Chapter 34 Isabella
We climb back into the SUV. The interior smells like blood and fear. The seat where Rossi sat is a patchwork of dark stains. My handprints are smeared across the leather, ghostly and sticky. My hands still covered in his blood.
I stare at them all the way back.
The drive to the penthouse takes ten years and four minutes.
By the time we reach the garage, my phone has buzzed six times with Nico’s name. I couldn’t answer in the chaos; my hands were busy, my brain was busy, and some part of me knew that if I heard his voice while I was elbow-deep in Rossi’s blood, I’d lose the fragile grip I had on myself.
We pull into the designated spot. The moment the engine cuts, the garage door on the private elevator slides open and Nico is there, flanked by two guards. His tie is gone, his shirt sleeves rolled, eyes black as a storm.
He’s at my door before Marco can even reach for the handle.
It yanks open and cold air rushes in. Nico’s hands are on me immediately, firm and careful at the same time, one at my elbow, one around my waist as if he expects my bones to give out.
“Are you hurt?” he demands, gaze sweeping from my face down to my chest, my hands, my legs, like he can will any injuries to reveal themselves.
“I’m fine,” I manage. “It’s not my blood.”
His jaw tightens. “Rossi?”
“They took him to St. Luke’s,” I say. Saying it out loud makes my throat ache. “Side hit. It looked bad. I tried to stop the bleeding. They said…” I have to swallow. “They said we got to him fast.”
His fingers flex on my arm, then loosen, as if he’s reining himself back from some edge.
“What happened?” he asks, voice low and controlled in a way that feels far more dangerous than shouting.
“We were two blocks out,” I say. The words come in careful pieces because if I try to rush them, I’ll fall apart. “Shots from the sidewalk. First hit the door, second the window, third came low through the panel and caught him. He shoved me down before I even realized what was happening.”
He absorbs it in silence, his eyes gone flat and cold.
Behind him, the door opens again and Adi steps inside, phone still in his hand, tie askew, expression shuttered but worried. “I’ve got her,” he says quietly, reading his brother’s face better than anyone.
Nico nods once, sharp. “Take her upstairs. Get her cleaned up. Then write everything down while it’s still fresh.”
“I can go to the hospital,” I say. “I should be there.”
“You should be alive,” Nico counters. “And you’ll be more useful to him and to me if you’re not sitting in a waiting room covered in his blood.”
He’s not wrong. I hate that he’s not wrong.
“Bathroom,” Nico says, turning to Adi. “Then water. Then notes. Don’t let her tell herself this is her fault.”
“Bossy,” I mutter.
“Accurate,” he shoots back, then leans in, fingers brushing my jaw, his thumb smearing a line of rust-colored red across my skin. “I’m going to the hospital. I’ll call as soon as I know anything.”
I nod, because if I try to say anything, it’ll come out as a sob.
He kisses my forehead—fast, fierce, more like a vow than a comfort—and then he’s moving, jerking his head at Marco. “You’re with me. Bring the second car around.”
They disappear into the concrete dimness of the garage, leaving me with Adi and two silent guards.
For a second, the world tips. My legs feel like someone replaced my bones with wet paper.
Adi’s hand closes around my elbow, steady and sure. “Elevator,” he says. “Come on.”
On the ride up, I stare at my reflection in the doors. The blood spatter looks worse in the harsh fluorescent lighting; there’s a thin streak across my cheek, a rusty smear along my jaw, my hands are a mess, dried in patchy patterns that make my skin look bruised.
I look like an extra from one of the crime dramas I used to binge when I couldn’t sleep.
The difference is that this time I can still feel the heat of it on my skin.
I don’t really remember the walk from the elevator to the penthouse door. One second the floor indicator is blinking our number, the next, the apartment is around me and Adi is pressing a clean towel into my hands and setting a glass of water on the console table.
“Bathroom,” he says, voice gentler than the word. “Then we talk.”
I nod, everything inside me moving on autopilot. I strip out of my coat and cardigan in the hallway, dropping them in a heap I know I’ll regret later, then stumble toward the en-suite.
The shower is too bright and too hot. I turn the water up anyway, stepping under the spray and bracing my hands on the tile as the first hit of warmth makes my knees almost go. The stream runs clear for a second, then pink, then an alarming dark red that swirls down the drain in slow spirals.
I scrub until my skin is pink and my hands sting, until my fingerprints feel like they might have been scoured off.
The image of Rossi’s side keeps surfacing behind my eyes—the torn flesh, the slick feel of muscle and heat under my palms—and I have to focus on the mechanical motion of soap, rinse, repeat just to keep from sinking to the floor.
Eventually, the water runs clear.
I shut it off and step out into the steam-heavy air, wrapping myself in one of Nico’s oversized towels.
It swallows me whole, smelling like him and laundry detergent and something faintly citrus.
I towel my hair with jerky, inefficient movements, not really drying anything, just needing to do something with my hands that isn’t pressing down on someone’s open wound.
Time gets slippery. I sit on the closed toilet lid for a while, wrapped in terrycloth, staring at the faint pink crescents still caught under my nails, then stand again when that makes my chest hurt. I don’t know how long I’ve been in here—ten minutes, thirty, an hour—when the door opens a crack.
“It’s me,” Nico calls softly.
“I’m decent,” I say, which is generous; I’m wrapped in one of his oversized towels and nothing else.
He steps in, closing the door behind him. The hospital smell clings to him, disinfectant and recycled air. His eyes are darker than they were last time I saw him.
“How is he?” I ask, gripping the towel tighter.
“He’s in surgery.” The words land like stones. “They don’t know yet. The bullet missed anything instantly fatal, but it did a lot of damage on the way through. They’re trying to repair what they can.” He swallows once, hard. “They said it’s good he had pressure on the wound as fast as he did.”
Something in me loosens and breaks at the same time. “Is that what they told you? That your girlfriend’s amateur-hour field medicine bought him ten extra minutes?”
His eyes flick to mine. “They said whoever was with him kept him alive long enough to be treated.”
The word alive makes my knees feel weak. “I didn’t know what I was doing,” I say. “He talked me through it.”
“That’s what he does,” Nico says. He steps closer, reaching for my hands. The skin on my palms is still pink and raw. He lifts one and presses his mouth to the center, a kiss so gentle it almost undoes me. “You listened. That’s what you did. And you stayed. That isn’t nothing, Belle.”
“I don’t want to be the reason your people end up in the hospital,” I whisper.
He shakes his head. “You’re the reason they have someone worth protecting. That’s different.”
Emotion surges up, hot and sharp. “What if he dies?”
For a second, the mask slips. I see it all, rage, fear, grief pushed down so hard it must hurt, the old instincts my presence has been tempering since the night he pulled a man off me.
“Then whoever ordered this,” he says, voice low and lethal, “will learn the difference between us trying to be clean and us remembering exactly how unclean we know how to be.”
A chill walks down my spine, but it’s not fear of him. It’s fear of what the world is turning him back into. “Promise me something,” I say, throat tight.
He studies me warily. “Depends what it is.”
“Promise me that when you go after them, and I know you will, you’ll do it smart. Not just hard. Use your brain, not just your gun. Don’t throw away everything your dad built because they’re trying to drag you back into the dark.”
“You sound like Adi,” he says.
“Good,” I reply. “Usually means someone’s making sense.”
He huffs out a breath that might almost be a laugh if it weren’t so exhausted.
“We’re not going to be passive anymore,” he says quietly.
“That’s over. But we’re not going to be stupid, either.
We’ll find the leak, we’ll cut it out, and we’ll deal with Orlov and whoever’s feeding him.
All of them. I can be my father’s son without becoming his worst days. ”
“And me?” I ask. “Where do I fit in this battle plan?”
He reaches up, cupping my face, thumbs warm on my damp skin.
“You stay alive,” he says simply. “You help us see angles we’d miss.
You keep being the woman who turned my penthouse into a place my family wants to be.
And you do not, under any circumstances, decide that the way to keep us safe is to walk out of here and go hide alone somewhere. ”
The thought had flickered through my mind, this idea that maybe if I left, if I took myself off the board, the attacks would stop. That they’d turn their attention back to boardrooms and docks and places I can’t see.
“She’ll be safer away from you,” my mother will say when she hears about today. I know it. She’s not wrong.
But as I look at Nico now, eyes haunted, jaw tight, shoulders bearing weight old and new, I understand something I didn’t before.
Leaving doesn’t make any of this less dangerous. It just makes me easier to grab. “I’m not going anywhere,” I say. “You’re stuck with me, Mancini.”
His exhale is slow, the edge easing off his shoulders just slightly. “Good.”
He pulls me in then, towel and all, folding me against him. I tuck my face into his chest and let myself sink into the solid heat of him, the steady hammer of his heart under my ear.
For a moment, I let my eyes close. I see Rossi’s face again, pale and determined; the flash of the gun; the way the blood bloomed under my hands. I see the rat on the table, the strips of my article, the long shadow of an uncle I’ve never met and enemies who know too much.
We have a traitor somewhere, maybe in their organization, maybe in the building, maybe in the newsroom I used to call home.
It could be someone who hears things in the kitchen, a nanny scooping up Letty’s toys, a driver on the payroll who thinks loyalty is optional.
It could be a tech who installed the cameras and decided to double dip.
It could be someone at the Ledger still taking calls from the same ghost who fed me my first poison-dipped tip.
We don’t know. That’s the part that scares me most.
I open my eyes, fingers curling in the fabric of his shirt. “Okay,” I say quietly, mostly to myself. “They wanted a warning. They got one too.”
He pulls back just enough to look at me. “What do you mean?”
“They told us they can hit us on the street,” I say.
“Fine. Message received. But they also told us we’re getting close enough to matter.
Close enough that we can smell them. That means they’ve slipped up somewhere.
And if there’s one thing I know how to do, it’s follow tiny mistakes to the people who made them. ”
His mouth curves, but there’s nothing soft in it. “That’s my girl.”
Something twists in my chest at the possessiveness in a way that has nothing to do with ownership and everything to do with being chosen, again and again, even when it’s dangerous.
I press my forehead to his. “Then let’s make sure they regret ever spelling my name,” I murmur.
His eyes darken, glinting with a promise that is equal parts love and violence. “Oh, we will,” he says.
Outside, somewhere in a fluorescent-lit operating room, a man who stood between me and a bullet is fighting for his life.
Inside this bathroom, wrapped in a towel and an embrace I never planned on, I realize we’ve crossed a line we can’t uncross. This isn’t just about an article anymore, or old debts, or even the Mancini name.
This is personal.
And monsters hate it when the people they’ve been hunting look back at them from the dark and say:
My turn.