Chapter Nineteen
Morena
The elevator doors closed on the penthouse like they were sealing a tomb. When they opened again into the lobby, the night doorman looked up once and then found something fascinating on his phone. In buildings like this, barefoot women like me were someone else’s expensive problem.
I walked out into the cold with almost nothing.
A few folded bills I had taken from the drawer while he was on the phone. No real phone of my own. No keys. No plan except the one that had formed the second I heard him admit the trail on Camilla had gone cold. Dario had my sister.
I had put a knife to my own throat rather than stay inside those walls another night knowing I was pregnant.
The city felt sharper than I remembered.
Wind cut through the thin fabric of the top he had dressed me in that morning.
My bare feet burned against the sidewalk within the first block.
Even after I threw his ring at his chest, some part of me belonged to him on paper and in the eyes of every man who mattered in this city.
I kept walking anyway.
Anger was the only clean thing I had left.
I didn’t cry. Tears had spent themselves on smaller losses.
What settled over me instead was a cold clarity that made the residual ache between my legs and the throb in my nipples feel suddenly far away.
I needed information. I needed a direction.
I needed someone who might remember I existed as more than Matteo Ventura’s newest acquisition.
The only name that rose through the static belonged to a girl I had helped once in a different life. Bella Dolce..
I hadn’t known her name at first. The night she walked into After Dark she had been all diamonds and bad decisions, a rich girl playing at danger in a place that ate rich girls alive. She was much too young to be there, anyway.
One of the regulars had gotten too close. Too sure she was on the menu. I was dancing with chains on my wrists, but I stepped between them anyway. Told him she was spoken for. Made it sound true enough that he backed off.
Later, when the immediate danger had passed, she grabbed my wrist hard enough to leave marks.
“Thank you so much,” she said, voice raw. “My name is Bella. Last name is Dolce. If you ever need something… I owe you.”
She never finished whatever else she meant to say. Someone called for her from the front and she ran. I never expected to collect on her favor. Now I had no one else.
Finding her took the rest of the night and most of the cash in my pocket. I started with the limited information I had overheard in the penthouse. Matteo’s voice on the phone. Expanded radius. Private airstrips.
I turned those scraps over in my head while I moved through the parts of the city that knew my face from the club.
Girls who used to dance remembered other girls.
Some of them owed me small favors from the years before the auction.
I asked quiet questions in quieter places.
One of them knew a driver who moved people for the lower-level crews.
The driver knew an address on a residential street that smelled like old money and private security details.
I was exhausted. Angry. Still half in shock. But I was moving.
By the time I reached the house they said was Bella’s, the sky was starting to pale at the edges. My feet were cut and filthy. My body ached in every sensitive place.
I rang the bell.
Bella opened the door in an oversized sweater and sleep shorts, dark hair loose around her shoulders..
For a second she only stared. Then recognition hit her hard enough to make her suck in a breath.
“You,” she whispered. “The dancer. From that night!”
“I need help,” I said. My voice came out low and scraped. “I wouldn’t be here if I had anywhere else.”
She looked past me into the empty street, then back at my face. Something complicated moved behind her eyes. Fear. Debt.
The memory of a hallway and a lie that had bought her time to run. “Come in. Quickly.”
The house was warm and quiet and expensive in a way that didn’t need to perform. Bella led me through a marble foyer into a kitchen that smelled faintly of the night before. I stood there like something that had tracked the street in with me.
Bella wrapped her arms around herself. “You’re Matteo Ventura’s wife now. Everyone’s talking about the auction. About how much he paid.”
“Wife. Because he paid for me,” I said. “Not because he loves me. There’s a difference.”
She flinched like I had slapped her. “My father works for men like that. He’s a doctor. He examines the new ones sometimes. When they need medical clearance for the Families.”
My stomach turned cold.
I knew the shape of those gloved hands. I had felt them on me in the first days after the auction while I was trying not to cry. Clinical. Detached.
“I think I remember him,” I said quietly.
Bella’s face went pale. “Oh my God.”
“I helped you once,” I reminded her, because I needed the debt between us to stay solid. “At the club. You were in over your head. I got you out.”
Her voice was small. “I told you my name that night because I meant it. If you ever needed something… I owed you. I still do.”
She moved then. Practical in the way girls who grew up around dangerous men learned to be practical when the danger finally arrived on their doorstep. She gave me soft pants and a high-necked sweater. She gave me a burner phone with a small amount of credit loaded. She gave me cash.
More than I expected from a girl who lived in her father’s house and operated on his gold Amex.
“I can’t hide you,” she said while I changed in the powder room. “If Matteo is looking, and he will be looking, I can’t be the one who kept you. My father answers when those men call.”
“I don’t need hiding,” I said. “I need information.”
She hesitated in the doorway, arms wrapped around her middle. Then she told me what she had overheard two nights earlier.
Her father speaking in low tones with another man in the study. Dario Rizzo’s name. A child being moved. A private airstrip north of the city that didn’t file proper flight plans. The kind of place men used when they didn’t want anyone tracking what left the ground.
A thin lead. But it was more than I had walked in with.
I programmed the approximate location into the burner phone. My body was running on pure adrenaline and the last scraps of rage. Exhaustion waited just behind my eyes, ready to drag me under the second I let myself stop.“Thank you,” I said.
Bella looked at me for a long moment. “You should know… my father got a call earlier tonight. Matteo’s people are asking if anyone’s seen anything unusual. They’re looking for you, obviously.”
I turned toward the door, the burner phone heavy in the pocket of the borrowed pants, the lead about the airstrip burning in my mind like the only clean thing I had left.
I had a direction now. North. Toward the airstrips. Toward whatever thin chance remained of finding Camilla before Dario disappeared with her completely.
I was reaching for the handle when the front door opened. Keys in the lock. The soft sound of a medical bag being set down on marble. Footsteps that belonged to a man who moved through the world with quiet, precise authority.
Bella went rigid beside me.
I turned.
The mafia doctor stood in the entryway.
Same calm face. Same careful hands. The same man who had examined me after the auction while I was trying not to fall apart. The man who had written notes about my fertility and my body like I was inventory. He stopped dead when he saw me.
His eyes moved from my face to the high neck of the sweater, then to his daughter, then back to me.
Recognition was instant and mutual and absolute.
The air left the room.
Bella whispered, “Papa…”
He didn’t answer her. He only looked at me, and I looked back at the man who had once put gloved fingers on my skin while Matteo watched. The burner phone in my pocket felt suddenly heavy with the only lead I had on my sister.
Nobody moved.
Bella stood frozen between us, her face white. The medical bag sat on the marble floor where he had set it down. The only sound in the entryway was the soft click of the door settling shut behind him.
He looked at me the same way he had looked at me the first time. Clinical. Measuring. Like he was cataloguing the damage.
“Bella, dear,” he said quietly. “Go upstairs.”
She opened her mouth. He gave her a single look. She closed it again, shot me one last panicked glance, and left. Her footsteps faded up the stairs. Now it was just the two of us.
He set his keys on the console table with deliberate care. “How long have you been gone?”
“Long enough.”
“Does your husband know you’re here?”
“Not yet.”
He studied the high neck of the sweater. He gestured toward the kitchen. “will not call him in the next ten minutes. After that, I make no promises.”
I almost laughed. It came out sharp and empty. “You’re offering me a head start?”
“I am offering you a chance to not collapse on my floor. Sit.”
I sat. He washed his hands at the sink, pulled on a pair of gloves from the bag, and crouched in front of me like this was any other examination. His touch was impersonal. Professional.
“You walked out,” he said while he worked. “With no money. No phone. No plan.”
“I had a plan, actually,” I bit out.
“And how is that working?”
I did not answer.
He moved to my feet. The cuts were worse than I had admitted to myself. He cleaned them in silence, applied antiseptic that burned, and wrapped them with the kind of efficiency that came from years of patching up men who could not go to regular hospitals.
“Dario Rizzo,” he said eventually. “You’re looking for the girl, aren’t you.”
My head snapped up. “What do you know?”
He tied off the last bandage and sat back on his heels. “I know the airstrip lead is real. I also know it is cold. Dario moved her again before dawn. Matteo already got the news. Someone higher than him is helping. Someone who can scrub flight plans and silence the right people.”
“Who?”