13. War for the Throne #2
"He's not at the estate anymore. He bolted — right after this morning.
He's the one who opened the service entrance for the men who took Sofia.
Then he ran, because he knows what happens to people who Sebastian doesn't need anymore.
Rental in Worcester, hiding, terrified. I wanted to tell you sooner. "
A pause.
The kind Enzo only takes when he's choosing words that matter.
"But I had a name without a location, and a suspicion without a confession.
If I'd brought you half a case while you were in the state you were in, you'd have moved on Ricci before he could talk, and we'd have lost the chain that leads to Sebastian.
I needed him cornered and willing before I put him in front of you.
He surfaced an hour ago through a contact who owed me a favor and a landlord who owed him rent.
He wants to talk, Matteo. He knows cooperating with you is the only thing keeping him alive. "
"About what?"
"About everything. He says the phone cloning, the photographs, the fabricated evidence — all of it ran through him. He was planted from the beginning. Six weeks inside your estate, reporting to Dante the entire time."
The car moves through the city. The morning light is gray and flat. I stare through the windshield and feel two realities collide inside my chest — the urgency of finding Sofia, and the looming truth about what was done to her. What I allowed to be done to her.
"The security feed," I say. "East corridor. The timestamp that showed her at my study door."
"Ricci had access to the system. He could insert footage, alter timestamps, and plant a clip.
" Enzo's jaw tightens. "The fifty-three seconds you saw — that wasn't her.
That was Ricci's work. He needed something that couldn't be explained away by metadata alone.
Something you'd see with your own eyes."
The words land like a verdict.
I let a fabricated case harden around the woman I love because every piece of it was designed to hit the exact fault lines Sebastian knew I carried.
All of the evidence that I have. None of it was random. It was built to make doubt look like proof. To make fear feel like instinct. To make me question the one woman I should have protected before I ever questioned her.
And I hate myself for how close it came to working.
Dante handed me the phone. Ricci handed me the eyes. Sebastian handed me the story.
And I let myself listen because some part of me believed there had to be a reason he targeted her in the first place.
A reason the photographs existed. A reason someone kept placing evidence on my desk like breadcrumbs leading back to the woman sleeping in my bed.
And I — the man who verifies everything, who trusts nothing, who has survived thirty years in this world by treating evidence as a starting point rather than a conclusion — I stopped searching the moment protecting her started to feel impossible.
The photographs kept coming. The footage appeared.
Her cloned phone produced conversations that looked real enough to survive a courtroom.
And every instinct in me split in half — one side seeing Sofia, hearing her laugh in my garden, feeling her heartbeat against my chest at night; the other seeing a pattern I could not explain away.
So I did the worst thing I have ever done.
I put her in the east wing where I could keep eyes on her, tighten security around her, and wait for the real architect behind the evidence to move.
I told myself it was temporary. Strategic. Necessary.
I told myself distance would keep her alive while I figured out who was trying to turn her into a weapon against me.
But none of that changes what it became.
An exile.
A punishment she did not deserve.
"There's more," Enzo says, quieter now. The flatness in his voice shifts — something careful beneath it, something he's been holding back.
"Say it."
"Sebastian was in the house yesterday. While she was in the east wing.
" He keeps his eyes on the road. "He came through the same service entrance Ricci opened for him.
Ricci confirmed it — Sebastian went in alone, stayed twenty minutes, and left without her.
" A pause. "She was still in the room this morning when they came back with more men.
Whatever he offered her — she didn't walk out with him. "
The car is quiet. I stare through the windshield.
She didn't go willingly — the room told me that before Enzo said a word.
The book on the floor. The shoes beside the bed.
Those aren't the details of a woman who packed her exit.
Those are the details of a woman who was taken from a life she hadn't finished living.
But taken doesn't mean she still wants to come back.
Sebastian sat in that room for twenty minutes.
He's good with words. He knows exactly where the wounds are and how to press them.
I exiled her. I flinched from her touch.
I sent her letter back unopened. Not because I stopped loving her.
Because loving her had become the weakness Sebastian was building his entire war around.
I gave her every reason to hear whatever he said and decide that the man waiting on the other side of a rescue wasn't worth returning to.
She's not a traitor. Some part of me knew that from the beginning. I just let fear and manufactured evidence speak louder than the woman herself.
Whether she still wants me — that I won't know until I find her.
That is what I deserve. To drive toward a woman I failed, carrying a letter she wrote for a man who never read it, and have no claim on her answer when I get there.
I press my hand flat against the letter in my breast pocket and feel the paper give beneath my palm. And I didn't even open it.
"How long do you need?" I ask.
"To find her or to build the case?"
"Both."
"Finding her — hours. The case—" He glances at me. "Ricci will give us everything. By the time we walk out of that room, Sebastian's name will be on every link in the chain. It'll hold."
I nod. I look out the window. I think about a woman in a room with no lock on the door, and a man who found her anyway. I think about twenty minutes and whatever words passed between them and the fact that she was still there when the sun came up.
"Drive faster," I say.
The safe house is a basement apartment beneath a closed barbershop. Enzo's territory. The kind of place where conversations happen that never leave the room.
Angelo Ricci is sitting at a folding table.
Mid-thirties, average build, forgettable face — the kind of man you'd pass on the street and never remember, which is exactly why he was chosen.
His hands are on the table, palms down, fingers spread.
His eyes are the eyes of a man who's been running for eight days and knows what the man across the table is capable of.
I sit down. I don't speak. I let the silence work.
Ricci lasts forty-five seconds.
"I was contacted eight weeks ago. Dante Moretti. He approached me outside my apartment — knew my name, my work history, and my financial situation. Inside placement. Six weeks, maybe eight." He swallows. "Fifty thousand. Half up front."
Fifty thousand. The price of my trust. The price of Sofia's reputation. The price of everything.
"What was the job?"