Chapter 1 LUCA
LUCA
Three assassination attempts, a federal audit, and my grandfather's funeral never pulled a raised voice out of me. I keep my hands on the polished mahogany desk, watching the door frame as Matteo stumbles through it.
Matteo stands frozen under the overhead lights. I lock my eyes onto his until a bead of sweat breaks at his hairline, slips past his eyebrow, and drips onto the collar of his damp jacket.
Before Matteo arrived, the meeting focused on actual business.
Adrian stood at the head of the long mahogany table with a map of the southern docks pinned flat beneath his heavy palms, tracing the routes the Bellinis had scouted over the past three weeks.
Rain tapped against the tall office windows while I tracked every pen mark Adrian made across the paper.
A good boss listens before he speaks. My father taught me that rule, even if he failed to survive long enough to enjoy the benefits.
The heavy double doors swung open, cutting through Adrian's voice. Matteo slipped inside ten minutes late, smelling of jet fuel and damp night air. Usually, he kicked the doors wide, slouched into the nearest leather armchair, and put his boots on my table before anyone could object.
Tonight, Matteo leaves the leather armchairs empty. His fingers stay glued to the brass latch behind his back, boots scraping once against the rug as he pins his eyes straight to the floor between his toes.
I lean forward until my palms rest flat against the dark wood. "What did you do?"
Matteo runs a hand through his dark hair until the strands stick straight up. "We grabbed the wrong woman. The dress, it was the exact same model, the coffee shop, same street, same building as Bellini's assistant's was supposed to be."
"Bellini's assistant is five foot two and terrified of her own shadow," I say, my tone dropping to ice. "Who exactly did you put on that plane?"
Neither of them moves. Adrian’s pen hovers an inch above the harbor chart, ink bleeding into a dark circle over the shipping docks.
Matteo shifts on his feet and drops his gaze.
"We were moving fast. She had the camel coat and the same brown hair.
Then this loud siren kicked off down the block.
I thought it was the cops rolling up on us, so I panicked as we already made her unconscious, so I yelled at Sal to shove her into the car. "
I pull up the London traffic feed on my desktop monitor, clicking through the street cameras until the audio feed spikes with a two-tone wail. I turn the screen so Matteo can see it.
"That is not the police," I tell him, tapping a finger against the monitor glass with slow, quiet force. "That is an ambulance. A two-tone siren. You panicked over a medical run two streets over, lost your head, and threw a completely random woman into a car without even checking her face."
"Sal confirmed it," Matteo insists, desperation bleeding into his tone. "He told the team it was her."
"Sal has been hit in the head so many times he thought of the sixty year old family doctor as his bride," I mutter, rubbing the bridge of my nose.
"Sal gets confused by revolving doors, Matteo.
You let a man with three recorded concussions run target identification on an international kidnapping operation.
Where is Bellini's actual assistant right now? "
"At home," Adrian reveals quietly, consulting the tablet in his grip. "Watching television in her living room. The surveillance team confirmed she never stepped outside her building."
"So she was never in danger."
"No."
"And the woman who was never supposed to be in danger is currently down in my courtyard, inside my house, because Sal and my cousin cannot tell the difference between a twenty-two-year-old assistant and whoever the hell you actually brought here."
Nobody answers that one. Nobody's stupid enough to try.
Adrian slides a folder across the table like it might bite him. I open it.
Nora Elizabeth Blake. Age twenty eight. Founder and chief executive of a crisis management firm in London that charges more per hour than most of my lawyers make in a month.
There is a color photo clipped to the corner, taken outside a glass office tower.
Even in print, her chin stays tilted high, the kind of woman who never yields an argument.
The visible client list includes owners of international airlines and premier football clubs.
One quote from a British financial weekly calls her the only person in London who can make a scandal vanish before the morning edition prints.
We didn't kidnap an assistant. We kidnapped someone who negotiates for a living, someone whose absence won't go unnoticed.
"We got her secured downstairs five minutes ago," Matteo volunteers, holding up his hands like a shield.
"You look at me like that's supposed to fix things."
"I am saying it because there is nothing else to say," Matteo mutters, pulling out an empty leather armchair and sinking into it under my glare.
"We did not know until Sal called from the tarmac in London to confirm the pickup was clean.
That was when he checked her passport photo and realized it did not match. "
"So you found out before the plane left London." I close the folder slowly, deliberately, the way I do everything when I want a room to understand exactly how much I am not shouting. "And you let it take off anyway."
"Turning the plane around would have meant flying over restricted airspace during a military radar shift, and I figured we could sort it out here," Matteo explains, raising his hands in surrender.
"You figured," I repeat, tapping a single knuckle against the mahogany.
"Matteo, understand what you did. You did not secure a timid asset.
You abducted a professional crisis fixer with direct lines to powerful billionaires, and you grabbed her in broad daylight on a London street with witnesses, cameras, and an active phone call to her firm. "
"She fought back like a rabid pit bull," Sal wheezes from the doorway, limping in on one socked, swollen foot.
He clutches his throat with one hand and winces with every breath.
"Fractured my toe through my shoe. Then she crushed my trachea and threatened to bite my fingers off if I touched her with the chloroform rag again. "
"Good," I mutter flatly, closing my eyes for a brief second to gather my patience. "I hope she files charges in international court for the windpipe. Maybe next time you will compare a photo before bundling an elite executive into the back of an SUV."
Sal shrinks back into the hallway, pulling the collar of his coat up to hide the deep purple bruising across his throat.
Adrian steps between us to cut in before I take a knife to someone.
"The immediate concern is containment. Her firm will notice her absence before noon.
That means missing person alerts, private investigators, and London police.
We need strict containment the second they escort her through the courtyard. "
"We do not have a containment plan," I correct him coldly. "We have an international kidnapping charge and a British passport tied to a massive diplomatic incident."
"To be fair," Matteo offers, flashing a grin as he rubs the back of his neck, "she has incredible comedic timing. She told her assistant to delete her browser history, called Sal and Marco cheap thugs in Armani knockoffs, and asked if our kidnapping strategy came from eighties cartoons."
Matteo mimics holding a wine glass and chuckles under his breath. "Then she gave our private jet a one-star rating. I offered her my vintage Barolo to help with the altitude. She looked me in the eye and said she would rather drink gasoline."
"I don't care if she recites Shakespeare while juggling knives, Matteo.
This is not a woman we can hold in a guest room and forget about until the war with the Bellinis is finished.
This is a woman who is going to start negotiating the moment she wakes up, because that is what she does for a living, and she is going to be very, very good at it. "
The office drops dead quiet. Matteo stops fidgeting with his jacket, his gaze dropping to the floorboards.
Across the desk, Adrian's grip on his pen tightens until his knuckles go white against the brass barrel.
I let the silence hang, my pulse steadying behind my ribs as I watch the two of them.
Every man on my payroll has a price or an angle I have already mapped out, but this file sitting under my palms has neither.
I know nothing about the woman sitting in the room downstairs, other than the fact that she fought off three of my men with bare hands and high heels.
The iron gates below have already swung shut, locking her inside my estate under armed guard.
She is here, on my ground, and this catastrophic mistake belongs entirely to me.
I haven't slept a full night in twenty years, not since my parents were murdered and the weight of the Brotherhood landed on my shoulders. I don't have room for a wild card, especially not a sharp-tongued British CEO who negotiates multi-million dollar crises before noon.
"What do we do with her?" Adrian asks, stepping closer to the desk with his arms crossed behind his back.
"Lock her in the east wing," I command , shutting the file folder. "Post two armed guards outside the door. No outside calls, no ransom demands, and no contact with anyone until I assess what kind of threat just entered my house."
"What about Bellini's assistant?" Adrian asks, glancing toward the courtyard window.
"Track her quietly before nightfall," I instruct, fixing Matteo with a cold glare. "You will supervise the team yourself. If you bring me another corporate executive by mistake, I will let Nonna handle your discipline."
Matteo swallows hard, the color draining from his face as he remembers our grandmother's temper.
"For what it is worth," Matteo adds, dusting off his jacket lapel with an amused smirk, "she promised to strip our family of every asset we own, starting with my knockoff coat, and feed zip ties down my throat.
Then she claimed she had four kickboxing moves left to show us. You definitely won't find her boring."
I push up from my chair. "I do not want interesting. I want the Bellinis eliminated and my family protected. Interesting gets people killed."
"Understood," Matteo replies quickly, backing toward the hallway. "Boring is good. Interesting is lethal."
Adrian rolls up the harbor map, locks it inside the metal credenza, and heads out the double doors behind Matteo without another word.
Then it's just me and the folder.
I flip the folder open again. A glossy headshot from a British trade magazine sits clipped inside the tab.
She stands on the steps of a London office tower, tailored wool coat sharp at the shoulders, dark hair pinned without a single stray lock in the wind.
Her chin tilts slightly upward. In the glossy print, her eyes catch the flash direct, cool, unblinking while the hard line of her mouth gives away nothing.
Below the picture, clipped headlines track two years of her firm cleaning up board-level train wrecks: an airline cover-up handled overnight, a tech CEO's embezzlement settled before trading opened.
Not a single apology in print. Just results, invoices with seven-figure fees, and silence.
I close the folder. Downstairs, heavy footsteps echo through the corridor as the guards lead her to the east wing. A woman who has no idea what my family does just stepped straight into the crossfire of a mafia war.
What the hell do I do with you now, Nora Blake?