Chapter Fourteen
Matteo
Morena Caruso was the most beautiful thing I had ever put my hands on. And she was lying to me by silence.
Except it looked like she was finally ready to tell me the truth.
“Her name is Camilla,” Morena whispered, pulling the photograph out from under her mattress. She pointed it at me. “She’s my little sister.”
Camilla.
A little girl in a red shirt, sitting on a dingy carpet. Looking straight at the camera.
I stood slowly and turned. Morena’s face had gone white. Her blue eyes locked on the photograph in her own
“She’s four. Dario took her the night I refused the private rooms,” Rena went on.
“He uses her to keep me dancing. To keep me from running. Every photo. Every threat. Every night on that stage. It was all about her. That’s why I begged you not to kill him.
If he dies and she’s with him, or if the people he knows take her… ”
Her voice cracked. She pressed her lips together hard enough that the color drained from them. I looked at the photograph again. Small hands. Dark hair. The same eyes as the woman standing in front of me, only softer.
Dario had not simply sold Morena. He had used her little sister as a leash.
He had kept the only pure thing left in Morena’s life as leverage while he put a knife to her throat and tried to take what belonged to me.
And she had protected that secret. Even after two hundred lines of ownership written in her own hand while tears dripped onto the page.
I set the photograph on the dresser with deliberate care. “You kept a child from me.”
The words landed like a blade laid flat against skin. Morena’s shoulders curled inward. “I didn’t know what you would do with her. You’re not soft. You bought me for a womb, didn’t you? I thought if I told you, you might use her the same way he does. To get something from me.”
I stepped closer. My free hand rose and caught her chin, forcing those wet blue eyes up to mine. Tears gathered at the corners but did not fall yet.
“You belong to me,” I said. “Every secret. Every reason. Every piece of the life you lived before I put my ring on your finger. That includes Camilla. From this moment your sister is under my protection. Dario is dead. He just hasn’t been told the day yet.
But you will never hide anything from me again. Do you understand me?”
“Yes.”
“Say it properly.”
“I understand,” she whispered. “I won’t hide anything again. And… thank you.”
I released her chin and stepped back. The pain pulsed hard enough that I had to clench my jaw against it.
The photograph of the little girl sat on the dresser.
The wall of Morena’s face watched from the living room.
The diary with its blacked-out confession waited on the table.
“Dario remains breathing for now. Not because he deserves air. Because the child is with him or with people he controls, and I will not risk her disappearing into the places men like him know about until I have her location confirmed and secured.”
“Okay,” Morena said. “I can help you.”
I nodded. “Yes. You will tell me everything. Every address. Every name. Every detail of how he contacted you and where the photographs came from.”
Morena’s blue eyes stayed locked on mine. Fear lived in them. Something else did too. Something that looked almost like desperate hope.
“You’ll keep her safe?” The question was barely audible.
I held her gaze for a long moment. The image of a four-year-old in a red shirt sat behind my eyes.
“She is under my protection now,” I said. “That is the only answer you need. The rest is logistics. And logistics are what I do best.”
I released the chain enough for her to move, then pointed to the low cushion beside the chair I used for work. “Kneel for me, baby. Let’s get to work.”
She did. The movement was automatic now. The white dress brushed the marble.
“Start talking,” I said. “Every detail. Do not leave anything out.”
She spoke in a low, steady voice that carried the scrape of tears.
I found out about everything.
The apartment Dario had kept her in. The men who came twice a week to check she was there.
The phone numbers he used. The way the photographs arrived.
Sometimes slipped under the door of the old place.
Once left with the building manager. The most recent one delivered to the penthouse through a cutout I had not yet identified.
The red shirt was new. The carpet was in a place Rena didn’t recognize.
The fact that Camilla no longer asked for her big sister much, according to Dario’s last taunt.
I typed as she spoke. Names. Addresses. Patterns. Weaknesses. The same cold efficiency I had used on the Vernizzi brothers. The same focus that had built the wall of her photographs in the first place. By the time she finished, the outline of a retrieval was forming in my head.
Dario would not see many more sunrises. If the child was elsewhere, the timeline would stretch only long enough to guarantee she came out of it breathing and unmarked. I closed the laptop and looked at the woman kneeling at my feet.
She was no longer only a solution to a seat. The realization sat in my chest like a second pulse I refused to name.
I stood. She rose at once, legs unsteady, eyes on me.
“The diary,” I said. “Write everything else we haven't discussed while I contact some people.”
She nodded once.
I watched her cross to the low table, pick up the pen, and begin. The soft scratch of ink on paper filled the quiet. She had hidden a child to protect the last pure thing in her life. She had begged for the life of the man who sold her because that man held the only leverage that mattered.
And now the secret was mine.
The retrieval would be arranged before the sun fully set. Dario would be handled with the same clean efficiency that had ended the Vernizzi line. The child would be brought somewhere safe, somewhere Morena could see her without fear once the dust settled.
She was writing when I looked back. Head bent. Dark hair falling forward. The flush faintly visible on her cheeks. The soft white fabric of the clothes I had chosen clinging to the body I had claimed. Her pen scratched faster. I left her there.
The study door shut. I put the photograph of Camilla on the desk under the lamp, face up, and made the first three calls.
Santino first. Not for permission. For bodies.
“I need a quiet team,” I said. “No Moretti colors. No one who drinks at After Dark. Four men who can take a door without turning it into a story.”
A pause. Then, flat: “Is this about your wife?”
“She has a younger sister.”
Another pause, longer. “Send me the address when you have it. I’m not putting Aurora’s name anywhere near this.”
“I wouldn’t ask you to.”
I hung up and called the two cutouts who still owed me unmarked vans and a clean doctor who did not file reports. Last, a man who specialized in finding kids men like Dario hid behind other names.
I sent the man the photo of Camilla. I did not give him Morena’s name. By the time I had a map on the screen, the outline was simple enough to be ugly.
Dario was sloppy when he felt powerful. He used the same two men.
He moved the child only when the photographs needed updating.
He liked ground floors and back exits and the kind of building where neighbors had already learned not to hear anything.
He would not expect me to come for the girl. He expected me to come for him.
That was the opening.
I would not hit the house he used for collections.
I would hit the place the photographs came from.
Two teams. One on the street to pin the watchers.
One through the rear the second the front went loud enough to pull every gun toward the wrong door.
No speeches. No message for the Families.
Camilla out first. Dario alive if he was in the room. Dead, if he made that impossible.
I was marking the second exit when the study door opened.
Morena stood on the threshold with the diary against her chest like a shield. The chain whispered when she took one step in. Her eyes went to the photograph, then to the map, then to my face.
“You’re going tonight.” Not a question.
“Yes.”
“You just found out she exists,” she reminded me.
“I found out she has been used as a leash on my wife. That is enough.”
She came closer anyway. Bare feet on the study floor. The white dress made her look like she had been placed in the wrong room. “He won’t be alone. He never is when he has her. And he will use her if he sees you. He will put her in front of him. That is what he does.”
“I know.”
“Then don’t go in like this.” Her voice frayed. “Don’t go in like she is a problem you can solve. She is four. She does not know your name. If she sees guns she will think you are just like him.”
I looked at her. There it was. Not defiance. Not the diary hate. Fear with my name on it.
“Are you worried about me,” I said. “Or your sister?”
Color hit her cheeks, angry and immediate. “I’m worried about her.”
“And me.”
She swallowed. “If you die in that house, I lose both of you. I get her back and there is no one left who can keep Dario’s people from taking her again. That is not love. That is math.”
I almost smiled. It would have been the wrong thing. “Come here, please.”
She did not. I stood and crossed to her instead, close enough that she had to tip her head back. I did not touch the chain.
“Listen to me,” I said. “I am not walking into a warehouse to make a point. I am going to get your sister. I have done this kind of work since I was younger than I should have been. I will not kick a door with her on the other side of it. I will not fire first in a room that holds a child. I will not leave her there because the timing is inconvenient.”
“And if he has a gun on her?”
“Then I put him down in a way that does not go through her.” I held her eyes.
Her hands had gone tight on the diary. “Take me with you.”
“Fuck no.”