Chapter 29 Isabella #2
The blast of cool air hits my face, sharp and bracing. I wrap my arms around myself, shivering. People murmur, complain, speculate.
“Maybe someone burned their lunch.”
“I smelled nothing.”
“My oven isn’t even on.”
I scan the crowd automatically, looking for threats, for familiar faces. Nico isn’t here. Of course he isn’t. He’s at the office. But my idiot heart searches for him anyway.
Rossi stays close, a silent wall at my side, his gaze constantly sweeping the perimeter.
Ten minutes pass. Fifteen.
Firefighters go in and out, talking to building management. No smoke curls from anywhere. No dramatic flames. The alarm cuts off eventually, leaving a ringing silence.
“False alarm,” someone yells.
Relief ripples through the crowd.
False alarm, I echo in my head. Just a stupid, normal, mundane…
Rossi’s phone buzzes. He checks it, his expression tightening almost imperceptibly. “They’re clearing floors,” he says. “We’ll go up with them. Let the others go first.”
“Is it really nothing?” I ask.
His jaw works. “We’ll see.”
The ride back up in the service elevator is cramped, two firefighters, the building manager, Rossi, me. My fingers are cold around my phone. Nico has texted twice.
You outside?
Rossi with you?
I text back: Outside. With Rossi. They’re letting us back in. Will call when I’m upstairs.
His reply is instant: Call. Don’t text.
I huff a weak laugh at that. Control freak.
The penthouse level opens into a quiet hallway.
No alarm. No smoke.
The building manager goes first, using his keycard to unlock the door. My heart thumps hard like a nervous rabbit.
Rossi steps in ahead of me, hand lifted slightly in that gesture that means stay.
I hover in the doorway, pulse roaring in my ears, while the firefighters do a quick sweep of the main areas. Kitchen. Living room. Hallway.
“All clear,” one of them calls back. “No heat signatures out of normal range.”
“See?” the building manager says nervously. “Likely a sensor malfunction. We’ll have maintenance check the system. No need to worry.”
Rossi’s gaze flicks to me. It’s not the same as saying don’t worry. It’s more like we’ll decide what this was ourselves.
“You can go back downstairs,” he tells them. “I’ll stay with Miss Romano.”
They leave, relief in every step.
The moment the door closes behind them, the atmosphere shifts. Rossi’s posture changes subtly, from professional escort to something sharper.
“Stay there,” he says quietly.
My skin prickles. “Rossi—”
“Please.”
It’s the please that shuts me up.
He moves through the space with military precision, eyes cutting like blades. Living room. Kitchen. Guest room. The bedroom.
He disappears down the hall, and I wrestle with myself. I want to follow. I want to be brave, to be in control of my own life, to not be the girl who hides in doorways waiting for men to tell her if the world is safe.
But the truth is, I’m scared.
And I’ve learned something, whether I like it or not: sometimes letting people protect you is its own kind of strength.
Rossi reappears a minute later, face even more blank than usual. “Isabella,” he says. “You should see this.”
My stomach plunges.
I follow him into the living room.
The first thing I notice is that nothing looks disturbed. The tree is still glowing. The couch cushion Letty fell asleep on yesterday is still rumpled. The blanket Nico wrapped around me last night is draped over the arm of the sofa.
For a second, I think maybe he’s being overly cautious.
Then I see the coffee table.
And the blood.
It’s not a lot. Just enough to be stark.
Enough to make my breath catch.
In the center of the smooth glass is a rat. Or what’s left of one. Small, gray, limp. Its throat is a ripped, wet line, dark fur matted, paws curled inward. Thick, almost-black droplets have dried on the glass beneath it like a constellation.
There’s a scrap of paper pinned under one of its claws. A jagged, torn edge, like it was ripped from something else.
My vision tunnels.
My body goes cold-hot-cold.
“That wasn’t here before,” I whisper, because my brain is scrambling, because my last memory of this room is Nico’s hands on my hips, his mouth on mine, my laugh as I hung Letty’s lopsided paper star on the tree. No rats. No blood. Just us.
Rossi’s jaw ticks. “It was not,” he says.
“Someone… someone came in here.” My voice shakes. “While we were outside. While the alarms…”
“Yes,” he says simply. “They used the alarm.”
I double over suddenly, hands braced on my knees, nausea punching through me. Not because of the rat itself, that’s gross, sure, but I’ve seen worse, but because of what it means.
This place was supposed to be safe.
This was the bunker.
The fortress.
The nest where I was rebuilding.
Rossi’s hand lands on my back, a steady weight between my shoulder blades. “Breathe,” he says again. “Don’t look at it. Look at me.”
I force myself to straighten, to keep my eyes on his face and not the coffee table. “This is a message,” I say, because my brain, stupid traitor that it is, automatically starts cataloguing, analyzing, connecting. “Rat. Snitch. Someone is talking who shouldn’t. Or someone they think is. Me.”
His eyes are very, very dark. “You’re not wrong.”
“Is this about the article?” I ask.
“We’ll find out.” There’s a thread of steel in his voice now. “Right now, you’re going to the bedroom and you’re going to sit on the bed and you’re not going to move unless I’m with you. Understood?”
“I…”
“Isabella.” It’s not sharp. It’s not loud. It’s just absolute.
Fear kicks something stubborn in me, though.
The part of me that refuses to be the girl curled on a bed while men move the pieces of her life around.
“I’m not hiding,” I say, voice thin but firm.
“Not again. This is my life they keep stepping into. My home.” I swallow. “At least let me call Nico from here.”
Rossi studies me for a long moment. Then he nods once. “Okay,” he says. “Here. But you stand behind me.”
I can live with that.
My fingers tremble as I lift my phone. Nico answers on the first ring.
“Belle?” His voice is already wrong. Too tight. Too alert. “What happened?”
I glance at the coffee table, then away so fast my vision blurs. “There wasn’t a fire,” I say. “But someone pulled the alarm.”
“Okay,” he says, like he’s bracing. “And?”
“And… when we came back up…” I swallow hard. My throat feels raw. “There was a rat on the coffee table. Dead. Bleeding. It wasn’t here before, obviously, Nico. Someone was in here. While we were outside.”
Silence.
Not the empty kind. The lethal kind.
“Isabella,” he says finally, voice low in a way that makes my skin pebble. “Are you hurt?”
“No.”
“Did you see anyone? Hear anything?”
“No. Just the alarm. And then… this.”
“Rossi?” he calls, a little louder.
“Here,” Rossi says, leaning slightly toward the phone.
“I’m already on my way,” Nico says. “Do not touch anything. No one comes in or out. You stay with her. Understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
The line goes dead.
I lower the phone.
The tree lights blink gently in the corner, cheerful and warm, like this is just another afternoon. Like nothing happened. Like there isn’t a dead animal bleeding on the table where we ate dessert yesterday.
Tears sting my eyes suddenly, hot and unwanted. “I was starting to feel safe,” I whisper, voice cracking. “I let myself believe it.”
Rossi’s face doesn’t change much. It rarely does.
But his eyes soften, barely noticeable if you don’t know him.
“You’re safer,” he says. “You’re still standing.
He’ll be here soon. So will his brothers.
This isn’t the end of your story, Isabella.
It’s just a move on the board, and they fucked up when they messed with you here. ”
I laugh, wet and short. “You all talk like this is chess.”
“It is,” he says simply. “Except the pieces bleed.”
A shiver crawls down my spine. I wrap my arms around myself and look, just for a second, at the rat again. At the ugly, small, brutal thing someone left like a calling card in the middle of my borrowed life.
A flare of anger licks up through the fear. “Okay,” I murmur. “You want to play?” My fingers curl into fists. “Then let’s play.”
Because I’m tired of being the girl they come after in the dark.
Tired of being the warning.
The message.
Maybe it’s time I remembered I’m a damn reporter.
And monsters don’t like it when you drag them into the light.