Chapter 2
NICO
The red taillights of her sedan bleed into the Chicago darkness.
I watch them until they turn the corner, merging onto the highway I ordered her to take.
My boots stay planted on the concrete. The freezing wind whips off the river, carrying the stench of exhaust and rotting garbage, but it cannot cut through the lingering scent she left behind.
Jasmine and warm cardamom. It doesn't belong in this neighborhood. It doesn't belong on this street.
Mine.
The certainty of that fact rearranges the foundation of my entire existence in a matter of seconds.
I was supposed to be on rooftop overwatch, monitoring the Bellanti auto-shop armory pressed against her clinic wall.
That was the mission. Then she walked out of the clinic doors.
That was the only reason I was breathing the frozen air on this side of the city.
She paused on the sidewalk. She did not run.
My target was the auto shop armory. My target evaporated the second she squared her shoulders against the dark.
I turn away from the street, into the shadows of the alley. I catch my reflection in a shattered window. Six-foot-three. Salt-and-pepper hair, cropped close — darker than Vincenzo's. A matching beard, trimmed to the jaw. Dark brown eyes, fast and assessing. Lean athletic build. A soldier's economy.
No ceremony. Tribal and geometric sleeve tattoos wrap both my arms, bleeding down to my wrists.
A sharp black neck tattoo cuts stark against my skin.
A gold watch clamps my wrist. No chain. I stand still in the glass.
Loaded. Not sleeping. I have been a soldier so long I do not know what I am outside of one.
Inherited violence. Sleepless since childhood.
Twenty years ago, my father Carlo was lured to a South Side warehouse and executed. His body was dumped in an alley much like this one. I was fifteen. Old enough to understand the shape of a massacre, young enough for everyone to decide what I was allowed to know. I wasn’t a child.
They gave me silence instead of answers while my family fractured.
I spent the next twenty years becoming the most lethal version of myself so no one would ever mistake me for someone who could be managed again.
When I close my eyes, I don’t see the warehouse floor.
I don’t see the alley. I see the empty chair at the table where my father used to sit. I see the silence.
I drag my gaze away from the glass. I sling my rifle bag over my shoulder. The nylon strap digs into my trap muscle. I’m abandoning the overwatch post. The Bellanti armory beside her clinic is suddenly secondary.
I pull my encrypted phone from my vest. The line connects to the Costa compound server room on the North Side.
Vincenzo answers on the first ring. "Status."
"I’m shifting position," I say. My voice is gravel and stone. It doesn't waver. It gives nothing away.
"Negative," Vincenzo counters instantly. "The fourth-floor roofline gives you the only viable angle on the rear loading bay of the Bellanti target. You move, you lose the sightline."
"I’m moving to her apartment building across the city," I state, leaving no room for argument. "I'll maintain remote sightlines on their loading dock."
Compulsion drives me, absolute and clean. Moving my base to her building puts me directly in her walls. It puts me below her feet. It puts my guns between her and the street.
Vincenzo pauses. I hear the rapid clack of his keyboard over the line as he brings up the topographical map of the block. "The apartment building exposes you to the eastern skyline."
"I will manage the exposure."
Another pause. Vincenzo is a genius. He doesn't like deviations from the plan without mathematical backing. "Understood. Shifting your geolocation tag now. Watch your six, Nico. The chatter on the encrypted channels is escalating."
The war is tightening. The Bellantis are pushing back. The compound is on high alert. Which brings us to the rot festering inside our own walls.
"The pattern you found." My voice drops to a deadly register. My eyes track every shadow. "The data leak."
"What about it?" Vincenzo's keystrokes stop.
"It points to someone who has been inside for a long time."
The silence on the line stretches out. It’s a suffocating weight. It is the sound of two brothers staring into an abyss they are not ready to cross. We don’t name anyone. We don’t make accusations. The evidence is a ghost, a shadow in the code, a terrifying implication.
Vincenzo goes quiet. He doesn't confirm. He doesn't deny.
The subject closes like a steel vault.
"I will patch your feed to the new location," Vincenzo finally says, his tone clipped. "Stay dark."
The line goes dead.
I slide the phone back into my vest. I step out of the alley. The cold wind bites at the exposed skin of my face. The street is empty. The factory down the block is locked down, the Bellanti guards huddled near the rolling metal doors. I ignore them.
I retrieve my vehicle and head to the boarded apartment building she lives in across the city. It gives me the angle I need on her.
Her building is a three-story brick structure.
The ground floor was a defunct laundromat, boarded up since the recession.
The upper two floors are residential. I have already mapped the occupancy down to the inch.
The second floor is entirely vacant, a skeleton undergoing abandoned renovations.
The third floor holds a single occupied unit—hers.
Until she returns, the rest of the building is dead space, and dead space is useful for a predator.
I walk up to the secure front entrance. A magnetic lock. A keypad. I don’t use the front door.
I move around to the alleyway on the eastern side.
A rusted fire escape clings to the brick.
I test the bottom rung. It groans but holds.
I scale the metal stairs with the silence of a predator.
I don’t make a sound. My boots find the solid edges of the grating.
I reach the second-floor landing. The window leading into the vacant apartment is painted shut.
I pull a thin steel pry bar from my tactical belt. I slide it under the wooden sash. A sharp, controlled twist shatters the dried paint. I slide the window up.
I step over the sill and into the darkness.
The apartment smells of sawdust, plaster, and stale air. Drop cloths cover the hardwood floors. Bare drywall stands unpainted. It is a hollow shell. Perfect.
I move through the dark without stumbling.
I reach the living room. The windows face the street.
On my encrypted phone, I pull up the remote camera feed of the Bellanti auto-shop armory pressed against her clinic wall.
I drop my rifle bag on a wooden sawhorse.
I strip my tactical vest off, tossing it onto a pile of unused drywall.
I’m running hot. Adrenaline burns away the Chicago winter.
She’s driving home. She’s on the highway.
I need to secure the perimeter before she returns.
I open my gear bag, pull out my surveillance rig. Two laptops. Signal interceptors. I set them up on the makeshift desk and boot the systems. Blue light paints my arms, highlighting the ink.
I bypass the building's outdated security matrix in less than three minutes. The camera feeds pop onto my left monitor. The lobby. The rear alley. The stairwell.
I’m inside her fortress. Making it mine.
I pull up the local traffic grids on my right monitor.
I track the highway cameras. I find her sedan.
She is driving exactly the speed limit, holding her lane like it is a discipline.
Even through the grainy pixelated footage, the control reads as fury.
She is furious. She’s terrified. Good. Fear keeps you alive.
Anger keeps you sharp. I will take both over apathy.
I lean over the screens, my hands braced on the sawhorse.
The memory of her scent slams into me again.
A warm, restless spice that contrasts violently with the bloody world I inhabit.
She’s curves and heat and defiance. She rebuilt her clinic right next to a war zone after the Bellantis firebombed the adjacent building. She didn’t run then or tonight.
She stood on the sidewalk and looked right at me. She challenged a monster in the dark.
My jaw locks. Heat crawls up my neck.
I need to check the third floor. I need to know the exact layout of the space she occupies.
I leave the second-floor apartment. I enter the main stairwell.
The silence of the building is absolute.
I climb the stairs to the third floor. Her door is solid oak.
Three locks. A digital deadbolt, a high-security cylinder, and a heavy-duty reinforced latch plate.
She’s careful. She understands the world is not safe.
I don’t touch the locks. I do not cross her threshold. Not the apartment. Not yet.
I press my palm flat against the wood of her door. The wood is cold, but the instinct raging in my blood is blinding.
Mine. She is mine. She doesn't know it yet.
She thinks I’m a threat she can manage, a thug she can sass into retreating. She has no idea what she just invited into her life. I’m not a threat. I’m an unavoidable consequence.
I step away from her door. I climb the final half-flight of stairs to the roof access hatch. The padlock is iron. I pick it in twenty seconds.
I push the hatch open and step out onto the tar-paper roof.
The city spreads out below me, a grid of sodium lights and frozen concrete.
The wind is vicious up here. It tears at my shirt, biting into my skin.
I welcome the cold. It forces focus. I walk to the edge of the parapet.
I look down at the street. The quiet residential block is directly in my line of sight.
I can see the streetlamps. I can see the alleyway approach. It is a tactically superior position.
But I don’t care about the shipping containers.