8. Alessio #3
Unless the betrayal wasn’t about hate. Unless it was about something else.
I pull up a file I haven’t looked at in years. My mother’s file. Riza Costa. She was beautiful, with dark hair and eyes that saw everything. She was the heart of the family. She survived the first betrayal only to be taken years later by the same war.
I look at a photo of her and my father, standing with Turi at a celebration months before my father was taken. They are laughing. They look happy. Turi is looking at my mother, and there’s a look in his eyes that I recognize. It’s the look I see in the mirror when I think about Amara.
Obsession. Devotion. A love that borders on madness.
My stomach turns. If Turi loved her… if the choice he made opened the first door and the war took her later because of it…
I shut the file down. I can’t think about it. Not now. I have a mission. I have a switch to dismantle. I have a partner to keep alive long enough to finish the switch.
I spend the rest of the night checking and re-checking the gear. We load the SUV with tactical vests, silenced sidearms, and the high-speed bridge Amara built. The compound is quiet, but it’s the quiet of a coiled spring. My brothers are in their own wings, preparing their own teams.
I see Turi in the hallway as I’m heading to the garage. He’s standing by the window, looking out at the rain-slicked courtyard. He looks old. Older than he did yesterday.
“Alessio,” he says, his voice soft. He doesn’t turn around.
“Turi.” I stop, my hand tightening on the strap of my tactical bag.
“Be careful tonight,” he says. “The world is full of ghosts, and they don’t like to be disturbed.”
“I’m not afraid of ghosts, Turi. I’m afraid of the living.”
He turns then, his eyes searching mine. There’s a sadness in them that goes down to his bones. “The living are the ones who break your heart, boy. The ghosts just remind you that it was ever whole.”
He reaches out and touches my arm, a brief, fatherly gesture. “You’ve done a good job, Alessio. You’ve kept this family together when it wanted to fly apart. Your father would be proud.”
I can’t breathe. The lie I told Dominic feels like a physical weight in the air between us. I want to ask him. I want to scream the question at him until he tells me the truth. Did you do it? Did you sell them out?
But I don’t. I just nod, my throat tight.
“Get some rest, Turi,” I say.
“I’ve had enough rest for several lifetimes,” he says, turning back to the window. “Tonight, I think I’ll just watch the rain.”
I walk away, and every step feels like I’m leaving a piece of my soul behind. I find Amara waiting by the SUV. She looks at me, sensing the tension, the raw, jagged edge of my nerves.
“You okay?” she asks.
“No,” I say, opening the driver’s side door. “But it doesn’t matter. We have a job to do.”
We climb into the car, and the engine purrs to life—a low, predatory rumble. I pull out of the garage and head toward the gate. The guards wave us through, their faces grim under the floodlights.
As we drive through the quiet streets of Chicago, the city feels like a stranger. The neon lights, the empty sidewalks, the towering skyscrapers—it’s all just a backdrop for the war we’re about to escalate.
Amara is quiet beside me. She’s checking her tablet, her face illuminated by the screen’s glow. She’s in the zone. I envy her that. I envy her the singular focus on the hunt.
“We’re twenty minutes out,” she says.
“Copy that.”
I grip the steering wheel, my hands fisted hard. The Bellanti-linked Gold Coast penthouse is coming up, accessible only by a private elevator with a biometric lock. Vane’s sanctum.
This is the first clean move we have. If we fail here, the switch triggers and the Costas are done. If we succeed, we take the first step toward ending the man who ruined our lives.
But as we pull onto Lake Shore Drive, I can’t stop thinking about Turi. I can’t stop thinking about the look in his eyes.
The one who keeps the secrets makes the hard choices.
I’ve made mine. I’m choosing the mission. I’m choosing Amara. And I’m choosing to keep the mole theory contained until I have proof strong enough to survive the war room.
I just hope I’m not the one who ends up drowning in it.
We reach the Gold Coast, and I park the SUV in a shadowed alley two blocks from the target. We check our gear one last time. Sidearms holstered. Comms in. Tactical vests snug.
“Remember,” I say, looking at Amara. “Stay in comms. If I say drop, you drop. If you need me to move, you say it once.”
She nods once, and I know better than to mistake agreement for obedience.
We step out of the car and into the night. The air is cold and damp, the wind off the lake biting through my jacket. We move through the shadows, two hunters closing in on their prey.
The service entrance is where Vincenzo’s schematics promised—a freight corridor off the loading alley, one camera on a lazy arc, one biometric panel glowing its smug corporate blue.
Amara kneels, her interceptor already out.
I stand over her, a wall between her body and the sightlines, and count the guard rotation in my head. Four minutes.
“Forty seconds,” she breathes. With Vincenzo’s schematic and a service-code flaw, the panel surrenders in thirty-one.
Inside, the service sublevel beneath the tower is all hum and chrome.
The server room sits behind glass at the end of a maintenance row, racks pulsing like an artificial heart.
She moves down the aisle reading labels like a woman who has been waiting ten years for one of them to confess, stops at the third cabinet, and connects her bridge to the rack’s primary uplink, a black shard no bigger than a matchbook disappearing into the cabling in under a minute.
A radio crackles somewhere above us. Boots on grating, close, then a second set behind them.
I raise my weapon; her hands never stop moving.
The first pair passes, trailing a guard’s bored humming.
The second stops at the aisle mouth, and for three seconds I count his breathing before he moves on and the air comes back into the room.
“Done,” she whispers. “He’ll never feel it. As far as his switch knows, this rack just grew one more vein.”
We slip out the way we came. No alarms. No bodies. The cleanest breach I have ever committed.
By the time we reach the SUV, the node is already whispering through our bridge to my third-floor terminal. The real work starts at home—six hours of it, maybe more, with the switch none the wiser.
The bridge is live. Now the switch can bleed. And as I look at Amara, I realize that no matter what happens tonight, no matter what secrets come to light, I will never let her go. She is beside me, and for once the vault has another pair of hands on the door.
And this time, I will be precise enough not to lose her.