Chapter 26
POV: Amanda
I spread everything out like I was setting a trap of my own — photos, maps, receipts, wire transfers, cropped screenshots of conversations.
The little service room felt suddenly too small for the weight of it all.
Adrian watched me, slow and furious and desperate, his jaw tightening as his eyes picked along the papers trying to stitch a story from the chaos I’d brought.
“Look,” I said, my voice flat because I needed the facts to carry the weight my throat couldn’t handle.
I pointed at a colored map I’d taped in the center.
“This is the city. Purple is De Lucca turf, green is De Lacqua. Blue—” my finger stabbed a cluster of dots, “—blue is Mancini restaurants, their trattorie and cafés. Red over here—Esposito.” I let the names hang like curses.
He leaned in, closer to the paper than to me. I could feel the heat of him even when our hands weren’t touching. His focus was all business now, the king returning to the table of war.
“And look at this,” I said. “See how the Mancini blue pins sit between you and them? They don’t have the muscle to take your whole thing down. Their only chance is to put the two of you at each other’s throats. Make you destroy each other and then sweep up the scraps.”
Adrian’s brow drew down. He flipped a photo over as if it burned him, then another. I slid my hand over his, not touching the papers, just covering his knuckles. He didn’t look at me. He never took his eyes off the evidence.
“He’s putting you against the De Lacquas,” I said. My voice cracked on the last word, like I’d ripped open something tender. “He wanted both of you to fight. Feed them a whisper here, a leak there—soften you up so someone else can take the throne.”
Something dark moved across his face. “Rosa Bianca,” he murmured, tasting the words.
My chest tightened. “White Rose,” I told him. “Operation White Rose. The FBI file name.” I watched his eyes go hard and colder than I’d ever seen.
“You mean…” he started, but I didn’t let him finish.
“It’s the Mancinis,” I said. “Not Vittorio—someone of theirs was arrested, Giovanni—Vittorio’s brother. He got pinched. They gave the police info to lower his sentence. They signed a deal.”
I shoved a printed report under his nose, the arrest photo of a man who looked like Giovanni and the notation of reduced charges.
“They offered crumbs to the FBI—enough real intel to buy a deal. But they’re not feeding us full truth. They’re feeding both sides. They tell De Lacqua where you’ll be, then give the police the same crumbs to look like cooperation. When it all collapses, Vinci—Vittorio—wants the crown.”
Adrian’s fingers moved, trembled barely, as he sorted through the pages. I watched the rage build like a storm behind his eyes, then flinch as the weight of me settled between us.
“I shouldn’t be here,” I blurted, the words tumbling out before I could breathe properly.
“After you asked me to leave. I… I went to the station.”
Saying it aloud made the scene flash in my head—Clifford’s office, the FBI faces, the silence that followed me in.
“They asked how I was alive. ‘No one leaves the De Lucca’s,’ they said. ‘You should be dead.’”
He looked up at me then, not with armor but with something fragile and broken. “I would never—” he started, low, more to himself than to me.
“I know.” My fingers fumbled at the corner of a photo because my hands needed something to do.
“But when I was at the station the FBI told me they had an informant—White Rose. The name gave me goosebumps and then it clicked. Rosa Bianca. The Mancinis’ dish. It had to be them.”
I forced a laugh that tasted like metal. “God, the irony.”
He closed his eyes and rubbed the bridge of his nose like he could scrub the discovery away. “So you told them about me?” His voice was quiet, each syllable a knife.
“No.” My mouth was dry; the word felt small in the room.
“Of course not. I told them nothing that would hurt you. I was going to leave—” I swallowed.
“But Clifford stopped me. He warned me I’d be done if I walked away. He broke protocol and—he gave me the file.”
I watched his face while I spoke, trying desperately to see the part of him that might still hear me.
Adrian stared at me as if the world had broken and only we two remained. I hoped, stupidly and fiercely, that he’d read the truth on my face—the cost I’d paid. “You betrayed me,” he said finally, very quiet, like a verdict.
“No.” Heat pricked at my eyes. I shook my head. “I lied to you about why I came. I lied about my name for cover. But I betrayed my job the moment I walked through your gate. I didn’t betray you. Not once. When I said I loved you—every time I said it—it was true. Every single time.”
He didn’t move for a long time. Outside, the casino hummed—clinking glasses, a slot machine’s mechanical heartbeat. His hand found mine on the table, a contact so light I almost thought I’d imagined it.
“You could have told me,” he said at last, brittle. “Before any of this.”
“I wanted to.” The confession came out ragged.
“I was going to quit. I wanted to tell you. My father—he was a cop. He died trying to stop this world. I volunteered because I thought if I could get inside, I could follow the rot and pull people out. I never thought I’d fall in love with you. I did. I do.”
A sound escaped him that was half laugh and half sob. “You volunteered to be my spy,” he said, each word hard as flint.
“I did.” My voice was small. “And then I stopped. I couldn’t be the person who brought you down. Not after I saw you with Bella, with Riccardo—how you are with them. I wanted a life with you. I was going to tell you after the casino, after I quit. But then I saw the pattern—Rosa Bianca,
the payments, Giovanni’s arrest—and I couldn’t stand by. I chose you over my badge.”
His face shifted in a dozen tiny, painful ways—anger flared, then dulled into something older and hollow. The spot where trust had lived in him cracked and showed black inside.
“How can I ever trust you again?” he asked, suddenly small, like a child asking why the world had changed.
“I don’t know.” My throat closed. “I know it’s too much to ask. I know I ruined everything. I’m not asking you to forgive me. I—” I tried to breathe. “I came because I love you. I’d rather die trying to keep you alive than live knowing I could have stopped it.”
His fingers tightened around mine until it hurt. For a moment a raw, dangerous ache passed over his face. “You’ll walk out that door,” he said, voice thin, “and every morning I will wonder which lie you used to get close to me. I’ll wake up thinking of you with someone else’s blade.”
“You can hate me.” The words left me like an exhale. “You can throw me out. Tell me to leave. But before you do—please—look at this. See what they’re doing. If nothing else, let me save you from that.”
He let go of my hand and picked up the photos, the receipts, the wire logs. Paper rustled like a small, frightened animal. For a long, brutal second there was nothing but him, the evidence, and the fragile thing between us that still wanted to be whole.
I waited to see which part of him would win: the man who loved, or the man who’d been betrayed.