Chapter 28
LORENZO
The first guard dies before he can raise his weapon. Two shots center mass. He drops and I’m already moving, not looking down, because there’s nothing behind me worth looking at.
The second guard gets his hand on his holster before Dante puts him down.
We move. Four brothers. Twenty-two men at our backs.
The Benedetti estate sprawls around us — marble floors, expensive art, wealth built on women transported in shipping containers.
The money is everywhere. In the crown molding.
In the crystal chandeliers. In the original paintings on the walls of a man who sells human beings and uses the proceeds to buy beautiful things.
Every room I clear is one room closer to her.
I’m coming.
“Main corridor splits ahead.” Marco in my ear, low and focused.
He’s got the building schematics on a tablet strapped to his forearm, calling positions as we advance.
Black ink marks his knuckles. Routes, fallback positions, extraction points in shorthand only he can read.
He moves differently from the rest of us.
Not a fighter. An architect of the assault, reading the building the way Isabella reads code.
“Left goes to the residential wing. Right takes us toward operations. She’s in the basement level, east side. ”
“We clear as we go,” Dante orders. “No one at our backs.”
We split. Nico and half the men take the residential wing. Dante, Marco, and I push toward operations.
A door opens on our right. Two guards, weapons coming up. I drop into a crouch, fire twice, roll left as return fire chips the wall where my head was. Dante flanks, takes the second. They fall.
My pulse is flat. My hands don’t shake.
Every other job, I’ve been empty. The violence mechanical. The kills logged like entries in a ledger. Debts paid, problems solved, nothing that stays with me past the debrief. I’ve walked out of rooms like this a hundred times and felt nothing.
Tonight is different.
She’s in this building. Every round I fire means one less body between us. Every door I clear brings the distance down. I’m not fighting like a weapon tonight.
I’m fighting like a man who has something to lose.
We hit a junction. Marco signals left. Three hostiles ahead.
I take point, Dante on my six. The first hostile sees us too late.
The fraction of a second where his brain catches up to what his eyes are telling him, and in that fraction I’m already pulling the trigger.
The second gets a shot off that goes wide.
I feel the air move past my ear, close enough that a different angle kills me, and I don’t hesitate, don’t flinch, because hesitation is for men who aren’t certain where they’re going. The third tries to run.
None of them make it.
The taste of gunpowder coats my tongue. Copper underneath it. My ears are ringing.
Keep moving.
“Operations center ahead,” Marco says. “Heavy presence. At least eight, maybe more.”
Eight. Good.
We stack on the door. Dante meets my eyes. Nods.
I kick it in.
The room erupts. Muzzle flash and shouting and the deafening crack of gunfire in an enclosed space. I’m already moving before the door finishes swinging, into the chaos instead of away from it, because the men who freeze are the men who die and I am not dying tonight.
Two down. Pivot. Third coming up on my left. Dante takes him before I have to, which is the only thing I’m grateful for tonight because I don’t have the patience for anything that slows me down.
Fourth and fifth behind overturned furniture, laying down suppressive fire. I advance anyway. Take a round to the vest that knocks the breath clean out of me, ribs screaming, the impact like a fist swung by something with no intention of stopping.
Cazzo.
I don’t stop.
Return fire, controlled pairs, fourth goes down.
Marco flanks the fifth, puts two in his back.
Three more in the far corner. One of them has a radio, screaming for backup.
I cross the distance in three strides. Not running, not rushing, just closing space the way water fills a hole.
Inevitable. I silence him with a knife. Cleaner.
The blade slides between his ribs. He folds.
The other two put their weapons down.
Too slow.
When the room goes quiet, I’m breathing hard. The vest took the impact but my ribs are a wall of heat. I’ll feel that for a week. I’ll feel it every time I breathe and I don’t care. I’ll feel it while she’s in front of me. I’ll feel it when she’s safe.
I’ll feel it when I can finally stop moving.
“Clear,” Dante calls.
“East corridor.” Marco, already moving. “Basement access is through the next section.”
We push forward. Marco keeps us oriented. Turn here. Stairs there. Two more hostiles in a side corridor, handled quickly. No ceremony, no hesitation, just the work. Each floor down brings me closer.
We hit the stairwell to the basement level when Nico cuts through the comms.
“We’ve got another one.”
“Another what?” Dante responds.
“Girl. In the residential wing. Not one of ours.” A beat. Nico’s voice is wrong. Flattened in a way I’ve never heard from him. “She’s different. Not cooperating.”
“Handle it and catch up.”
Static. Then sounds of a scuffle. A woman’s voice, harsh and guttural, words I don’t understand. Then Nico, speaking the same language back.
Russian. Fluent Russian I didn’t know he had.
She goes quiet. Silence on the line.
“Nico?” Dante, sharp.
“I’m fine. She’s fine.” A loaded pause. “I’ll find you after.”
Dante and I exchange a look. Later. That’s a problem for later.
We descend.
The basement level is a different world.
Emergency lighting only, red-tinted, casting everything in the color of something wrong.
The air drops ten degrees and picks up something underneath the cold.
Disinfectant, or worse. Something organic and terrible.
My skin crawls. I’ve been in places like this before.
Warehouses. Shipping containers. Rooms with locks on the outside and rings bolted to the walls.
This is where they keep them.
The women. The product. This is where Sofia Vitale spent three years. This is where Isabella is right now, in the dark, waiting for me.
The thought is a blade between my ribs. Cleaner than the bullet. Harder to ignore. Damn her for making me feel this.
I’m so close. Hold on.
“Main room ahead,” Marco says. “That’s where Flavio’s been running operations from. If he’s anywhere, he’s there.”
Flavio. The man whose phone call I answered three hours ago. Who told me she was with him. Safe, for now. Enjoying their conversation. The voice that orders expensive wine and death warrants with the same inflection.
We stack on the entry. This time I don’t wait for Dante’s signal.
I kick it open and move.
The room is larger than expected. A command center. Screens on one wall, maps on another, the infrastructure of a trafficking empire spread out like a war room. And in the center, surrounded by his last remaining guards, stands Flavio Benedetti.
He looks smaller than I expected. Older.
A man of money and strategy and distance, not blood and proximity.
The guards around him number six, weapons raised, but the math isn’t in their favor and they know it.
The calculation is visible in the way they’re holding themselves.
Still fighting but already anticipating the end.
“Santoro.” Flavio’s voice is steady. I’ll give him that. “You came.”
“Where is she.”
He tilts his head. Studies me the way he probably studies everything.
With the mild curiosity of a man who’s already figured out the angle.
“She refused me, you know.” Every muscle in my body goes rigid.
“I offered her everything. Her sister. Her freedom.” He spreads his hands.
“All she had to do was give me what she had on your family. Security codes. Financial records. Vulnerabilities.” He pauses. Lets it sit. “She said no.”
The words land somewhere below the ribs.
She refused. Even in the dark, even after I locked her up and took her choice away, even with her sister’s life on the table. She refused to betray me.
“She said you’d come.” Flavio shakes his head, something like genuine wonder crossing his face. “I didn’t believe her. The Santoro enforcer, tearing through a fortified compound for a hacker he’s known a few months.” A short laugh. “She was certain. I was not.”
She was alone in the dark. With every reason in the world to hate me. And she bet her life on me showing up.
“But here you are,” Flavio says. “Tearing my compound apart like the devil himself. All for her.”
My grip on the gun is white-knuckled. The polymer creaks.
“Where.” My voice comes out barely human. “Is. She.”
Flavio’s eyes flicker. Still working an angle, even now. Even here, surrounded, outnumbered, with blood on the floor and nowhere left to go. “Basement. Third door on the left.” He gestures vaguely. “She’s been remarkably stubborn.”
Remarkable. The word lands wrong. Like she’s a novelty. A puzzle he enjoyed before she became inconvenient. Like she wasn’t alone in the dark in this building, cold and afraid and holding herself together with nothing but her own spine.
I should kill him now. End it here. Dante’s been waiting years for this. For the man who poisoned our father slowly and methodically, who sent someone to finish what the poison started, who built his empire on women who never got to go home.
But Isabella is thirty feet away.
The flashbang comes from nowhere. Light and sound and the world turning white, my ears screaming, instincts firing before thought catches up.
I hit the ground hard, roll, come up shooting at shadows that might be guards or might be walls.
Gunfire everywhere. Shouting. The guards using the chaos the way professionals use chaos.
Strategically. Quickly. Covering something.
When my vision clears, Flavio is gone.
A door built into the wall paneling, pre-positioned, frame still swinging. Not improvised. Prepared. He mapped his exit before we breached the first floor, built it into the architecture, anticipated exactly this moment. The flashbang wasn’t desperation.
It was the plan.
Blood on the floor. Trail leading out. He’s wounded. Not dead.
“He can’t have gotten far.” Dante is already tracking the blood, fury cracking through every seam of his control. “I’ll—”
“Later.”
Dante stops. Looks at me.
“Isabella first.” I hold his gaze. “Flavio bleeds out in a ditch or he doesn’t, and either way she’s thirty feet from here in the dark.”
For a moment I think he’ll argue. Flavio killed our father. Tried to kill him. Made our family pay for years what one man’s conscience cost. This is Dante’s right. His closure. His to take.
He nods. Once.
“Go.” Already moving toward the blood trail, Nico and Marco falling in behind him. “We’ll secure the building and find him. Go find her.”
The corridor is narrow. Emergency lights cutting red through the dark. Third door on the left.
I count as I run.
First door. Just a door, locked, nothing. Keep moving.
Second door. Sounds of the building clearing, gunfire fading to nothing. Keep moving.
Third.
It’s locked. Heavy reinforced steel, frame welded to concrete, a lock designed not to be kicked through. Designed to hold people in.
I kick it anyway. The frame shudders. Holds.
“Isabella!”
Silence.
My throat closes around her name. The silence is the worst thing in the building. Worse than the gunfire. Worse than the smell.
I kick again. Every muscle behind it. Every ounce of the fury and the fear and the three hours of not knowing driving itself into the door frame.
The lock gives.