14. Take It All Back
FOURTEEN
TAKE IT ALL BACK
MATTEO
Night. Rain. The waterfront.
Enzo's intel narrowed it to three locations — warehouses Sebastian's shell companies own or lease along the harbor. We don't know which one holds Sofia. So we hit all three at the same time.
I split our men into three teams. Two lieutenants take the north and south warehouses with four men each.
I take the central one myself — the largest, the most recently active on the shipping records, the one Enzo's gut says feels right.
Enzo's gut has kept me alive more times than my own judgment, so I listen.
Enzo is at my right. Eight men behind us, armed and silent, moving through the rain like shadows with purpose.
The waterfront is empty at this hour — nothing but shipping containers and chain-link fences and the black water of the harbor reflecting the city lights in broken ribbons. The rain comes down in sheets, cold and relentless, turning the pavement into a mirror.
I am soaked. I don't feel it.
I am exhausted. I don't feel that either.
What I feel is a focused, crystalline clarity that has nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with the letter in my breast pocket and the woman who wrote it.
Every step toward that warehouse is a step toward her.
Every heartbeat is a count of the debt I owe — not to the family, not to the throne.
To her. The debt is to her.
Sebastian's men are positioned at the perimeter — two at the main entrance, two at the service door, a roaming patrol along the dock side. Professional. Organized.
We go through them.
Not around. Not over. Through. My men move with a ferocity that startles even Enzo, and Enzo has seen me at my worst. The perimeter guards go down in seconds — not killed, but neutralized.
Disarmed. Removed from the equation with the kind of focused aggression that happens when men are led by someone who is not fighting for territory or money or pride.
I'm fighting for her. They can see it. It changes everything.
The warehouse door is reinforced steel. Enzo has a breaching tool. Eleven seconds. The door comes open and we pour through — flashlights cutting through the dust and shadow, boots on concrete, the choreography of controlled violence.
Sebastian's interior team folds fast. They're outnumbered and they know it.
The building opens up — a wide central floor, shipping containers stacked along the walls, catwalks overhead, the bare industrial skeleton of a place built to hold cargo, now holding the only thing in the world I can't afford to lose.
And there, standing in the center of the warehouse floor, is Sebastian.
My brother is waiting for me.
Not hiding. Not running. Waiting — hands at his sides, jacket removed, sleeves rolled up to the elbow, the posture of a man who expected this moment and prepared for it the way he prepares for everything.
Completely. Patiently. With the particular calm of someone who has run every scenario and decided the outcome before the first move.
The warehouse lights are industrial — bare fluorescents bolted to the ceiling thirty feet up, casting a flat white light that strips every shadow from his face and turns the wet concrete floor into a mirror.
Rain hammers the roof. A broken skylight above the center of the floor lets the water through in a thin, steady curtain, and the puddle it's made on the concrete is spreading slowly toward us both.
He looks like our father. Same jaw. Same shoulders. Same eyes — dark, precise, the eyes of a man who has never once in his life looked at another person without calculating what they're worth and what they'll cost.
"Brother," he says.
"Where is she?"
"Safe. For now." He tilts his head. The old habit — the angle of a man examining something he's deciding how to use. "You came faster than I expected. I underestimated how far gone you are."
"Where. Is. She."
"In the back. Room at the end of the corridor.
" He reaches into the inside left pocket of his jacket and produces a key — small, steel, hanging from a short ring — and holds it up between his thumb and forefinger.
Unhurried. Deliberate. He lets it catch the fluorescent light, lets it turn once on the ring, lets me see exactly what it is and exactly what it opens.
The same way you'd dangle bait in front of something you want to watch, reach for it.
"Or I could give you this. Walk away from the succession.
Sign it to me. Take your wife and go. Everyone gets what they need. "
He lets it swing for one more second.
Then he closes his fist around it — slow, deliberate, watching my face while he does it — and slides it back into the left inside pocket. Pats it once. Holds my gaze.
"No," I say.
The hands close.
His weight shifts forward — center of gravity dropping half an inch, the tell I've known since we were boys throwing punches at the same bag under the same instructor's eye. Sebastian always moves his weight forward before he commits. He did it at fourteen. He does it now.
He's faster than I remember.
His right hand drives toward my jaw in a straight line — no wind-up, no telegraph, the punch of a man who has been training for this specific fight for longer than I knew the fight was coming.
I slip it — my head moving left by instinct — but the knuckles catch my cheekbone and the graze is enough.
White flares across my vision. My eye waters instantly, involuntarily, the body's response to impact it can't control.
He's already throwing the left. A hook angled low — aimed at my ribs, the left side, the scar. He knows exactly where to go. We were built by the same men. He knows every place I've been broken because he was in the room when some of them happened.
I get my forearm up. The hook lands on bone instead of the scar, and the force travels up my arm and into my shoulder like current through a wire — a deep, numbing throb that tells me the arm is going to be slow for the next thirty seconds.
I step into the gap his missed hook created, inside his guard where the long punches can't reach, and I drive my elbow into his sternum.
Not a swing. A push. Short, direct, my body weight moving through the point of contact rather than stopping at it.
The impact makes a sound — a flat, dense thud — and Sebastian's breath leaves him in a sharp involuntary exhale.
He staggers. Two steps back, three, his hand going to his chest for one unguarded second before the discipline kicks in and he drops it.
He doesn't go down.
He catches himself against a shipping container, his palm flat on the corrugated metal, and I can see the recalibration happening behind his eyes.
The first plan didn't work. He's building a second one in real time.
Sebastian has always been more dangerous in the second round than the first — in the first, he fights his plan; in the second, he fights you.
I don't give him the second round.
I close the distance fast, before he's fully upright.
He sees me coming and pivots, trying to use the container as a wall at his back — cutting off my angles, forcing me to come at him straight.
I grab the arm he pivots on, using the rotation against him, and drag him forward off the container.
His balance goes. He drops to one knee on the wet concrete, and the wet gives him nothing to push from.
His right arm comes up from his knee — a rising strike aimed at my chin, desperate and ugly, the kind of punch a man throws when he's down and needs space. It catches me under the jaw. My teeth snap together with a hard, ugly crack. My head snaps back.
The warehouse lights streak across the top of my vision in long white smears, and I feel my weight tipping backward over my heels.
I let it take me.
Backward onto the concrete — shoulders first, rolling with it rather than fighting it, the way you fall when you know how to fall.
My back hits the floor and the impact punches the air from my lungs but I'm already moving, already rolling onto my side and up to one knee before the world has finished tilting.
The concrete is ice cold through my shirt.
The rain puddle has spread to where I landed.
My palms are wet and gritty with whatever the warehouse floor has been collecting for years.
I spit blood. Bitten the inside of my cheek on the jaw impact.
Sebastian is up. He's breathing harder than he should be — the elbow to the sternum is still working on him, a debt his body is paying in oxygen.
His left hand moves briefly to his chest again.
Just briefly. He catches himself. But I saw it twice now, which means it isn't discipline anymore — it's damage.
"You always lead with the right," I say.
My voice is level. Keeping him talking costs me nothing and buys my vision time to clear.
"You always telegraphed the elbow." He looks at the blood on his lip — somewhere in the exchange he caught it on the container’s edge.
He touches it with two fingers. He studies the red.
"Same instructor. Same drills. Same tells.
" His eyes come back to mine. "This was always going to come down to who wants it more. "
"I know what I'm fighting for," I say. "Do you?"
Something moves behind his eyes. Fast. Buried before it surfaces.
He comes again. Slower this time — not hesitant, but deliberate.
He's stopped trying to end it quickly. He feints left — a shoulder drop, just enough to pull my weight that direction — then drives right.
The punch hits my shoulder, rotating me sideways, and before I can reset he's behind me.
His forearm comes across my throat from the rear.
His other hand presses the back of my skull forward, loading the choke with his whole upper body.
Not tight enough to cut off the blood supply yet. But it is tightening.
Every second I wait, it tightens more. I know this. He knows this. We both learned it in the same room.