Chapter 2 #2
I walk to the opposite side of the roof. The side that overlooks the secure parking lot in the rear of the building.
I stand like a statue in the freezing wind. I wait.
Twenty minutes later, the iron gates of the rear lot slide open. Her sedan pulls in. The tires crunch over the frost-covered asphalt. She parks in her designated spot. She turns the engine off.
I watch her from above. A hawk circling a very specific, very precious target.
She stays in the car for a long time. The headlights cut out.
She is sitting in the dark. She is using her rigid clinical structure to suppress the panic.
You compartmentalize the terror. You build a box in your mind, you shove the trauma inside, and you weld it shut. You do it until you are hollow.
She steps out of the car in a thick wool coat. She clutches her bag against her side. She scans the lot. She scans the alley. She is hyper-vigilant.
She walks toward the back door of the building. She punches her code into the keypad. The door unlocks. She slips inside.
I turn on my heel. I drop back down the roof hatch. I secure the padlock behind me. I move with silent, lethal speed down the stairs, slipping back into the vacant second-floor apartment.
I reach my monitors just as she steps into the lobby on the camera feed.
She walks toward the stairs. She doesn’t take the elevator. Smart. Elevators are traps.
I watch her climb. The camera in the stairwell captures her face.
Her lips are pressed into a thin, tight line.
She reaches the third floor. She unlocks her door.
One. Two. Three locks. She steps inside.
She shuts the door. On the camera feed I see the seam of light at the threshold wink out as she throws the locks.
She’s locked in. She’s secure.
I exhale a harsh, jagged breath. The tension in my muscles doesn't abate. It simply shifts into a low, thrumming hum. A permanent state of readiness.
I pull a folding chair from the corner of the vacant room. I set it up directly in front of the monitors. I sit down. The screens cast a blue glow over the dust motes dancing in the air.
The operation is no longer about the Bellantis. The operation is Priya Sharma.
I pull a secondary monitor toward me. I hack into the city's public registry.
I pull her business licenses. I pull her clinic blueprints.
I map the exact dimensions of the first floor.
I memorize the layout of her therapy rooms, the placement of the windows, the thickness of the glass.
I access the fire department records from the night the building next door was firebombed.
I read the casualty reports. I read the structural damage assessments.
The fire had spread to the clinic walls. She had to rebuild the entire eastern half of her business. She lost equipment. She lost months of revenue. She rebuilt it all with her own two hands.
My knuckles pop as I clench my fists on the makeshift desk.
The Bellantis took her safety once. They made her collateral damage in a war she had nothing to do with.
They will never touch a single hair on her head again. I will burn Chicago to the bedrock before I let a single ember fall on her roof.
I shift my gaze back to the stairwell camera. Nothing moves. The hallway is empty.
I lean back in the folding chair. The silence presses in. This is my environment. Isolation. Surveillance. Tactical supremacy. I have lived in the dark so long I forgot what warmth feels like.
Seven women under the compound roof now. Seven sets of footsteps that don't belong to soldiers. The fortress our fathers built has stopped sounding like a war room and started sounding like a home. I catch it only from the edges. I don’t go inside more than I have to.
Then I stood on the sidewalk and inhaled her scent.
I scrub a hand over my face. The gold watch clinks against the desk.
The job was supposed to be simple. Sit in the freezing warehouse. Watch the factory. Log the delivery trucks. Map the Bellanti supply lines. Report back to Enzo and Matteo. A standard reconnaissance mission. The kind of mission I can run in my sleep.
But I don’t sleep.
I close my eyes. My father's chair swims into view.
The mahogany wood gleaming under the chandelier.
The silence in the compound. The hollow, aching void where my father should have been.
Matteo finding the body. Dante absorbing the trauma over the phone.
Vincenzo going quiet. Fabio breaking things.
I didn’t break anything. I became the thing that breaks others.
I open my eyes. The blue light of the monitors is sharp and unforgiving.
I look at the surveillance feed of her door. The solid oak barrier.
I am a weapon. Weapons do not have homes or warmth. They are kept locked in dark rooms until they are needed to spill blood.
I’m sitting in the room. I’m waiting to spill blood. But the parameters have changed. I am no longer guarding a family legacy. I’m guarding a woman who defied me on a freezing sidewalk.
My phone buzzes on the desk.
I pick it up. A secure text message from Matteo.
Report.
I stare at the glowing letters. I could tell him the truth — that I abandoned the primary vantage point because a civilian walked into my line of sight, that I commandeered a vacant apartment to guard her, that the war just got more complicated because I have a vulnerable weakness sleeping one floor above me.
I type my response.
Position shifted to clinic roof. Visual on loading bay maintained. Perimeter secure.
I hit send. I drop the phone back on the desk.
It is an outright lie. A dangerous one. I am holed up inside the vacant second floor of her apartment building, miles from the clinic roofline, and I have just told him otherwise.
Matteo doesn't tolerate blind spots in his operations.
Enzo will dissect my shifting geolocation and realize my sightlines are compromised. Santi will simply look at me and know.
Let them.
Let them come. Let them question it. Let the entire Bellanti army march down this street.
I draw my custom 1911 from my shoulder holster. I eject the magazine. I check the brass casings. I slide the magazine back into the grip with a sharp, satisfying click. I rack the slide. A live round chambers.
I place the sidearm on the desk, beside the monitor displaying her door.
She’s right above me. I can almost feel her heat radiating through the floorboards. I can almost smell the spice on the air.
I don’t know how she sleeps. I don’t know if she curls into a ball to protect herself, or if she sprawls out, claiming the space. I don’t know what she wears. I don’t know the sound of her breath when the armor finally drops.
I will know.
I’ll map every inch of her existence the way I map a battlefield. I will learn her routines and memorize her tells. I will secure the entry points, neutralize threats, and shield her in a fortress of my own design until the rest of the world ceases to exist.
She thinks I’m a monster in the shadows. She thinks I’m a thug who bullied her onto a highway.
She’s wrong.
I’m the only thing standing between her and the fire.
I lean forward, my forearms resting on the dusty wood. I watch the static feed of the empty hallway. Hour after hour. The city sleeps. The traffic dies down. The freezing wind rattles the glass of the window I pried open.
I don’t blink. I don’t waver.
I sit in the dark. I guard my woman.
And for the first time in twenty years, I don’t see my father’s empty chair.