Chapter 3
The Aventador purrs beneath me as I take the final curve toward home, so ready to start punishing my little Word Collector.
I lift off the accelerator when the gates come into view. The car slowing as unease creeps into the space anticipation occupied three seconds ago.
The gates are open.
They should not be open.
They should be closed.
Always.
Automated security protocols are part of my personal Ten Commandments. Motion sensors, cameras, and backup systems layered like redundancies in a hostile takeover.
Nothing stays open at my house without permission.
Until now, apparently.
The mansion rises against the night sky, a Victorian Gothic silhouette in blood-red stone that usually greets me with uplighting on the arches and a soft glow from the foyer visible through leaded glass.
Tonight it's completely dark.
Every window, every external fixture—dead.
I park and kill the engine. Silence drops like a curtain.
Nothing but the cold Pennsylvania quiet and the sound of my own breathing.
I exit the Aventador and approach the house. The front door is cracked open. I can't even explain the feeling in my gut right now. It's absolute dread bordering on the verge of panic.
I blow out a breath, then push it open and step into the foyer.
Motion sensors should be flooding the space with light.
Nothing.
I pull my phone, activate the flashlight, and sweep the beam across marble floors and antique furniture arranged like set pieces in a museum no one's visiting.
Everything looks untouched.
I move down the main hallway toward the back of the house, toward the door that leads to the basement. Halfway down the corridor my foot kicks something.
I stumble, catching myself against the wall with my free hand, phone jerking in the other. The beam sweeps wildly before I steady it and aim down.
The Little Prince lies face-up on the floor.
The words to describe what I'm feeling right don't even exist.
I pick up the book and look down the hallway. My eyes land on the far end of the house—the library.
Why is this book on the floor?
I straighten, swinging the phone's beam in a wider arc.
Metal glints a few feet away.
A key.
But not just a key.
The key.
It rests against the baseboard like it skidded there and stopped. Small, and brass, and offering exactly what I promised—freedom whenever she wanted it.
She used the key. Came upstairs. Took the book.
My brain catalogues possibilities with the efficiency of a spreadsheet sorting data into columns labeled 'likely', 'possible', and 'you're fucked'.
She finally decided to leave. Took the money, the passport, the fresh start I gift-wrapped and left waiting. She waited until I was away at Sunday dinner and left quietly. No scene, no crying, no goodbyes… the freedom I told her she could claim any time.
The thought should bring relief—one less witness, one less liability, one less person I have to protect from Luca LaRiccia's inevitable questions about his missing degenerate son.
But that's not what happened here.
There is no relief because my phone light catches another glint of metal down the hall. Shoved against the wall is the case.
I walk over, pick it up, and then thumb the latches and click it open.
Sixty-three thousand dollars in banded stacks stare back at me.
The passport with Emmaleen's new name, photo, and a birth date that makes her two years younger.
The plane ticket to anywhere, date open, private and untraceable.
She didn't take the case.
She didn't leave.
Which means someone else opened these gates, cut my power, and came inside.
I move fast toward the control room, each step cataloging details—no alarm trigger, no smashed glass, no signs of forced entry anywhere. Whoever did this had access codes or better.
Professional override.
The control room door is unlocked. I push inside and the darkness swallows everything except the faint glow from my phone.
I sweep the beam across the wall of monitors.
Every screen is black.
Not sleeping. Not dimmed. Dead.
I tap a keyboard. Nothing. Try the backup console. Still nothing.
The entire network—more than a dozen high-definition feeds, thermal overlays, motion sensors, perimeter alerts—systematically shut down from the outside.
I grab for the laptop I keep stowed inside a built-in cabinet beneath the main console, yank it free, flip it open. The screen floods bright white, and I blink against the sudden light, pupils contracting hard enough to hurt.
Password typed. Enter.
Local network infrastructure loads—routers, nodes, circuit diagrams.
Everything offline.
I've got a backup power system designed to outlast a three-day blackout. Industrial-grade battery array with solar redundancy and a diesel generator that kicks in automatically if both fail. The fact that it's all offline means this wasn't a simple breaker trip or grid failure.
This was a total hack.
Professional.
Military-grade penetration.
I don't think the name.
I don't.
I refuse.
I do not.
It comes anyway.
LaRiccia.
The only people both capable of this kind of operation and with a reason to do it.
They don't know. They can't know.
Dom and Ricky have been running the deepfake religiously for weeks—Rico posting vacation photos from Manila, Bangkok, Ko Samui.
Smiling in club mirrors. Flashing cash at blackjack tables.
Fucking Instagram models with geotags proving he's alive and indulgent and exactly where rich assholes go to disappear for a month.
But if they know—
They have to know.
This is a major breach. Hell, this is more than a fucking breach. This is a declaration of war.
Luca LaRiccia doesn't send subtle messages. He sends bodies or invoices, depending on whether you're worth collecting from or just worth erasing. If he suspected I killed his son, I'd already be in a warehouse with a blowtorch aimed at my kneecaps while he waited for me to confess.
Unless he's not after me.
Unless he's after her.
The witness.
The girl who saw me put a bullet in Rico's skull and lived to tell about it because I couldn't pull the trigger a second time.
Instantly, I'm spiraling. Thoughts turn in to theories, turn into nightmares…
Then I remember the trail cam.
The cheap motion-activated wildlife camera I installed in the woods after Emmaleen's first day here—the day I handed her my Aventador and watched her panic through the dash cameras.
The day she pissed in my woods and I had no footage of it because I hadn't anticipated needing coverage that far off the perimeter.
The day that started this whole game between us.
I pause, staring at the dark screen in front of me.
Is it still a game?
Was it ever?
She signed the Doctrine. She kneels. She calls me King. She lets Jino train her body, and me break her mind, and she comes back every single time asking for more, writing seventy-three-page poems in terza rima about how much she wants my darkness.
That's not a game. That's—
I shove the thought away.
Not now. Not when someone was in my house, and she's missing, and every system I built to protect her is offline.
Later.
If there is a later.
The trail cam runs on AA batteries, records to a local SD card, connects to nothing. No network. No Wi-Fi. No cloud backup. Just motion, timestamp, save. Analog redundancy in a digital world, which makes it exactly the kind of thing a professional hacker would miss.
I grab my phone and head outside.
The woods are silent except for wind moving through bare branches. I navigate by memory and phone light, cutting through underbrush until I reach the oak tree where I mounted the camera at chest height, angled toward the driveway in front of the house.
Still there.
I yank it free from the strap, check the indicator light. Green. Active.
Back inside, I pull the SD card from the camera's side slot and load it into the laptop's reader. The file directory populates—dozens of clips labeled by date and time.
I scroll to tonight.
7:57 PM.
8:01 PM.
I click the first one.
The video loads. Grainy infrared footage, trees rendered in ghostly white-green. A car enters the frame from the driveway.
The vehicle that pulls up to my gates looks like something a high schooler would abandon in a Target parking lot after the transmission died.
What is that? Some kind of piece of shit beater car?
I scoff. Of course it is. Whoever did this probably stole it.
The driver's door opens.
A man gets out.
Big guy. Six feet, maybe more. Broad shoulders, lean build—moves like someone who knows how to handle himself in a fight. Wearing all black. Jeans, long-sleeve shirt, boots, and a ski mask pulled down over his face.
He doesn't hesitate. Doesn't scope the perimeter or check for cameras. Just walks straight toward my front door like he's been here before and knows exactly where he's going.
He punches in the code to my house.
The specific, exact, private-as-fuck code that only four people on the planet know.
Me.
Dom.
Ricky.
And Jino.
He, or someone on his team, blacked out my defenses. All of them except one piece of shit analog trail cam.
Which is exhibiting it's lack of well-thought-out function and purpose, because the footage cuts off after thirty seconds of no movement.
I click to the next timestamp.
8:01 PM.
The video loads. Same grainy green-white infrared. The front door opens and the man exits—no shirt now, ski mask still in place, one arm wrapped around Emmaleen.
His hand covers her mouth.
Four minutes.
He was inside my house for four fucking minutes.
Professional hacker, military-grade breach, systematic shutdown of every failsafe I've built—and he gets in and out in the time it takes to order coffee.
He knew the layout. Knew where to find her. Got her out of the dungeon—
No.
Wait.
She wasn't in the dungeon.
The book on the floor. The key by the baseboard. The library.
She broke my rules. Used the key, wandered into restricted territory, grabbed The Little Prince like she was browsing a fucking Barnes & Noble instead of staying where I told her to stay, where she'd be safe—
Why, Emmaleen? Why did you break the rules today of all days?
On screen, the man drags her toward the Buick. She's not fighting. Not screaming. Just… compliant.
Like she's been trained to be.
Headlights sweep across the hallway outside the control room.
A car door slams.
Footsteps on gravel.
I'm up and moving, laptop forgotten, phone in hand, every nerve firing as I grab a gun from the foyer table, cross the space, and yank open the front door.
Jino stands on the porch, grinning, duffel bag slung over one shoulder, looking relaxed, and happy, and completely unaware that the world just collapsed.
"What's with the lights? You will not believe who I just talked to on the way home," he starts, still smiling. "Cassie from the strip club, weren't we just talking about her a couple weeks ago? Total submissive energy, and I'm thinkin' maybe I should—"
He stops mid-sentence.
The smile dies.
"What happened?"
I try to answer. My mouth opens. Words should come out. They don't.
I try again.
"Someone—she's—Emmaleen—"
The stuttering fragments sound pathetic even to my own ears, syllables jamming together like a car crash in slow motion. I tell myself to get it together. To speak like a functioning adult instead of a panicked child.
I can't.
Jino drops the duffel bag and grabs my shoulder. "G. Look at me. Breathe. What happened?"
"Emmaleen's gone." The words finally break free, sharp and jagged. "Someone broke in. Professional. Hacker, probably. Shut down the entire grid. Power, cameras, alarms, everything offline. Four minutes. In and out."
Jino's expression shifts from concern to tactical assessment in half a second. "How do you know?"
I speed walk back into the control room, Jino at my heels. Then rewind the footage. We watch until the man puts Emmaleen in the trunk.
"LaRiccia," Rico says flatly, not a question.
I nod, turning back to the footage. Then I reach down and press the space bar, halting the footage mid capture.
I just… stare at it as my whole world stutters.
Because it's… it can't be.
What the fuck is he doing here?
Jino presses a contact. Brings the phone to his ear. "Yeah, it's Moretti. We've got an emergency. I need—"
I cross the space between us and take the phone from his hand. Jino stares at me, confusion flickering across his face. The voice on the other end says, "Moretti? You still there?"
I keep my eyes locked on Jino's as I answer back. "Forget you got this call." Then I end it.
Jino's shakes his head. "What the fuck are you doing?"
I don't answer. I turn and walk back to the laptop, Jino following. I point to the footage frozen on the frame.
Jino leans in. "What? What am I looking at?"
I point at the screen again. At the frozen image of the man shoving Emmaleen into the trunk. The angle catches his left arm as he lifts it, pushing her down. The ski mask hides his face. The black clothes hide his identity.
But he's shirtless. I think Emmaleen is wearing his shirt.
And right there, in plain sight, are tattoos. Very identifiable tattoos.
Celtic tattoos.
Black ink. Intricate knotwork. Distinctive enough that there's no mistaking them.
Jino goes very still beside me.
"Holy shit," he breathes.
I don't say the name.
I don't have to.
We both know exactly who has Celtic tattoos like that. Who moves like a ghost through security systems. Who has the skills, the access, and the history with me to pull off a breach this clean.
Jino's hand is already moving, grabbing his phone from me, fingers flying across the screen. "We line up backup anyway. Track the car. Find the location. Go in quiet, extract her, no casualties—"
I take the phone again.
Jino rounds on me, anger flashing hot in his eyes. "Giovanni, what the fuck—"
"We cannot retaliate," I stress, each word deliberate and final.
"He took her," Jino snaps. "He broke into your house, shut down your security, and kidnapped your—" He stops himself, searching for the right word. "—your slave. And you don't want to fucking massacre this guy? G! Come on!"
I turn back to the screen.
To the footage of Lorcan ó Fearghail pushing Emmaleen Rourke into the trunk of a stolen Buick.
"No," I say quietly. "I can't."
There is only one man who could do this to me and get away with it.
One man on this whole planet who I have a blood oath with.
Lorcan has taken Emmaleen.
Why? I have no fucking clue.
But there's not a damn thing I can do about it.