Chapter 5 STEPHANO
I let the nurse fuss over my hand because the world needs a second to stop spinning.
Her gloved fingers are small and efficient; the band aid and the cold cleaner are a businesslike ritual that lets me recompose as much as the sting of the antiseptic.
I let her talk at me—what’s your name, do you feel dizzy—because the sound of a woman giving orders in a calm voice is a kind of anchor I haven’t practiced in a long time.
I need to regroup, get my mind in order, and get away from that woman on the bed. She pushed me so close to my edge that the barrel of my own gun tasted like surrender. Not breaking. Conti men don’t break. We detonate. We erase. We end things.
And for one heartbeat, I almost ended her.
No one has ever stood in my crosshairs and laughed. Not even Nico dared to smile while staring down the hole that decides who lives. But she did. She looked at me like she already knew I wouldn’t pull the trigger, like she’d measured the exact width of my restraint and danced on the line.
And the worst part?
She was right.
I wanted to punish her. I wanted to drag her beneath me and make her feel every ounce of the chaos she just poured into my blood. Not just want. Need. A hunger so sharp it felt like worship.
It wasn’t only her body—though God knows the thought of pinning her wrists and watching that defiance melt into pleas has lived rent-free in my head since the moment I saw her—no, it was the way she looked at me and saw the monster and still refused to kneel.
She saw the storm and stepped into it barefoot.
I've killed men for less provocation. I have buried empires for smaller insults. Yet she stands there bleeding from my world and dares me to finish what it started.
And I almost did.
The gun was steady. My finger was ready. One ounce of pressure, and the problem calling herself my wife would have been solved forever.
But I couldn’t.
Because the second I imagined a world without that reckless, infuriating fire in her eyes, something inside me went colder than any grave I’ve ever dug.
So I holstered the bullet and gave the monitor my fist instead.
She wants to play? Fine.
But the next time she tests how far she can push a man who has nothing left to lose, she’d better be ready for what happens when the leash finally snaps.
Because next time, I won’t aim for the screen.
The nurse steps back, but I don’t take my eyes off Ana—if that’s her name—who lies against the hospital pillow like a war map with a hole in the middle.
The morphine smooths the edges of pain out of her diamond-shaped face; it makes her look soft where she is not.
She stares at the window like she’s reading something I can’t see.
"Nico’s alive," she says finally, not looking at me.
The words drop like stones into a shallow pool; heavy, deliberate, impossible to take back.
Ripples race across the silence, touching every corner, shivering the monitors, shaking the IV stand, brushing the edges of my control.
Each ripple carries a memory buried three years deep: Nico laughing in the rain, Nico saying, Race you, Nico gone.
They spread wider, faster, until the surface of me fractures in a hundred quiet places. Then the ripples slow. The room holds its breath. Time stills, thick and trembling, until the surface is glass again; too still, too perfect, like the moment before a sniper exhales.
I don’t move. I don’t speak. I just stare at the woman who just shattered the only truth I had left and wait for the next stone she’s about to throw.
I expected a punch of hope. Instead, a weight slides up into my chest, feeling older and meaner.
Relief and alertness braid into something that tastes bitter.
"Where did you find him?" I ask the question.
She looks at me then, and there’s a flash of guilt across her face like a bruise. "La Cueva del Jaguar in the Sierra Madre. They moved him from a safehouse in Venezuela to deeper in the mountains. I—" She pins me with a look, stubborn as bone. "I barely made it out."
She tells the rest in a clipped rush: the ambush, the fight, the way men showed up when they should have all been dead, the truck chase, the airstrip.
How they jumped into the ventilation shafts, and how the night tasted like metal and diesel.
And then, quietly, the part that makes the hair rise on my arms—how Nico told her, Find Stephano. Tell him: Temporale.
There it is, like a match struck in a room I’d already sealed. The old chord in me tightens. Temporale.
She meets my eyes again, and there’s no apology in the set of her jaw, only the fact of what she did. "He said there’s a palm drive," she tells me. "A safe-deposit box in Mexico City. We need to get it."
My first instincts are animal and immediate: the ownership that flared earlier reasserts itself with more ferocity; she’s mine to protect, yes, but also a live wire who brings heat into my center.
When she mentions a drive, my mind shivers with the ledger and my father’s name.
There’s a line connecting them now, and it goes through her.
She tries to sit up, and I put a proprietary hand flat on her sternum and force her back down, keeping my voice measured and final. "Where the hell do you think you’re going?" I demand icily.
Her mouth quirks; the defiance is absurd and infuriating. "I’m getting out of here, and then I'll find the drive," she snaps.
I can feel a dozen responses—kill her for the way she walked into my life, kiss her until she forgets herself—but they’re loud and stupid, and I don’t let them out. I lean closer instead, curious and furious and a little terrified at what curious does to me when she’s near.
"You’ll do neither," I order. "You’ll stay. You’ll let me vet every face that looks at you. You’ll tell me everything now, and you don’t get to stand up on your feet again until I say so."
"I won't tell you, unless we go together.
" She bargains. Her accent is faint, but there.
A memory of weathered consonants, Russian, the syllables like an exclamation point.
I tuck it away the way I pocket knives: labeled and ready.
Once Dre has a list of names, that should help us narrow it down.
Not that I expect it to be long. How many red-haired female assassins could there be?
Her good eye shoots fire at me, and God help me, but I like it. I like how defiant she is. Her mysteriousness I could do without, but I'd be lying if I said it wasn't alluring as fuck. Just like the color of her eye. Jade green. The deepest, clearest green I've ever seen.
"You've been shot twice and beaten up. I won't wait for you to recover before I go after my brother."
"They probably moved him."
"Then I will find out where to," I vow. I've lost Nico once. It won't happen again.
"That will take time. I will be ready." She promises.
I don't doubt that she will be. She's like a goddam zombie, only a clean shot to the head will stop her. And it impresses the hell out of me.
She eyes me again sharply, "Do we have a deal?"
"I don't deal with people I don't know."
"Too bad. You’d better get over it, or I won't tell you anything more."
Heat flares in my stomach. God help me, but she is pushing my buttons. She watches me, and for the first time, there’s a weird, private truce in her eye, an admission that she needs me as much as I need a direction.
Something ugly rears inside me. Something sharp and biting. "What is my brother to you that you're willing to risk your life for him?"
I steel my expression, myself for her answer. Because if she and Nico… fuck, that thought alone is enough to drive me insane.
"I couldn't get Nico out. That's a failure. And I don't do failures," she retorts. Of all the answers she could have given, this one relieves me the most and is the most believable, given what I know about her.
I nod. "If we are to work on this together. I need more from you. Go through it again, slower this time."
She nods, "My name is Ana Volcov. I work freelance."
I pretend to believe her and listen while she tells me that she was at the wrong place at the wrong time when the cartel needed a pilot.
She explains she does odd jobs, legal or not; she's not choosy.
I don't call her out on her bullshit—a woman as trained as her is doing more than odd jobs—and let her keep going.
"So you just happened to notice an American among the prisoners and decided, out of the goodness of your heart, that you needed to rescue him after they took you to the mine." I slowly begin to pick her story apart before she's even finished.
She raises her hands in defeat. "What can I say. I'm a bleeding heart for my fellow countrymen."
The word bullshit lies on the tip of my tongue, but I push it down.
Let's see how far she's going to take this.
I wonder what makes her think I'll believe a word she says when she is so obviously lying to me.
Her good eye is challenging me to challenge her.
I nod, but a derisive snort from me tells her that I don't believe her.
At least not this part. She was there for a reason, and I will find out what that reason is.
God help her if she knew. If she went there looking for Nico, only to fuck it up because she didn't involve me in the first place.
The rest of the story is hard to hear. My mind tries to conjure up an image of Nico, what he looks like now, three years later.
He was barely nineteen when he vanished, right after his birthday.
And now, right after his twenty-second birthday, he resurfaces.
I don't think Ana realizes it, but the details she's giving me make me believe this part of her story.
She says Nico must have been working out; he was fit.
That soothes parts of me. I can't help but wonder if my father knows all this, if his payments to the Venezuelans were to keep him alive.
But why the hell wouldn't he have told me?
Why would he let me believe my brother is dead?
Her story gets harder when she gets to the part where Nico sacrificed himself so that she could get away.
"I would have driven the jeep, I swear," she looks at me, and I see nothing but truth that I know will haunt me forever. "Had he known how to fly the plane. As it was, one of us had to make it out."
A deep breath grounds me. I hate to admit it, but she's right. They did the right thing. The only thing that made sense given the situation they were in. The fact that she came to me after buys her a certain amount of… credibility. She didn't have to do that.
"Why were the Venezuelans after you, when you say he was imprisoned by a Mexican cartel?" I ask not just to challenge her story, but because the Venezuelans and the Mexicans working together? That's a whole other Pandora's Box I'd like to keep a lid on.
She surprises me when she fills me in. "Now that is an interesting question.
First, Nico is Don Aurelio Valverde's prisoner," she probes me, as if to see if that name means anything to me, and I nod.
"A woman, Donna Margarita," she pauses as I nod again, "and Don Aurelio's father are working together.
Have been working together for a long time.
Decades. During that time, they've not only been undermining and infiltrating the Bratva here in New York, but La Famiglia as well. "
Her information sounds solid. Some of it I already knew, some is new. But she still hasn't answered my question about how the Mexicans fit into this. I'm about to ask, when she continues, "Second, about the Mexicans?" She shakes her head. "I don't know yet how they fit in. But I will."
I sit back and run a hand over the stubble growth on my cheeks. "You do realize that what you're telling me, what you know, is a lot for a woman doing odd jobs?"
She shrugs without wincing. Whoever she is, she's got more balls than most men. "Let's say I have certain… loyalties."
"So you know everything about me, but you're keeping yourself under a shroud?" I challenge.
"Take it or leave it." She throws the towel right back at me.
"I'll take it," I agree. If she's done her homework, she'll know that I won't stop until I find out who she is. She’s dropping more clues than she realizes, and I have my ways of finding those things out, too.
Some say I'm the best in the country, but I don't agree.
If I were, I would have found Nico a lot sooner.