5. Amara #3
I reach into my pocket and pull out the manifest. I stare at Vane’s name. For ten years, this man has been a ghost, a nightmare that lived in the margins of spreadsheets and bank records. But he’s real. He’s alive. And he’s here.
I think about my brother. I think about the way he looked when he was laughing, the way he always told me I was too smart for my own good. I think about the forty thousand dollars.
The fear that’s been sitting in my stomach since the warehouse starts to change. It’s not cold anymore. It’s hot. It’s a slow-burning rage that matches the fire in Alessio’s eyes.
They think they can watch us. They think they can hide in the shadows and pick us off one by one. But they don’t know who they’re dealing with. They don’t know that I’ve spent ten years learning how to find the things people try to hide.
And they definitely don’t know Alessio.
I get up from the bed and walk over to the desk. I pull a blank legal pad from the corner of his desk and start to write. I grab a pen and start to write. I redraw what I remember: the visible nodes, the direction of the feed, the one connection I stared at long enough to memorize.
If someone inside the compound is feeding Vane, they’re leaving math behind.
I’m halfway through a diagram of the security system when the door opens again. I jump, my hand flying to the small knife Alessio gave me earlier, but it’s just him. He looks exhausted, his shoulders slumped, his eyes weary.
“Dominic?” I ask, setting the pen down.
“He’s not happy,” Alessio says, closing the door and locking it. “He doesn’t like that I kept the investigation from him. He doesn’t like that I brought you into the middle of it.”
“And the mole?”
Alessio walks over to the desk and looks at my drawing. He stares at it for a long moment, his eyes tracking the lines I’ve drawn.
“I told Dominic we have an internal feed,” he says softly. “I didn’t tell him how deep I think it goes. If I name a traitor before I know who it is, they’ll turn on each other. Panic will do what Bellanti bullets couldn’t. It will make us aim at each other.”
He looks at me, and I see the weight of the secret settling back onto his shoulders. He reaches for the old habit of carrying it alone, and this time I don’t let him.
“You aren’t alone,” I say, stepping toward him. I take his hand, my fingers lacing through his. “I saw the manifest. I saw the feed. I’m in this, Alessio. Whether you like it or not.”
He squeezes my hand, his grip almost painful. “I don’t like it, Amara. I hate that you’re in this. I hate that your blood is on my floor.”
“It’s my blood, Alessio. I get to decide what it’s for.”
He pulls me into him, his arms wrapping around me like a shield. I bury my face in his chest, breathing in the scent of him, letting his heartbeat steady mine. We are two broken people in a house full of ghosts, fighting a war that started before either of us knew how much it would take.
“We find him,” I whisper into his shirt. “We find Vane. We find the mole. And we end it.”
“We end it,” Alessio repeats, his voice a promise.
He holds me for a long time, the only sound in the room the ticking of the clock on the wall.
The world outside wants us dead, and somewhere inside these walls someone may be helping it.
But in here, in the dark, there is us. There is only the heat of his body and the steady rhythm of our breathing.
I realize then that I’m not thinking about the exits anymore. I’m not looking for the quickest way to the gate. After ten years, I’m not running. Not tonight.
I’m home.
The thought should scare me. It does. But when Alessio lifts my chin and kisses me—a slow, desperate kiss that tastes like salt and survival—I let myself stay for one breath longer.
The war is just beginning. But finally, I think we might actually win.
I pull back just enough to look into his eyes. “Alessio?”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t ever apologize for saving me again.”
He smiles then, a small, dark twist of his lips that makes my heart skip a beat. “I can’t promise that, Amara. I’m a doctor. I’m built to worry about you.”
“Then worry about me while we find the person who did this.” I gesture to my arm.
He nods, the smile vanishing, replaced by that cold, clinical focus. “Tonight we lock down what we can, then sleep in shifts. Tomorrow we hunt properly.”
“Alessio, you need to sleep too.”
He looks too tired to stand, but his hand still settles on the gun.
He pulls the blanket over me with hands that linger only because they are finally shaking. He sits in the chair next to the bed, the one facing the door, his gun within reach on the side table. He looks like a guardian, a silent sentinel watching over the only thing that matters.
I close my eyes, the exhaustion finally pulling me under. The last thing I feel is the warmth of his gaze, a steady, unwavering light in the middle of the dark.
And the last thing I do—because ten years of alone is a hard habit to kill—is ease my injured arm against my ribs, hiding the tremor in my hand more than the bandage.
He kills for the people he keeps. I watched him do it tonight, quick and clean, and I didn’t look away. That should terrify me. What terrifies me is that, for one breath, it made me feel safe.