharp eyes.
"Let me call. He's less likely to growl at me than at you at this time of night," she said and reached for her phone.
Iz was Silas's soft spot, and if anyone could convince him to get out of bed and go on a retrieval mission at a moment's notice, it would be her.
Leo still disappeared into a room and came out moments later with his hair ruffled and lips reddened, a sleepy and bedraggled Dante behind him. Tall and blond, his little brother's new fiancée was another mercenary whose hands were as bloody as his own.
"Where are we going, and who are we killing?" Dante asked and stretched.
"Izmir and everyone," Rodrigo replied without hesitation. "We leave as soon as possible. I'll need Athena and Kon, too. I need ghosts. Hunters. So tell Athena no flamethrowers or explosives."
Dante pulled a face. "You're not giving her much incentive to get out of bed."
"She can take as many blades as she likes?" Rodrigo suggested.
"She usually does," Leo said, a vicious little grin on his face.
Rodrigo folded his arms. "Well, if she can't handle a smash and grab without all the toys, then maybe she should stay behind."
Dante laughed. "Ooof. Right for her pride? That's so sneaky and manipulative."
"And that is why he has always been the heir, and we were just the spares," Dario chimed in, gesturing to him and Leo.
Rodrigo managed a small smile at their nonsense. "I haven't found any magical relics in Gabriella's collection to offer Kon, but tell Athena I'll let her have the pick of Gabriella's swords if she gets up."
Kon's obsession with artifacts wasn't mere collecting. After everything they'd discovered about Serapis and the Aurora, gathering magical objects had become a survival strategy for both Kon and Athena. Knowledge was armor against enemies who could wield magic and occult forces with impunity.
Dante winked at him. "Now, swords are excellent bait. Bribery will work on Cub every time if shiny blades are involved. I'll go bang on their door and hope that Kon doesn't try to shoot me."
"If he does, he'll regret it," Leo said, the assassin back in his eyes.
Dante shot him a wink and headed up the stairs.
Rodrigo turned back to the screens. The image of Giana, hurt and hooded, was burned on the back of his eyelids.
All those years he had watched Giana, he had been so controlled that she had never seen what lay underneath his cold exterior. Now, he would be the monster he really was to get her back.
He would tear Izmir apart, stone by stone, and would burn it all to the ground if he had to.
Aspettami, anima mia, he thought, a silent vow across the distance.
Wait for me.
I'm coming.