Chapter 12 #2
Now that I’m in the same family man boat as him, I am starting to understand his reasoning.
Rafael lowers himself into a chair, looking as worried as he does tired. “We stick to gathering intel and then we decide.”
Everyone nods.
"Back to your cousin. He would help us because?" Massimo asks, one eyebrow arched, his tie finally knotted to his satisfaction.
"He's Vetrov. Blood is blood. We need him, he’s in. Count on it." Kon's expression brooks no argument, his dark eyes carrying the certainty of a man who doesn't invoke family lightly. "And he's wanted access to Chicago for years. This gives him a reason."
Rafael considers this for a long moment, his fingers steepled beneath his chin, the light from the windows throwing his shadow long across the carpet. "Bring him in. When Marchetti falls, I want his empire picked clean before the body's cold. We can use help we can trust."
“Da, moy brat.” Yes, my brother.
Kon gives Rafael a nod and there’s a million words behind that one action that sums up to trust.
I file the name away, my thumb tracing the rim of my coffee cup where the ceramic has gone cold. Cristian Vetrov. If Kon is vouching for him, the man is either extraordinary or family loyalty runs deeper than I realized. Given what I know about Kon, it's probably both.
The conversation shifts to tactical assignments.
Kon will coordinate with the Petrov family to counter Enzo's overtures.
Drake will continue squeezing the financial networks.
Massimo and Rowan will intensify surveillance on Enzo's properties.
I'll prep the intelligence package for the federal contacts Rafael has been cultivating.
Part of me wants to do this the easy way. It’s clean and done. But another man will just step in. So no. We have to cut out the cancer from the root. On top of this all I don’t want to be the man who puts my wife’s father in the ground. In prison, sure. But not graveyard rot.
The meeting wraps with the efficiency of men who have done this before, chairs scraping back, jackets straightened, faces already shifting from brotherhood to battle.
Drake pauses at the door long enough to catch my eye, one brow lifting in silent question.
I give him a nod that says I'm fine, and he accepts it with a nod of his own that says he doesn't believe me but won't push. Not today.
After the door closes, I sit alone in that silence and think about what Drake said.
My files on the Marchetti family are extensive. Including the ones on Ilona. But those sit behind three layers of encryption on a secured server that no peripheral breach could touch. The risk is negligible. I built the architecture myself.
I drain my coffee and pull up the Rosetti casino contracts that need signing this afternoon. Ilona is preparing the fresh set in her office next to mine. I can hear the faint hum of her printer through the wall, a domestic sound that has no business making me feel like the luckiest bastard alive.
I push the security briefing out of my mind and turn to the work that keeps this empire running.
Some decisions look different in hindsight.
This is one of them.
Ilona
The Rosetti contracts fill the printer tray in neat, warm stacks, the scent of fresh toner sharp in my nose.
I gather them into a folder and tap the edges against my desk to straighten the pages, already mentally organizing the signing copies from the file copies.
The low murmur of voices still rumbles through the wall from Luca's office, the Syndicate meeting stretching past its second hour, and the muffled cadence of conversation has become the background rhythm of my workdays.
My office is smaller than Luca's but I've made it mine in the three weeks since he cleared out the storage boxes and ordered a proper desk. A jasmine candle burns on a table close to the window. Its warm floral scent pushes back against the clinical smell of toner and recycled air.
The pregnancy book Katriana gave me props open against my keyboard, turned to a chapter about the second trimester I keep rereading during lunch breaks.
A framed copy of the ultrasound from last week leans against my monitor, our daughter's profile caught in gray and white, her head tilted like she was already listening to the world outside.
I turn back to my computer to close the print queue and my fingers freeze on the mouse.
A new folder sits on my desktop. Huh. I didn't put it there.
MARCHETTI, I.
My last name. My initial. In a folder I've never seen before, on a computer I've been using every day for three weeks.
My pulse ticks up, a quick stutter beneath my ribs that I feel in my throat and the tips of my fingers. Why is my name on any file within these walls?
I double-click the folder.
The first thing I see is my own face.
The photograph is grainy, taken from a distance with a long lens, but unmistakably me.
Walking across the university quad with my backpack slung over one shoulder and my hair pulled into a ponytail that hides the blue tips.
Sunlight catches my profile, and the expression on my face is one I recognize from memory, the blank, pleasant mask I wore every day to keep the world from seeing the trapped animal underneath.
The timestamp in the corner reads September 3rd.
My throat tightens. I click to the next image.
Me leaving my apartment building, the revolving door caught mid-spin, Gino's thick frame visible two steps behind me.
Me at the coffee shop three blocks from campus, the vanilla latte I always order visible in my hand, steam curling from the lid in a wisp of white that the photographer captured with unsettling clarity.
Me walking down Michigan Avenue with my guards flanking me like shadows I couldn't shake, my face turned toward a shop window, the wind pulling at my hair in a moment I remember because the cold bit through my jacket and I'd wished I'd grabbed a scarf.
The photographer was watching me wish for warmth while he catalogued my vulnerabilities.
Photo after photo after photo. Weeks of my life laid bare in images I never posed for and never consented to, each one filed and labeled with a detached thoroughness that makes my skin crawl. But why?
The air in my office turns thin and cold. My hand trembles on the mouse as I scroll deeper, past the photographs and into the documents beneath them.
Subject Profile: Marchetti, Ilona Age: 22. Daughter of Enzo Marchetti. Primary value: leverage potential against E. Marchetti. Secondary value: access to inner family circle.
The words blur and sharpen, blur and sharpen, my vision pulsing with each heartbeat that slams against my chest. The candle’s scent suddenly feels cloying, too sweet, the warmth of it mocking the ice spreading through my veins.
Subject rarely leaves predetermined routes. Bodyguard rotation suggests vulnerabilities at 7 a.m. and 11 p.m. Frequency of university attendance suggests academic commitment as potential pressure point.
I scroll further. My breathing turns shallow, each inhale scraping against the tightness in my chest like sandpaper on raw skin. Bile rises hot and sour in the back of my throat when my vision catches on the ultrasound photo beside my monitor.
Virgin status confirmed through intercepted medical records. HIGH VALUE. Use as leverage against E. Marchetti.
The date on the file stares at me from the bottom of the screen. I pull up a calendar.
Two weeks before the masquerade.
The world tilts. The Rosetti contracts sit in their neat folder inches from my hand but they might as well be on another continent.
The fluorescent hum of the office lights sounds like screaming.
The toner smell that was sharp and clean thirty seconds ago now turns my stomach, mixing with the jasmine until the air in this small room feels poisonous.
He knew who I was before Scarlet Thorn. Before I became his "jungle flower," before his hands traced the painted vines across my skin and his mouth worshiped my body like I was the only sacred thing he'd ever touched.
Before I whispered my name against his lips and gave him the one thing I'd been protecting my entire life.
He knew who I was and what I was worth, and he walked into that club with a plan that had nothing to do with desire and everything to do with destroying my father.
Destroying me.
HIGH VALUE. Use as leverage.
My third condition echoes through my skull so loud I'm surprised the walls don't shake.
You never lie to me again.
He agreed.
The rat bastard looked me dead in the eyes and promised.
And the whole time this file existed. The whole time, every kiss and every whispered endearment and every morning he pressed his lips to my belly and called our baby his miracle, this file sat in his system with my virginity catalogued like inventory.
My entire life has been reduced to a strategic asset.
I press my palm flat against the desk to steady myself, feeling the cool wood beneath my fingers, grounding myself in something solid while everything else dissolves.
My other hand drifts to my belly, an instinct that has become as natural as breathing over these past weeks, and the warmth of my own skin against the place where our daughter grows is the only thing keeping me from flying apart.
The office door opens behind me.
"Hey, baby. Do you have the Rosetti contracts? We need them in the..." His voice trails off.
I don't turn around. I don't need to. The reflection in my monitor catches his silhouette in the doorway, broad shoulders filling the frame, one hand gripping the doorjamb hard enough to turn his knuckles white.
I’m standing far enough to the side that he has no problem looking at all the images I’ve pulled from the file on my screen.
The silence that fills the space tells me everything.
The air between us thickens until the room feels like it's shrinking around us both.
There’s a string of curses followed by my name. "Ilona." My name in his mouth sounds different now. Stripped of the warmth. Scraped raw. “Let me explain.”
"How long were you watching me before that night?" My voice comes out steady in a way that should terrify us both.
The pause that follows stretches long enough to bury a marriage in.
Behind me, I hear the soft creak of his shoe shifting against the carpet, the barely audible catch of his breath, the silence of a man choosing between another lie and the truth he can no longer outrun, no doubt.
"Two months." His voice is hollow.
Two months. While I was studying for exams and drinking vanilla lattes and dreaming of a night of freedom, he was photographing me through long lenses and cross-referencing my medical records.
While I was lying in therapy talking about trust and healing and learning to let someone in, he was building a dossier on me for leverage potential.
"You knew who I was. The whole time."
"Yes."
"You approached me on purpose. To seduce me. To use me."
His breath catches behind me, a rough scrape of air that sounds like it cost him something vital. "At first. Yes. But Ilona..."
"Don't." I close the folder with a click that sounds like a bone breaking.
My hand is steady on the mouse. My spine is straight.
My eyes are dry. The tears will come later, in a place where he can't watch them fall and calculate their strategic value.
I slide my wedding ring off and leave it by the keyboard.
I smooth the front of my blouse with steady hands and turn to face him.
His face is ashen beneath the olive of his skin. The gold flecks in his dark eyes have dimmed, swallowed by hollowness, from what I can tell. At least I hope he feels hollow.
I know I do.
He wears the expression of a man who built his life on a foundation of arrogance and watches as it crumbles beneath him.
His hands hang at his sides, fingers curling and uncurling against his thighs, the viper's ruby eyes on his right hand catching the light with each involuntary movement.
"I need to go."
"Where?" The word comes out fractured, splitting across a fault line I've never heard in his voice before.
"Anywhere you're not."
I walk past him. His hand rises as if to catch my arm and then falls to his side, fingers curling into a fist that trembles against his thigh. I dare him to try to stop me. Everything I said is true, and he knows it. That knowledge builds a wall between us made from his own deceitful actions.
I walk past him and head for the elevator. My heels click against the stone with the measured pace. I refuse to run, refuse to cry, refuse to give this building one more piece of myself.
I count my steps the way I used to count them leaving my father's study after a reprimand. Twelve to the elevator. Twelve steps between the happy woman I was five minutes ago and the woman I have no choice but to become.
Someone cold and just as ruthless as the men who keep deciding my life for me.
His scent follows me down the hallway. Sandalwood and leather. The smell of every lie I believed.
The elevator doors open. I step inside and press the lobby button. The elevator descends, and somewhere on the floor above me, the man who promised never to lie to me stands in the wreckage of every promise he ever made, surrounded by the architecture of deception he was too confident to dismantle.
And that’s on him.
I press my palm against my belly, where our daughter grows in the only body I've ever been able to trust.
"It's just us now, little one," I whisper. "But we're going to be okay."
The lobby doors open and I don't look back.