Chapter 6
LORENZO
She follows me to Dante’s study without speaking. Good. I prefer silence. Silence is safe and honest. Silence doesn’t require anything from me.
The house has gone still this time of morning, most of the staff still moving through their routines. Her footsteps behind me are lighter than mine, quicker to keep pace. The borrowed clothes hang off her. White T-shirt slipping off one shoulder. Sweatpants sitting low on her hips.
I’m clocking details. That’s my job.
The study door is already open. Dante sits behind the desk, laptop open, coffee steaming beside him. He looks up when we enter, and his eyes narrow when he sees her. Assessment. Calculation. The same look he gave Cassia once, before everything changed.
“Isabella.” Dante gestures to the chair across from him. “Sit.”
She doesn’t hesitate. Doesn’t defer. Just crosses the room and takes the seat like she belongs in it. Like she’s not surrounded by people who could end her with a phone call.
I position myself by the window. Near enough to hear everything. Far enough to observe.
“You said you have intel on the Benedettis,” Dante says. “Locations. Routes. Operations.”
“I do.”
“How much?”
“Years of surveillance. Financial records, shipping manifests, property holdings. Names of buyers.” Her voice is steady. Professional. “I know where they move their product. I know who pays them. I know which cops look the other way and how much it costs.”
Dante’s expression doesn’t change, but I catch it. The flicker he’s too disciplined to show.
“And you’re willing to share all of this.”
“That’s the deal.” She leans forward, jaw set. “You help me get my sister back. I give you everything I have.”
“How do we know it’s accurate?”
“You don’t.” She holds his gaze, steady as stone. “But I’ve spent years building this database. Cross-referencing sources. Verifying every piece of information. I didn’t do this for fun. I did it because my sister’s life depends on it being right.”
Silence stretches. Dante looks at me. I give him nothing.
“Show me,” he says.
She turns to face me. “I need my laptop. Or access to one.”
“Your laptop is being analyzed.”
“I figured.” No anger. No accusation. Just fact. “Then I need a clean machine and network access. My files are backed up.”
“Where?”
Her lips press together. “You think I kept all that incriminating evidence on a single device? Everything’s backed up and hidden across multiple locations. I can access it from anywhere.”
It lives in my head now. Not on those drives. That’s what she told me in the apartment. Looking me dead in the eyes while her screens burned. And I bought it.
Shit. My knuckles whiten against my forearm.
“You’ll have supervised access,” I say. “Monitored connection. Nothing goes out without approval.”
“Fine.”
“And I’ll be monitoring.”
Now she does smile. Small. Sharp. “I’d expect nothing less.”
Dante stands. “Set her up. Report back with what she has.” He pauses at the door. “If this is real, if your intel is what you say it is, we can work together. But if you’re playing us—”
“I’m not playing anyone.” Her voice is flat. Final. “I want my sister back. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”
He nods once and leaves.
Now it’s just us.
“Follow me.”
I lead her along the corridor to my office. Not Dante’s study. Not a spare room. Mine. The room is sparse. Desk. Two chairs. Window overlooking the east garden. No personal touches. No comfort. Just function. For years I’ve made sure no one feels welcome here.
I gesture to the empty chair. “Sit.”
She does. Close enough to hear her breathe. If I sit, I’ll be facing her. Watching her. Unable to look anywhere else.
I could have put her anywhere else. Should have.
I pull out the laptop we’ve prepared. Clean machine, monitored network, every keystroke logged. She’ll know we’re logging everything. She doesn’t seem to care.
I set it down, angled toward her. She’ll work here. In my space.
Her fingers move across the keyboard before I can blink. A login screen. Then another. Then a cascade of authentication prompts she navigates seamlessly, like it’s second nature.
“Six different servers,” she says, not looking up. “None of them talk to each other. You’d need all six to read anything, and they’re scattered across three continents.”
Words fail me.
Her hands. They’re not what I expected. Smaller than mine. Unpainted nails, bitten short. A callus on her right index finger from years of typing. They move across the keys with a precision that borders on violence. Each keystroke deliberate. Certain.
I’ve seen hands do terrible things. I’ve used my own to break bones and end lives and never once trembled. But I’ve never seen hands build something. Navigate a digital landscape like it’s a territory to be conquered.
She’s not typing. She’s commanding.
“There.” She turns the screen toward me. Folders. Dozens of them. Organized by date, by location, by operation. Years of work, laid out in neat digital rows.
“Start with locations,” I say.
A map fills the screen. New Orleans and the surrounding parishes, pinned and color-coded.
Her finger taps a cluster near the port.
“Flavio’s main compound. Former warehouse, converted five years ago.
” She pulls up a second file. “I hacked the utility company. Power consumption spikes on the fifteenth and thirtieth of every month. Shipment days.”
Her fingers move across the keyboard in bursts. Three seconds of fury, two seconds of reading, then fury again. She’s forgotten I’m here.
I cross-reference her locations with what we already know. Nico’s intel. Marco’s street whispers. It matches. All of it.
“What else?”
She works for the next two hours. I watch. I tell myself I’m supervising. Monitoring her access. Ensuring she’s not sending anything out.
She has a rhythm when she works. Her fingers dance across the keys in patterns I don’t understand. She types in questions in a language I don’t speak, and it gives her answers, pulls up data, unlocks secrets.
Nonna Rosa brings coffee an hour in. Pauses in the doorway when she sees the setup. Her eyes move from Isabella at my desk to me by the window, and she pauses a moment too long. She’s never seen anyone else in this room. I don’t ever allow it.
She sets a pot on the sideboard without comment, but her gaze lingers on me.
Isabella pours herself a cup without breaking stride. Black, two sugars. She stirs it while she works, takes a sip, and her eyes close for half a second. A tiny sound of relief in the back of her throat, so small I shouldn’t have been able to hear it.
Black, two sugars. I won’t forget.
The afternoon light shifts through the windows, warm rectangles moving across the floor. My office smells like old leather and chicory and, underneath it all, her.
“This one,” she says, pointing at a transaction. “Three million routed through Cyprus, then Panama, then a P.O. box that receives mail for one person.”
“Who?”
“State senator.” She pulls up a photo. A man I’ve seen on television, smiling with his family, talking about law and order. “He has a taste for young ones. The Benedettis have been supplying him for four years.”
Her voice is flat when she says it. Clinical. But her fingers pause on the keyboard. Her shoulders tighten.
More names follow. More money. The data blurs.
My focus shifts to her. The furrow between her brows when she hits a wall.
The muttering, fragments of code and curse words, her fingers moving faster until whatever she’s chasing surrenders.
The way her lips part when she’s close. The sound she makes when she catches it. Low. Satisfied.
My grip tightens on my own arm.
Three hours in, she stretches in her chair. Rolls her neck. The movement exposes the line of her throat, and I track the motion of her pulse beneath her skin.
“Hungry?” I ask.
She blinks, like the question surprises her. Like she forgot I was here. “What?”
“You haven’t eaten.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not.” She’s been running on caffeine and not much else. “Nonna Rosa left sandwiches in the kitchen.”
She stares at me. “I’ll eat later.”
“You’ll eat now.”
“Are you ordering me to eat?”
“We need your brain functioning. That requires food.”
She holds my gaze. Doesn’t back down. Doesn’t agree.
“Fine,” she says. “But I’m not leaving this room. Bring me something.”
I leave. Walk to the kitchen. Make her a plate. One of Nonna Rosa’s sandwiches. Some fruit. A handful of the cookies that appeared on the counter this morning.
I’m making a woman a plate of food. I don’t make anyone food. Gia asks and I tell her to get it herself. Marco asks and I ignore him. But she asked, and I was already moving before my head caught up.
When I bring it back, she looks at the plate, then at me. “Thank you.”
I don’t respond. Return to my position by the window.
She eats while she works, one hand on the keyboard, the other bringing food to her mouth between keystrokes. Her lips close around the sandwich. Her throat moves when she swallows. She licks a crumb from the corner of her mouth without breaking stride, and my grip tightens on my forearm.
She finishes the sandwich. Ignores the fruit. Eats all the cookies.
“The buyers,” she says, pushing the empty plate aside. “This is where it gets complicated.”
Names scroll across the screen. Some I recognize. People who shake hands with mayors and donate to charities and attend galas where they pretend to care about the same victims they purchase.
She gestures at the display. “Follow the money. It never lies.”
Her chin lifts when she says it. That satisfaction. She built this. Alone, in a dark apartment, night after night. And it’s airtight.
She’s been working for hours. The light through the windows has gone golden, then orange, now fading. My office is dim around her, lit by the glow of the monitor, and in that light she looks different. The shadows under her eyes less harsh. The sharp edges of her face softer.
I move closer. Lean over her shoulder to see the screen better.
She freezes. Not fear. I know what fear looks like in a body. How it shrinks people, makes them lean away. She’s not doing that. She’s holding her ground while I invade her space.
My chest is inches from her back. The curve of her neck. The small hairs at her nape. Her pulse jumping just below her jaw. Coffee and underneath it, her. Warm. Clean.
My lungs expand. Heat radiating off her skin. If I leaned forward another inch, my chest would press against her back.
My body holds. Not forward. No retreat.
“The shipping routes,” I say. My voice comes out lower than I intended. Rougher.
She pulls up another file, her typing steady even though my breath moves her hair. The strands shift. Goosebumps rise along her nape.
“They use three main corridors.” Her voice is even. Controlled. She’s working to keep it that way. “Port of New Orleans for international. Highway 90 for domestic traffic. And the river, when they need to move without paperwork.”
“Personal space exists,” she says.
She doesn’t move.
“Not for you.” The words slip free before I catch them. “Not in my office.”
I put her here. Chose this. Could have given her space anywhere in the house. Instead I installed her across my own desk. Where I work. Where I think. Where I’ve kept a place of solitude.
I invited her into my territory. And now I’m the one who can’t stay away.
She turns her head. Not enough to look at me. Just enough to show the line of her profile, the curve of her mouth. Her lips are parted. Her eyes half-closed.
If I leaned down. If I turned her chair. If I—
“Then make yourself useful and get me more coffee.”
I step back. Cross to the corner where Nonna Rosa keeps a pot warming. Pour coffee into her cup. Two sugars.
When I set the cup beside her keyboard, she doesn’t look up. Just cradles it and takes a sip.
“You know how I take it.”
Not a question.
Silence is the only safe reply.
I return to the window. Put distance between us. My hands won’t settle. I fold my arms across my chest and force myself to become a statue.
She keeps working. I keep watching.
She leans back and closes the laptop. “That’s everything I can access from here. The rest requires hardware I don’t have.”
“We can arrange that.”
“I figured.” She looks at me. Not a glance. A study. “You’ve been standing there all day.”
“I’m supervising.”
“You’re staring.”
Denial would be a lie.
“Why aren’t you afraid of me?”
The question comes out before I can swallow it. I’ve been turning it over since the moment I kicked in her door and she met my eyes instead of looking away.
She’s quiet. “I’ve met scarier men than you.”
A lie. She knows it. I know it. The Benedettis are savage, but they’re not me. No one looks at me and thinks they’re safe. No one looks at me and thinks I’m survivable. But she said it anyway. Met my gaze and lied to my face like she was daring me to call her on it.
“Get some rest.” My voice sounds wrong. Too rough. Too raw. “We’ll continue tomorrow.”
She stands. For a moment we’re facing each other across my office. The laptop closed between us. The coffee cup empty.
“Goodnight, Lorenzo.”
My name in her mouth. It settles somewhere it shouldn’t.
“Goodnight.”
She leaves. The door closes behind her.
I stand in the empty room. My desk still smells like her. The chair still holds the impression of her body. The cup sits beside the keyboard, lipstick I didn’t know she was wearing marking the rim.
When did she put on lipstick? Was it there all day? How did I catch her coffee order and miss that?
I leave my office. The hallway is dark now. I walk to the east garden instead.
Mama’s garden. Jasmine blooming in the humid air, heavy and sweet. I sit on the bench by the fountain and let the sound of water fill the silence in my head.
Hands on a keyboard. The way she takes her coffee. A woman who looked at me and lied to my face like she was giving me a gift I didn’t deserve.
Tomorrow we’ll work again. Tomorrow I’ll maintain distance. I’ll remember that she’s an asset and nothing more. Tomorrow I’ll stop noticing.
I sit in the dark among Mama’s flowers, and I don’t believe a goddamn word of it.