Chapter 28
SCARLETT
I’ve never been this scared in my entire life.
And I’ve been scared plenty of times. Scared when I watched Antonio bleed out on that office floor six years ago.
Scared when I realized I was pregnant and alone and running from a man who could find anyone.
Scared every single time Luca got sick or hurt or cried out in the night, and I had to figure out how to fix it by myself because there was nobody else.
But this is something else entirely. This is a fear so deep it has settled into my bones, and it’s even scarier because I’ve never been in this situation before or had firsthand experience to navigate it.
The SUV stopped two blocks back and now we’re walking. Walking toward the place where my son is being held hostage. Every step feels like a death wish, like walking right onto the inevitable.
But I have no other option. I’d walk into the lion’s den without a second thought if that’s where my Luca is being held.
Snow is falling, and I try to let myself get distracted. Soft white flakes drift down from a grey sky, landing on my shoulders, on my eyelashes, and on the barrel of the gun strapped to my hip.
It’s the first snow of the season. Three days ago, Luca was begging me to take him to the park if it snowed enough. He wanted to build a snowman and catch snowflakes on his tongue and make snow angels and drink hot chocolate with extra marshmallows afterward.
I’d promised, and said I’d bring him.
Now he’s somewhere inside that church with a gun to his head, and I’m walking through the snow to either save him or die trying.
The cathedral is getting closer with every step.
St. Sebastian’s. I’ve never seen it before today.
I’d only heard about it in the research I did years ago when I was trying to understand the family that wanted me dead.
It used to be beautiful, probably. There are hints of what beauty it once had in the architecture, the tall arched windows and the carved stone details and the spires reaching up toward heaven.
Now it just looks sad and abandoned. The windows are dark and broken, the stone covered in graffiti and cobwebs, the whole building sagging like it’s tired of standing. Like it’s been waiting to fall down for decades and nobody cared enough to either fix it or put it out of its misery.
And my son is in there. My baby is in that rotting building with a traitor who probably will not hesitate to harm him if he doesn’t get what he wants.
I want to throw up. I want to sit down in the snow and cry until someone tells me this is all a nightmare and I’m about to wake up. I want to be anywhere else, anyone else, living any other life but this one.
But I keep walking because Luca needs me to keep walking.
Dante’s men are spreading out around us, forty of them moving with expertise that tells me they’ve done this before.
They’re splitting into groups just like we planned, the main force heading for the front doors while Marco takes his team around to the catacombs and the snipers climb to their positions on nearby rooftops.
All those hours in the war room, all those plans and backup plans, are now serving their purpose.
I stay close to Dante as agreed, so close I can smell the gun oil on his hands and feel the tension emanating off him.
He’s different this morning. The man who held me last night, who told me he loved me, who promised we’d build a life together after this, he’s gone.
Locked away somewhere deep inside. The person walking beside me now is someone else entirely.
Someone harder and capable of doing terrible things without flinching.
I need that person right now. I need him to be exactly what he is because that’s the only person we need to get our son back.
We stop about fifty feet from the entrance and Dante’s hand finds my arm, squeezing once. A reminder. Stay close. Don’t move unless he says. Don’t shoot unless there’s no choice.
I know. He’s told me a hundred times. But I nod anyway because I can see the fear underneath his mask, the desperate need to know I’ll be okay no matter what happens in there.
The doors are massive. Old wood that has seen decades of weather, iron hinges rusted orange.
They swing open with a creak that echoes through the empty street as we push in. Inside, the church is destroyed.
I don’t know what I expected. Maybe some part of me imagined pews of chairs in rows, something that still looked like a place where people came to find God. Stupid and naive me. The kind of thinking that belongs to the person I was before all this started.
What I see instead is chaos. Pews turned upside down and rotting, wood split and covered in dust. Broken glass scattered across the floor, making crunching sounds under our boots as we move deeper into the mess.
Debris everywhere from chunks of plaster fallen from the ceiling, old hymns and jotters torn apart and scattered like a kid’s playground.
The smell is worse. It reeks of decay making my stomach turn.
We keep walking, but Viktor is nowhere in sight. With every step, unease tightens in my chest. I start to wonder if he was ever meant to be here at all, or if this place is just a distraction, a way to pull us off track while he carries out his real plan somewhere else.
I glance at Dante, and one look at him tells me he’s thinking the same thing. His expression is controlled, carefully blank, but I know him well enough to see the calculation beneath it. He’s already measuring exits, angles, possibilities.
I’m about to say it—then I see him.
Viktor is standing at the far end of the church, on the raised platform where the altar used to be. The weak morning light is coming through the broken windows behind him, turning him into a silhouette against the grey.
And in front of him, pressed tight against his chest with a gun to his head, is Luca.
Everything else stops existing at the moment.
The men around me, the danger, the plan, all of it vanishes until there’s nothing left in the world but my son’s face. His eyes are huge and wet with tears, his cheeks red and puffy from crying, his small body shaking so hard I can see it from here.
He’s still wearing his dinosaur pajamas.
The blue ones with the little T-rexes that he picked out himself because dinosaurs are his favorite thing in the whole world.
The ones I pulled from the dryer three days ago and folded and put in his drawer, never imagining they’d become the clothes he was kidnapped in.
My baby. My poor little boy. Standing there terrified while a monster holds a gun to his head.
Then he sees me.
“Mama!”
The word hits and rips through me like a bullet.
Every instinct I have, every maternal impulse that’s been embedded in me since the moment I found out I was pregnant, screams at me to run to him.
To grab him and hold him and never let go.
My feet actually move, carrying me forward without my permission, one step and then another.
But Dante’s hand closes around my arm and yanks me back.
“Not yet,” he breathes against my ear. “Wait.”
I want to scream at him and wriggle past him and every other person standing between me and my son. But I force myself to stop and think, to remember that moving blindly is exactly what will get Luca killed.
So I stand there, shaking. Watching my terrified child while I can’t do a single thing to help him.
Viktor is smiling and it’s the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen on a human face.
“Right on time,” he calls out, his voice bouncing off the stone walls. “I was starting to think you might disappoint me.”
Dante steps forward, positioning himself between me and Viktor. “We’re here. Let him go.”
“Did you bring what I asked for? The location?”
“We’ll trade once Luca is safe.”
Viktor laughs. The sound is hollow, mocking, completely devoid of anything human.
“That’s not how this works, old friend. You don’t get to make demands when I’m the one holding all the cards.
” He presses the gun harder against Luca’s temple and my son whimpers, a tiny broken sound that makes me want to tear Viktor apart with my bare hands.
“Here’s what’s going to happen. Scarlett tells me exactly where Antonio hid the ledger.
Then she goes and gets it. And if everything goes smoothly, maybe I let the boy live. ”
“You’re not getting anything until Luca is safe,” Dante says again.
“You’re not listening.” The smile drops from Viktor’s face.
“I spent fifteen years in your shadow. Fifteen years doing your dirty work while you took all the credit. Fifteen years of loyalty you never once thought to reward. Now it’s my turn.
And your precious family isn’t going to stop me from taking what I’ve earned.
Goosebumps roll through my skin, and the hairs on my arms stand. I can feel it in the air, something’s wrong. I’m immediately on alert, and that’s when I notice the movement.
Shadows shifting in the balconies above us. Shapes barely visible in the dark corners of the side chapels and the glint of metal.
We’re not the only ones with backup. Viktor has been planning for us to come armed, positioning his men turning this church into a trap. And we walked right into it.
“Dante—” I start to warn him, but he is already reacting, shoving me behind a stone pillar. I hit it hard, my back slamming against cold rock.
Viktor raises his hand in a snap sign, and the cathedral explodes.
Gunfire erupts everywhere. From above, from the sides, from behind pews I didn’t even know were hiding people. The noise is so loud, I can feel my ears vibrating.
Bullets tear through the space where I was standing half a second ago. Stone chips rain down on my head. Dust fills my lungs. My ears are ringing so loud I can barely think.
I press myself flat against the pillar and try to find Luca with my eyes through the chaos. There’s smoke and muzzle flash and bodies falling and blood spreading across the floor, and I can’t see him. I can’t see my son.
“Luca!” I scream his name, but my voice disappears into the roar of gunfire.
Dante is crouched beside me, returning fire at the balcony with equal fervor. There’s blood on his face. I don’t know if it’s his.
“Stay down!” he shouts over the noise. “Marco’s coming through the catacombs!”
I want to believe and trust that somewhere beneath us, Marco and his men are fighting their way toward my child. But all I can see is death and all I can hear is screaming, and somewhere in this nightmare my five-year-old son is watching people die.
Viktor planned this. He knew exactly how we’d come in, exactly where to position his shooters, exactly how to turn this church into a killing ground.
Now my baby is caught in the crossfire.
The thought cuts through the panic like a blade. Luca is here and he needs me. I didn’t walk into this hellhole to hide behind a pillar while my son is terrified and alone.
I grip my gun tighter, feeling the weight of it in my shaking hands. Dante taught me how to use this. Taught me to aim and breathe and squeeze the trigger instead of pulling. I practiced until my arms ached and my ears rang and I could hit a target more often than I missed.
Now I’m going to find out if any of that matters.
I peek around the edge of the pillar, searching desperately for Luca through the smoke and chaos.
I’m coming, baby. Mama’s coming.
Just hold on.