Chapter 33 Isabella
The next morning, the building feels like it’s grown a spine made of men with guns.
There are more of them, that’s obvious even before coffee; different faces at the elevator, new shadows in the lobby, an extra pair of eyes just inside the penthouse door. They’re not overtly menacing, just quietly present, the way big cats in a zoo look like they’re politely tolerating the fence.
Nico walks me through it while I eat toast I don’t really taste.
“Two on the floor, two in the lobby, rotating pairs on the garage level,” he says, gesturing to camera feeds on his office screens. “We’ve added another vehicle to the pool, switched up the plates, and rerouted the path to the office and back. No patterns, no routine, no easy target.”
“With all due respect,” I say, “I am the easy target.”
He doesn’t argue, which is both validating and depressing.
“That’s why you don’t go anywhere without one of us,” he says, tone absolute. “Today it’s Rossi. I have to be in the office for a few hours, and I trust him to handle anything that comes close to you.”
Rossi stands just inside the doorway, as if he appeared when his name was said. Dark jacket, dark jeans, expression carved out of stone. If statues came with concealed weapons and a terrifying knowledge of kill shots, they’d look like him.
“I need to go out,” I remind Nico, stuffing down another bite of toast because if I stop, my stomach will realize it’s nauseous. “Pharmacy run, remember? My prescriptions.”
“You could stay in,” Nico says.
“I could.” I lift my chin. “Or we could agree that a ten-minute drive with your head of security and enough bulletproof plating to stop an apocalypse is a reasonable compromise between ‘reckless’ and ‘bubble wrap’.”
The muscle in his jaw jumps.
Rossi, mercifully, steps in. “We’ll take the SUV,” he says. “Direct to the pharmacy, direct back. No stops. No detours.”
“We’re not hitting a drive-thru?” I ask. “No contraband muffins?”
His mouth almost moves. “Sorry, ma’am.”
“It’s Isabella,” I say automatically.
He nods. “Isabella, then. Get your coat.”
I put my mug in the sink, pull on my coat and scarf, and let Nico fuss with the buttons like I’m five. He adjusts the collar, like the extra fraction will turn it into armor.
“This is a bad idea,” he mutters.
“You signing off on it anyway?” I ask.
He lets out a slow breath. “Yes. With conditions.”
“Of course.”
“You listen to Rossi,” he says. “You don’t argue with Rossi. If he tells you to get down, you get down. If he tells you to move, you move. You don’t stop to pick up your phone or your bag or your dignity, you just do it.”
“Copy that,” I say, trying to keep it light.
His hands frame my face, thumbs brushing my cheekbones. “Call me when you get there. Call me when you leave. Text me in between just to annoy me.”
“I can definitely do that.”
He kisses me—quick, fierce, like he’s trying to seal something in place—and then he steps back, letting Rossi move in.
“Let’s go,” Rossi says gently.
The elevator ride down is quiet. The two guards flanking us stand with their hands behind their backs, eyes straight ahead, the picture of discretion. My reflection on the elevator doors looks composed enough, though my fingers worry the strap of my bag.
When the doors open into the garage, the air is colder, smelling faintly of concrete dust and exhaust. The SUV waits near the ramp, big and black and smug about its safety ratings.
Rossi opens the back door for me. “Middle seat,” he says. “Buckle up.”
“Yes, Dad,” I mutter, climbing in.
He takes the front passenger seat—of course he does—and another man I don’t know well, Marco, slides into the driver’s side. The doors shut with the heavy, reassuring thump of reinforced metal.
“Three blocks,” I tell Marco. “There’s a little independent pharmacy on—”
“We’ve got the address,” Rossi says. “We mapped it last night. No need to worry.”
He says it like that’s going to stop me.
We pull out into daylight. It’s one of those thin autumn mornings where the sun looks like it’s doing its best but doesn’t really mean it, pale light glancing off glass and steel. Pedestrians hunch into their coats. Taxis jostle. Somewhere, a car horn is having an existential crisis.
I watch the city slide by, hands clasped in my lap, listening to the low murmur of Rossi’s instructions to Marco. They talk in shorthand, street names and turn counts, a language of habit and paranoia.
“You okay back there?” Rossi asks after a minute.
“Define okay?”
He gives me a brief look over his shoulder. “On a scale of one to ten, where one is ‘asleep on a beach’ and ten is ‘your building is on fire’, where are you?”
My throat tightens at the word fire. I swallow. “A strong seven,” I admit. “Possibly an eight.”
“We’ll bring it down,” he says.
He believes it. That helps.
We’re two blocks from the building when it happens.
I’m looking out the window at a woman wrestling a toddler into a stroller, thinking about how normal everyone else’s day seems, when something slams into the side of the SUV with a sound like a sledgehammer hitting a dumpster.
The whole vehicle shudders.
A split second later comes the crack I should have recognized from movies, from documentaries, from every terrible clip I’ve ever watched as research and told myself was distant enough not to touch me.
Gunshot.
My brain stutters, trying to categorize everything at once: the spray of tiny glass flecks from the bottom edge of the window where it meets the door, the way the SUV jerks as Marco swears under his breath and corrects, the sudden heavy weight of Rossi’s arm as it comes across the back of his seat and shoves me down.
“Down!” he barks. “Isabella, get down, now—”
I’m already folding in on myself, curling forward as another sharp crack explodes against the metal. The sound is both distant and earsplitting, like the world has become a tunnel full of thunder.
The SUV’s armor holds; the glass above me spiders but doesn’t shatter fully. I can see, through the fractured mosaic, a sliver of the street, a shape on the corner, someone in a dark hoodie turning away.
More noise—horns, shouting, a chorus of surprise from people who have no idea how quickly a Saturday can tilt.
“Go, go, go,” Rossi snaps. “Drive through, don’t stop.”
Marco hits the gas. The engine roars. My shoulder slams into the back of his seat and for a stupid second, I worry about leaving a crease, like that matters at all.
There’s a third impact, lower, a brutal punch against the door, and this one feels different, has a wrongness to it I don’t have words for until Rossi makes a sound I’ve never heard from him before, a short, sharp grunt that’s half-curse, half-something else.
I twist, still half-curled, trying to see. “Rossi?”
He grits his teeth. “Stay down.”
His right hand is braced against the dash. His hand is pressed against his side, just under his ribs. When he pulls it away for half a second to adjust his seat belt, there’s blood on his fingers.
For a moment, I don’t process it. The world has narrowed to the sway of the car, the distant wail of sirens, the haze of adrenaline making my vision too sharp at the edges and blurry in the middle.
Then it clicks.
The third hit wasn’t the door.
It was him.
Panic spikes, hot and bright. “You’re hit.”
“I noticed,” he mutters, breath coming shorter now. “Bullet came low, through the seal on the window. Ricochet, maybe. We’re lucky.”
“Lucky?” My voice is climbing. “You’re bleeding, Rossi.”
“We’re moving,” he says. “That’s all that matters right now. Marco, two more blocks, then left into the underground. We don’t lead them home.”
Blood is seeping between his fingers now, dark and too fast, staining the hem of his shirt. It’s soaking into the seat, creeping across the fabric in a spreading bloom that makes my stomach roll.
The part of my brain that took a basic first aid course in college kicks in, fighting through the fear. “Pull over,” I say.
“We’re not stopping until—”
“Pull over,” I say again, louder this time, throat raw. “He’s bleeding out, Marco. We need to stop the bleeding, now. We’re not doing a tour of Manhattan while he leaks all over your upholstery.”
There’s a heartbeat of hesitation.
Then Marco curses and yanks the wheel hard, swerving us into a narrow side street lined with loading docks. The car rocks to a halt beside a stack of recycling bins. “Stay low,” he orders, already reaching for the radio clipped to his jacket. “Calling it in.”
Rossi exhales through his nose, like this is mildly inconvenient, and then the tension bleeds out of his shoulders in a way that makes my skin crawl.
“Isabella,” he says. “Climb through the middle. Put pressure. High and hard.”
I scramble, adrenaline making my limbs clumsy. The seat belt fights me; I nearly trip on the floor mat; everything feels too slow, like my hands are moving through glue while my heart sprints.
I manage to slide through the middle, kneeling on the seat beside him. Up close, the damage looks worse. His shirt is soaked, the dark patch spreading sideways, down, already past his waistband. The smell hits me, metallic and thick.
“Shit,” I whisper.
“Language,” he says faintly, which is so like him it almost breaks me.
He leans the seat back a little with his free hand, giving me better access. “Heel of your hand,” he directs. “Right there. Press in, then up.”
“Up?” My voice cracks. “What if I make it worse?”
He turns his head just enough that our eyes meet. His eyes are dark, still clear, but I can see the pain running under the surface like a current.
“You’ll keep me alive,” he says. “I trust you. Now do it.”
My hands are shaking, but I do as he says, plucking his bloody fingers away and replacing them with my own.
The heat of the wound is shocking. The fabric is slick, and when I dig in, I feel the give of muscle, the hard ridge of bone, and something softer beneath that makes my vision blur for a second.
He grunts, breath hissing out between his teeth.
“Sorry,” I choke.