Chapter 22
LORENZO
I made the right call.
The SUV cuts through New Orleans darkness, headlights carving pale tunnels through the humid night.
Dante drives. Nico rides shotgun. I’m in the back, running through the tactical layout Marco fed us an hour ago.
Entry points. Guard rotations. The holding area where they keep the girls before transport. Where they’re keeping Sofia.
Isabella is safe. Locked in three inches of reinforced steel with enough supplies to last a week. She’ll hate me for it. That’s fine. I can survive hate.
“She’s going to be furious.” Dante’s eyes find mine in the rearview mirror.
“She’ll be alive to be furious.”
Silence. Nico shifts in his seat, exchanging a look with Dante. They’re thinking what they won’t say out loud.
“What.”
Nico turns, arm draped over the headrest. His expression is easy, but his eyes are sharper than he lets most people see. “You know she’s not going to stay in that room.”
“The lock is biometric. Keyed to me.”
Nico’s mouth curves. “You sure about that?”
“Five minutes out.” Dante’s voice pulls me back. “Marco, you reading us?”
The comms crackle. “Loud and clear. I’ve got eyes on the compound. Thermal shows maybe a dozen heat signatures. Less than we expected.”
Less than we expected. Cold prickles at the base of my spine.
“How many were we expecting?” Nico asks.
“Intel said twenty to thirty. Armed. Professional.”
“And we’re seeing twelve?”
“Eleven now. One just went off the grid. Could be a bathroom break. Could be nothing.”
“Proceed as planned,” Dante says. “Stay sharp.”
The compound materializes out of the darkness. High walls. Razor wire. Built to keep people in as much as out. We park a quarter mile back and go on foot, moving through the underbrush like shadows. I take point. Gun drawn. Every sense tuned to the environment.
The night is too quiet. I’ve done enough of these to read the rhythm of a guarded site. The shuffle of boots. The soft murmur of bored men passing time. The click of lighters, the glow of cigarettes in dark corners.
None of that here.
We reach the perimeter. Two guards at the east gate, where there should be four. They’re not patrolling. Just standing. Like they’re waiting.
“This feels wrong.” Nico’s voice is barely a breath beside me.
I nod once. But we’re already here. Sofia might be inside. Isabella gave up everything to reach her sister, and I put her in a box so I could be the one to bring Sofia home. I can’t turn back now.
Hand signals. Dante left flank. Nico right. I go through the middle.
The first guard doesn’t see me coming. I’m behind him before his partner can react, knife across his throat, lowering the body to the ground. The second guard reaches for his radio. My bullet hits him between the eyes. Two down. Too easy.
We move through the facility like a blade through water. The layout matches Marco’s intel. Main building ahead. Holding area in the basement. Administrative offices on the second floor. But where the hell are the guards?
I clear rooms. Storage. Empty. Kitchen. Coffee on the counter, still warm. An office with papers scattered across a desk, a printer still humming. They knew we were coming. They left in a hurry.
Why leave in a hurry if they set this up?
“Renzo.” Dante, in my ear. “Second floor is clear. No resistance.”
“First floor clear,” Nico adds. “Something’s wrong.”
Since we pulled up and the night was too still.
The basement stairs yawn ahead of me. Dark. Silent. I descend.
The holding area is where Marco said it would be. Reinforced door. Electronic lock. I bypass it in seconds, a skill I learned long before Isabella made hacking look like poetry.
The door swings open.
Empty.
The smell hits first. Urine and body odor and something sweeter underneath, sickly and organic. A smell that had soaked into the concrete. It would never leave.
Stained mattresses on the floor, four of them, no sheets.
A bucket in the corner that hasn’t been emptied.
Metal rings bolted into the walls at wrist height with frayed rope still attached.
Scratches gouged into the concrete near one of the rings.
Fingernail marks. Someone clawed at the stone until their fingers bled.
Water stains on the mattresses. Dark spots that aren’t water. A child’s hair tie on the floor, pink, crusted with dirt.
No girls now. No Sofia. But they were here. The evidence of it coats my lungs with every breath.
A table sits in the center of the room with a laptop sitting open.
The screen glows in the darkness, and as I approach, I see what’s displayed.
A photograph. Isabella, taken through a long lens.
She’s walking through the French Quarter, coffee in hand, looking at something off-camera. Weeks ago, before I brought her to us.
Below the photograph, a single line of text: Did you really think we didn’t know?
My blood turns to ice.
They evacuated. They left guards to make it look real, but not enough to stop us. They left evidence. A laptop. A message. Why? The Benedettis don’t leave evidence. They don’t leave traces. They destroy everything.
Unless they want you to find it. Unless they want you standing exactly where I’m standing right now.
My eyes sweep the room again. Fresh patches on the walls I missed. Wires running along the ceiling, disappearing into conduit. The faint smell I’d dismissed when I entered, too focused on clearing the space. Chemical. Sharp underneath the must and damp.
Accelerant.
I’m already moving. “Out.“ Running, taking the stairs three at a time. ”Everyone out. Now.“
“Renzo, what—”
“The building is rigged. Move.“
I hear them running. Boots pounding above me, beside me. Dante and Nico don’t question it. They’ve run with me long enough. When I say move, you move.
The front entrance is too far. Side door. Kitchen. I change direction, shoulder through a doorway, past the cold coffee and the abandoned cups. The smell is stronger here. They wanted us in the basement. Wanted us deep in the building before it blew.
“Go go go—“
We burst through the kitchen door into the night air. I’m counting steps, counting seconds, running the math on blast radius and accelerant spread. Twenty feet. Thirty. Not enough.
“Down—“
The world turns white. The shockwave lifts me off my feet and throws me forward into the dirt. I roll, cover my head, debris raining down as heat sears across my back. Then the sound catches up. A roar so deep it shakes my teeth. Ringing silence. Ash falling like snow. The taste of dirt and blood.
I force my eyes open. The building is gone. In its place, a pillar of fire clawing at the night sky. Secondary explosions ripple through what’s left of the structure, sending fresh waves of heat rolling over us.
“Dante.” My voice sounds wrong. Muffled. Distant. “Dante.“
“Here.” Movement to my left. He’s pulling himself up, face streaked with ash and blood from a cut on his forehead. “I’m here.”
“Nico.”
“Still breathing.” Nico staggers to his feet, brushing embers from his jacket. “Jesus Christ, Renzo. How did you—”
“The smell.” I push myself upright. My ears are ringing. Glass shards bite into my palms. We made it out with five seconds to spare. “Accelerant. They wanted us in that basement when it blew.”
We stand there, the three of us, watching it burn. The heat is intense even from this distance. If we’d been thirty seconds slower. If I hadn’t caught the smell. We’d be ash.
“They tried to kill us.” Nico’s voice is flat. Processing. “This wasn’t just a trap. They wanted us dead.”
“They wanted us out of the way.”
Out of the way. The Santoro compound. Isabella. Locked in a panic room.
She’s a hacker, Renzo.
“Marco.” I grab for my comms, but they’re dead. Fried. I pull out my phone. Cracked screen, but it powers on. “Marco, come in. Status report.”
Static.
“Marco.“
He breaks through, strained. “Renzo. Thank God. We saw the explosion on satellite, we thought—”
“Status on the compound. Status on Isabella.”
“Hold on, let me pull up the panic room feed.” A pause. Keyboard clicking. Then silence. Too much silence. “That’s not right.”
My lungs stop. “What.”
“The door’s open. The panic room door is open.
” More clicking, frantic now. “I’m checking the timestamp.
She overrode the lock over an hour ago. She looped the perimeter cameras from the panic room terminal before she walked out.
Our guys at the gate never saw her leave.
” His voice cracks. “Renzo, the compound security feed was on a loop too. Someone else looped it. Not her. A separate breach. I’ve been watching a recording this whole time and I didn’t know. ”
Over an hour. She was out before we even reached the site.
“Where.” I’m moving now, toward the SUV, brothers falling into step behind me. “Track her phone. Track everything.”
“Already pulling it up. She headed toward the Benedetti location. Toward you.” Marco’s voice drops. “But her signal cut out. About twenty minutes ago. GPS just stopped. Right at the edge of their surveillance perimeter.”
Twenty minutes ago, I was walking through those rooms. Clearing them. Finding the laptop.
Twenty minutes ago, she drove straight into whatever net they had waiting. Because I locked her up. Because I took away her choice.
“Her last known location. Send it now.”
“Already sent. But Renzo.” Marco hesitates. “If they have her—”
“She could have ditched the phone. Gone dark on purpose. She’s survived on her own longer than most people last in our life. She can disappear.”
But even as I say it, I don’t believe it. Isabella wouldn’t go dark. Not when she was this close to finding Sofia. Not unless she couldn’t.
Did you really think we didn’t know?
Goddamn it. They had her photos. Surveillance from weeks ago. They tracked who she was and what she meant to me. This whole thing was never about killing us. It was about drawing her out. The Benedettis didn’t loop our feeds to watch us. They looped them so she could leave.
“Get in.” I yank open the SUV door. “We go to her last known location. We find her trail. We find her.“
Dante and Nico pile in without argument. Dante takes the wheel. The engine roars to life. I pull up the coordinates Marco sent, my hands locked on the screen even though everything behind my ribs is tearing loose.
“Marco. Every camera in a five-mile radius of that location. Every traffic light, every security feed, every doorbell camera you can access. I want to know every vehicle that passed through, every person on foot.”
“On it.”
“And trace how they looped the feed. Not Isabella’s spoof on the perimeter cameras. The other breach. Someone else got into our system. I want to know who and how.”
Marco built our system. Isabella reinforced it. To breach both without triggering an alert would take a team. Resources we couldn’t have expected.
“Renzo, I—” Marco’s words are thick. “I should have been watching closer. I should have—”
“Later.” I can’t comfort him right now. Can’t afford anything except the cold focus that’s kept me alive this long. “Just find her.”
The line goes quiet. Dante drives. Fast. The fire shrinks in the rearview mirror, replaced by dark highway and darker thoughts.
I did this. She went after Sofia alone. The same choice she’s been making since she was nineteen years old. And now she’s out there in the dark, and I don’t know if she’s hiding or running or captured or worse.
She’s smart. She’s survived this long. She can handle herself.
But she walked into the surveillance perimeter of a family that just tried to blow me up. A family that’s been hunting her as long as she’s been hunting them. A family that looped our security feeds without Marco noticing. They planned for everything. Including her.
I need you to trust me.
I do.
She trusted me. And I put her in a cage, and she flew straight into the fire.
“We’ll find her.” Dante cuts through the spiral. “Whatever it takes.”
I don’t answer. Can’t. My throat locks. My chest won’t open. Every mile a thousand.
Please. The word rises unbidden. Not quite a prayer. More desperate than that.
Please let me find her in time. Please don’t let me lose her the way I lost Mama.
Please.