Chapter 004 Isabella
I wait until two in the morning, when the compound settles into the heavy breath of a sleeping predator and the camera in my suite finishes its slow arc away from the bathroom door.
Darkness leans against the bulletproof glass like a living thing. I have memorized the rhythm: twenty seconds of blindness every three minutes. More than enough for someone who was taught to move through shadows before she learned to walk in heels.
My Chanel clutch rests on the vanity, innocuous as a forgotten accessory. The guards who rifled through it found only lipstick, compact, tissues—nothing worth a second glance. They never felt the false bottom, the deliberate tug in the stitching at the lower corner. Sloppy. Even Carmela, my sweetest cousin from New York, would have caught it.
In the bathroom I close the door softly and ease the lining free. The titanium lockpick slides into my palm—thin, cold, lethal in its simplicity. Milo’s Christmas gift, delivered with a wink and a joke about “just in case.” He never imagined the case would be a Russian fortress. Rocco’s training hums in my muscles: breath slow, fingers steady, mind colder than the metal.
I press my ear to the suite door. Nothing. The last guard rotation passed seven minutes ago; I have eight more before the next. My pulse does not race. This is what I was forged for—not waiting to be broken, but choosing when to strike.
The lock is high-end: electronic primary, manual override concealed beneath a flush panel. Forty-two seconds of delicate work—angle, tension, release. The mechanism sighs open rather than clicks. I am through.
The hallway breathes cool marble under my bare feet. I leave the coarse slippers behind; silk would whisper, but skin on stone is silent. Ballet drilled this into me long before I ever held a blade: weight on the balls of the feet, hips aligned, every step a controlled fall forward. Mother paid for those lessons to make me graceful. I perfected them to make me invisible.
East wing first. Empty guest rooms yawn with dust and moonlight. No heat signatures, no recent scent. Abandoned.
West wing: cigarette smoke, gun oil, low male voices behind doors. Life pulses here. Danger lives here. My skin tightens as though the air itself recognizes a predator’s territory.
Through a half-open door I glimpse a weapons cache—false panel, identical layout to the ones we keep at home. Either all mafia families are creatures of habit, or Viktor studied us the way a hunter studies tracks.
The stairs call. Down means the main floor, and lower still the basement whose bleach-and-blood smell still clings to memory. Up means the unknown. I choose up, counting the steps that protest under my weight, memorizing them for later.
Third floor. The corridor feels occupied—lived-in, watched. Halfway along, a door stands ajar, blue monitor glow spilling across the marble like spilled mercury. I listen. No breathing, no shift of fabric. Empty.
I slip inside.
Monitors line three walls—sixteen screens, four feeds each, flawless coverage. Military grade. But the monitors are not what steal the air from my lungs.
The far wall is papered in photographs. Dozens. Hundreds. All of me.
My legs carry me forward without permission. The images blur into a single, suffocating mosaic of my own face—every angle, every year, every moment I believed was mine alone.
Opera three months ago, emerald silk catching the chandelier light while I laughed at Matteo’s joke. Coffee shop, sunglasses, phone to ear, unaware of the lens across the street. Emma and Alessandro’s wedding—spinning with Rocco, head thrown back, joy unguarded for once. Dawn runs along my usual park loop, ponytail swinging, earbuds in. My bedroom window at three in the morning, staring into the garden after another nightmare clawed me awake.
And one photograph older than the rest: me at fifteen, days before Dimitri died. Innocent. Untouched by blood.
The timestamps in the corners are meticulous. The oldest images date back three years—when I stepped out of the protected shadows of being the Moretti princess and began running operations myself. He did not watch the child. He waited until I became something worth hunting.
My chest caves inward. This is not mere revenge. This is devotion twisted into something monstrous. Years of patience, of study, of anticipation. Some photographs have no tactical value whatsoever—just me breathing, thinking, existing while he collected fragments of my life like a magpie hoarding jewels.
The room smells of stale coffee, warm electronics, and beneath it all—his cologne. Amber, smoke, winter night. He sits here in the dark, surrounded by his own scent and my captured images, watching.
Footsteps approach—heavy boots, two sets. No time to reach the door. I fold myself behind the server bank, back flat to the wall, lungs paused mid-breath.
The door opens wider. Two guards enter, settling into the chairs.
“You hear about Sergei?” one asks in Russian.
I understand more than I should. The language slides through my mind like something half-remembered from a dream.
“Yeah.” A low whistle. “Jaw wired shut. Specialist flying in from Moscow for the eye.”
My stomach knots.
“Idiot thought five years meant he could run his mouth.”
“What’d he say?”
A shrug I can hear in the silence. “Something about the Moretti girl. What he’d do with ten minutes alone.”
“Blyad.”
“And Gregor—Siberia run till spring.”
“What’d he do?”
“Brought her dinner. Looked too long when she took the tray.”
The second guard exhales. “So what is she—ransom? Trade?”
A snort. “You’ve seen the boss in here. Three, four in the morning, just… watching her screen. Not the perimeter feeds. Her. For hours.”
“So we pretend she’s furniture.”
“You want to end up like Sergei? Yes. Eyes on the floor. Forget she has a face.”
They move on to other gossip. I remain frozen until their boots retreat and the door closes.
The information settles like lead shot in my veins. The same man who wrapped his hand around my throat, who fed me from his fingers and promised to break me, is shattering his own soldiers for daring to imagine touching me.
He is not simply keeping me. He is guarding me. Violently. Possessively.
The return journey stretches endless. Every shadow could hide him. My bare feet leave damp prints—sweat, fear, something darker. I move with the same lethal grace, but now I feel watched in a way that has nothing to do with cameras.
3:52 AM. The suite door closes behind me with the softest click. I relock it from inside, blade still sheathed against my thigh beneath the coarse nightdress.
I slide into bed, but sleep is impossible. Two truths circle each other like duelists.
First: he has hunted me for years. Every routine I thought I controlled, every vulnerability I believed hidden—he catalogued them long before I walked into his trap. I thought I was the infiltrator. I was already ensnared.
Second: the violence he visits on his own men is not discipline. It is ownership. He will kill me—he has promised it—but no one else is permitted to bruise what he intends to break.
The realization should terrify me cleanly. Instead heat coils low in my belly, treacherous and undeniable. My body recognizes a mirror: someone else who kills to keep what is theirs.
I hate the response. I hate the slickness gathering between my thighs when I picture him in that room, alone, surrounded by hundreds of stolen moments of me.
My hand moves before my mind consents, slipping beneath the rough cotton. I am drenched—embarrassingly, shamefully soaked. The discovery draws a soft, involuntary sound from my throat.
I press my free hand to my neck, fingers fitting exactly into the faint marks his grip left earlier. The pressure sends a bolt of heat straight to my core. My hips lift off the mattress.
I imagine him watching this on the hidden camera he must have trained on the bed. Imagine his pupils blowing wide, his control fraying as he sees me touch myself wearing his bruises, drenched because of his obsession.
Would he come storming in? Would he pin my wrists above my head and replace my fingers with his own? Would he finally take what he has only photographed for years?
The fantasy tightens everything inside me. I circle my clit faster, then slide two fingers deep, curling them the way I imagine he would—rough, claiming. My pussy clenches greedily around the intrusion. I press harder against my throat until sparks dance behind my eyelids.
His name tears from my lips in a whisper I will deny tomorrow.
The orgasm hits like a blade—sharp, devastating, perfect. My back arches clear off the bed; waves of pleasure pulse through me until I am trembling, gasping, undone.
Aftershocks ripple long after my hand falls away. Shame tries to rise, but something colder and clearer pushes it down.
He is obsessed. Good.
An obsession can be manipulated. A weakness can be weaponized.
I will let him watch. I will let him punish anyone who looks too long. I will feed the hunger I saw in his eyes until it consumes him—until he forgets revenge, forgets caution, forgets everything except the need to possess what he has stalked for years.
I will become the trap he walks into willingly.
And when he is deepest inside it—inside me—I will cut his throat with the blade still warm against my skin.
Sleep finally claims me, dreamless for once.