Chapter 10
LORENZO
The warehouse smells like rust and old blood. Not mine. Not yet.
Three men ambushed us at the south entrance. They’re down. I’m still standing.
Nico presses his hand to a gash on his shoulder, cursing under his breath. Marco checks the bodies, making sure they stay down.
The intel was wrong. The Benedettis knew we were coming. Someone talked.
The mission debrief can wait.
I move through the building on autopilot, gun raised, checking corners I already know are safe. The Benedettis left in a hurry. Coffee cups on a desk. Monitors still running, showing empty feeds. They knew. They ran.
But maybe they didn’t have time to move everyone. Maybe she’s still here.
The holding area is in the back. Heavy doors. Electronic locks that Marco’s bypassing, fingers flying over a tablet connected to the security system.
“Got it.” The lock clicks.
I push through the door.
The room is bare. Cots stripped. No clothes, no personal items. Just the faint smell of cheap soap and sweat soaked into the concrete.
Next room. The same. The next. The next. Bare mattresses and silence, one after another, until I stop counting.
“Renzo.” Nico, quiet now. “They’re gone.”
I stand in the last room. Stare at the cot where someone slept. Where maybe Sofia slept. Where she might have been lying hours ago, waiting for a rescue that came too late.
The Benedettis moved them. Got word and loaded the girls into trucks and drove them somewhere we can’t reach. The window closed. The transport schedule resets. Another ten days, minimum, before we have another chance. If we get another chance.
We were too late. I was too late.
Bring her back. Bring yourself back.
I promised. And I’m about to walk through that door with nothing but blood on my knuckles and the wrong answer on my tongue.
The drive back takes forty minutes. Silence. Nothing in my head worth saying. The city slides past the window and I try to figure out how to tell her.
Since Sofia vanished, she’s been starving herself on a diet of guilt and code and cold coffee. She found Sofia. Gave us the location. Trusted us. And I couldn’t deliver.
The gates open. The car pulls up the drive.
And I see her.
She’s at the window. Second floor. The study. Tracking the car’s approach. Even from here, her shoulders drop when she spots me in the back seat. Her hand presses flat against the glass for a moment before she steps back.
By the time I get inside, she’s standing in the middle of the study. Fixed on the doorway. Waiting. Her expression is open. Arms loose. Leaning forward. Already building for the moment when I tell her Sofia is safe.
I stop in the doorway.
A shower first would have been smarter. Washed the blood off, changed my clothes, turned myself into a man who doesn’t reek of violence and failure. But she deserves to know now.
“Lorenzo.” Her voice catches on my name. “Did you. Is she—”
The words won’t form. My silence is answer enough.
The hope leaves her in stages. First the gaze, going flat. Then the mouth, pressing shut. Then the shoulders, curling inward like she’s trying to hold her ribs together.
“No.” The word comes out small. Cracked. “No, she was supposed to be there. The intel was solid. I checked it a hundred times. She was supposed to be there.”
“They moved them.” My voice sounds wrong. Distant. “Hours before we arrived. They knew we were coming.”
“Someone told them.”
“Yes.”
She’s shaking. Fine tremors running through her whole body, fists forming and releasing at her sides.
“How close?” She looks at me, her eyes wet. “How close were we?”
The truth will gut her. But she’s asking.
“The coffee was still warm.”
A sound escapes her. Small and wounded. She presses her hand to her mouth, trying to hold it in.
Sofia was right there. Hours ago. Gone again. Swallowed back into the network that’s been chewing girls up for years.
The doorway is where I belong. Give her space to grieve. To hate me.
I’m crossing the room before I decide to. She doesn’t back away when I reach her. Doesn’t pull back when I grip her arms. Just looks up at me with wet lashes. Searching. Waiting.
“I’m sorry.” The words scrape out rough and inadequate. “Isabella, I’m sorry. I promised you I’d find her and I didn’t.”
“Don’t.” Her hand comes up. Covers my mouth. Stops the words. “Don’t apologize. Don’t tell me it’s not my fault. Don’t say any of the stereotypical things people say when they can’t fix what’s broken.” Her voice shakes. “Just. Don’t.”
I nod. She lets go.
We stand there. Within reach. The tears she’s fighting visible in her lashes, her jaw trembling with the effort of holding herself together.
“I should have been there.” Her voice cracks. “If I’d been in the van, on comms, maybe I would have seen something. Maybe I could have caught it in time.”
“No.” I cup her face. Force her to look at me. “This isn’t on you. The leak came from somewhere else. You did everything right.”
“Then why does it feel like I failed her again?”
“I need—” She stops. Tries again. “I need to not be in my head right now.”
“Tell me to stop.” Same words. Same offer.
“No.” Same answer. Fierce. Wet-eyed and certain.
I go to her waist. Start to turn her. Automatic. Instinct. One grip at her nape, the other angling her hip.
“No.” She resists. Braces against the turn. Plants her feet.
I freeze.
She turns around. Faces me.
I stop breathing.
Right there. Tear-tracked and fierce. Lashes clumped together from crying.
“I’m not doing this with the back of your head again, Lorenzo.”
My name. In her mouth. While she’s looking at me.
Cazzo.
“Isabella.” It comes out rough. Wrong. Like the word has too many syllables and all of them hurt to say.
“I’m right here.” She cups my cheeks. Bitten nails. Calluses from keyboards. “Look at me.”
I look.
She works my shirt buttons. Methodical. The same focus she brings to everything that matters to her. Gets the shirt open and doesn’t recoil at the blood, the cut on my arm, the bruise forming on my ribs.
“You should have that looked at.”
“Later.”
“Gia’s going to kill you.”
“Later.”
Warm against my chest. Mapped against the ink and the scars. She traces a line down my sternum with one finger and I can’t look away.
I freeze. Default to her hips. Familiar. Safe. Slide to the hem of her shirt and pull it over her head. Cotton bra. White. Nothing fancy. More devastating than the midnight silk because this is simply and fully her.
I reach for her waist. She catches my wrists.
“You’re not turning me around.”
“I’m not.”
She unclips her own bra. Lets it fall. And she’s looking at me while she does it, watching my reaction, daring me to look away.
I look. At her. At everything. Every muscle in my body locks. The pressure shoots up my skull.
“You going to say something, or just stand there turning purple?”
The laugh surprises us both. Mine. Short, rough, no notes of humor. More like a sound that escapes when nothing else will.
“I don’t—” The words stall. She’s standing in front of me and I have blood under my nails and I don’t have the language for any of this.
“You don’t what?”
“Know how to do this part.”
She stares. “This part?”
“The facing-you part.”
The sarcasm drops for a second. She’s seeing me. All of me.
“I should warn you,” she says, “my face is a whole situation right now. Very attractive post-crying look. Mascara everywhere. Really top-shelf ambiance.”
Not funny. Something in me loosens anyway.
She pushes her leggings down, her underwear with them, steps out of both. Standing in nothing. And I’m standing here in an open shirt and blood-stained pants, and there’s nothing pretty about this. Violence and grief. Nothing else left.
“Your turn.” She tugs at my belt. I let her. Her fingers work the buckle, the zipper. Practical. Focused. Brow furrowed like the buckle owes her something.
“You’re analyzing my belt buckle.”
“Force of habit. It’s a very interesting mechanism.”
“It’s a belt.”
“A structurally sound one. Good engineering.”
Her voice is getting faster. Nervous.
I catch her wrist. Hold it still against my stomach.
“Breathe.”
One long exhale that shudders on the way out.
“I am breathing. I’m an excellent breather. Top tier lung capacity from all the—”
“Isabella.”
She stops talking.
I guide her backward to the desk. She sits on the edge. I step between her legs. Face to face. No hiding.
Condom from my wallet. She holds steady while I open it. Neither of us speaks. The wrapper sounds too loud.
Her legs wrap around me, pulling me closer. Wet heat against my cock. My teeth grind together.
“Fuck.“ Wrenched out. She’s slick and hot against me and I haven’t even pushed inside yet.
I brace on either side of her hips because if I touch her I don’t trust my hands.
“You can touch me.” Her voice drops. “I didn’t break last time. I won’t break now.”
I trace up her thigh. Slow. Watching her face change with every inch. The catch in her breath. The way her lips part. I have no training for this.
I push into her. Inch by inch. Her head tips back. I catch it. My palm behind her skull, cradling. The same reflex I use when pinning someone against a surface. Except careful now. Protective.
“Fuck.” She gasps. “You. That.”
She can’t finish.
“Tell me.”
“Different. From this angle. Different.”
I move. She moves with me. Her eyes on mine. Her legs around me.
A groan tears out of me. Low. Involuntary. She’s tight. So fucking tight.
“You feel—” I can’t finish either. She’s ruined the sentence along with everything else.
Her fingers claw down my back. Her pussy grips me with every thrust and the desk creaks beneath us. One arm cradling her skull. The other braced against the wood, white-knuckled.
“Stay with me.” Her grip on my jaw. “Don’t disappear.”
How does she know?
I press my forehead to hers. Hold it there.
The raid drops away. The blood. The failure. The empty rooms. Just her. The taste of salt on her throat where the tears dried. The sounds she makes. The way she’s tightening around me, her rhythm getting ragged.
“You’re shaking,” she says.
I am. My knuckles on the wood. Trembling. Same tremor from days ago. Same reason.
“So are you.”
She bites her lip. “Shut up.”
“Don’t stop.” She says it against my mouth. Almost a kiss. Not one.
I don’t stop. My rhythm goes rough. Desperate. Hers matches it, her heels digging into my lower back, pulling me deeper.
“Don’t move.” Rough. Against her mouth. “Stay with me.”
“Lorenzo.” Quiet. Broken. My name sounding like the only word she can remember.
Her body locks around me. Head thrown back against my palm, spine arching off the desk, mouth open on a sound that moves through me like a blade.
She comes and I watch it happen. Her face.
Her neck. The pulse beating wild in her throat.
The way her thighs squeeze and her nails score my shoulders and she stops breathing for three seconds, four, five.
The realest thing I’ve ever seen.
She pulses around me. Her eyes find mine, glazed, undone.
She sees me. While she’s falling apart. She’s looking right at me.
The pressure shatters.
I come harder than I have in my life. Every muscle seizing. The world goes black at the edges and my hips stutter, drive deep, and the groan that rips out of me is low and broken and dragged from somewhere that should have been long dead.
“Isabella.”
Her name tears out of me. Then again.
“Isabella.”
Then Italian. Flooding. Not a decision. The language underneath, the one I buried with my mother, spilling out in fragments.
“Dio.“ Against her throat. ”Cazzo, Isabella.“
Words I didn’t choose. My mother’s language pouring out while I’m buried inside this woman and I can’t stop it. Can’t stop any of it.
My forehead drops to her shoulder. I’m still moving. Small rolls of my hips. Still inside her. Not ready to leave.
“Volerti è la cosa più pericolosa che abbia mai fatto.“
The words come out against her skin. Ragged. I don’t translate them. She doesn’t ask.
Wanting you is the most dangerous thing I’ve ever done.
I stay pressed against her. Still standing. My legs aren’t.
She runs her fingers through my hair. Once. Lightly. I jerk. Involuntary. She doesn’t pull back. Does it again.
I let her.
Then the shift. I catch it before I see it. Her body going stiff beneath me. Her rhythm changing from the open, shattered aftermath into steel. Closed. She’s pulling away without moving.
“The data.” Flat. “I need to look at the data again. There might be something I missed.”
Her eyes are wet. Not from the sex. From the guilt crashing back in. Sofia’s name written in the set of her jaw.
“Stay here.”
“I can’t.” She untangles herself. “She’s out there, Lorenzo. While I was—” She can’t finish. Her chin lifts. Her shoulders square.
I let her go.
She pulls on her shirt. Sits at the laptop. Starts typing. The clicking fills the silence.
“Isabella.”
She doesn’t look up. Hair falling to hide whatever’s happening underneath.
“I’ll find her. The next window. I’ll find her.”
Her fingers pause on the keys. One second. Two.
“I know.”
She starts typing again.
I pick up my shirt. Walk out.
The shower runs cold. The blood swirls down the drain.
Her face when she came. Looking at me. Seeing me.
I don’t know how to close it again. I don’t know if I want to.