Chapter 4
This was not mercy.
It was privacy.
“Where is my wife?” Luca asked.
Marco bowed his head.
“I don’t know.”
Luca hit him so hard the sound echoed against the walls.
Marco fell from the pew onto the stone floor. Blood touched his lip. He did not raise his hands.
Luca stood over him. “Wrong answer.”
Marco coughed once, then laughed softly.
That laugh nearly got him killed.
“You still think this is about where she is,” Marco said.
Luca grabbed him by the collar and dragged him up. “Say her name carefully.”
“Isabella,” Marco said, and for the first time his voice cracked. “Isabella Rossi. The only innocent person in your house.”
Luca’s fist tightened.
Marco looked at him with blood on his teeth.
“You want the truth? Fine. I helped them get past the cameras. I gave them the gaps in the patrol routes. I told them when she came back to the mansion. But I did not take her.”
The chapel seemed to grow colder.
Luca’s face emptied of expression.
“Who did?”
Marco swallowed.
“The ones who should have been dead.”
Luca stared at him.
Marco lowered his voice. “You built your empire on buried names. Did you think the graves would stay quiet forever?”
“I asked who.”
Marco’s eyes lifted to the cross above the altar.
“Valentina Moretti.”
Enzo, standing near the entrance, cursed under his breath.
Luca did not move.
Because that name belonged to a ghost.
Valentina Moretti had been the daughter of a man Luca destroyed six years earlier. Her father, Carlo Moretti, had controlled the eastern docks and thought himself untouchable until Luca took his ports, his money, his men, and finally his life. The official story said Carlo died in a warehouse fire.
The unofficial story was worse.
Valentina had disappeared afterward.
Everyone assumed she had run.
Everyone assumed wrong.
“She’s alive?” Luca asked.
Marco nodded.
“And Isabella?”
Marco closed his eyes.
“She was bait.”
Luca’s hand moved to the gun beneath his jacket.
Marco saw it and did not beg.
“Kill me if you want,” he said. “But she planned for that too. Every minute you waste punishing me, your wife gets farther away.”
Luca leaned close.
“Where did Valentina take her?”
Marco hesitated.
This time, Luca pressed the gun under his chin.
“Speak.”
Marco whispered, “Old Moretti theater. Beneath the west district.”
Luca froze.
The Teatro San Aurelio had been abandoned for years after a fire gutted half the building. Luca remembered it because Carlo Moretti had once hosted charity galas there, smiling for cameras while selling guns from the basement.
A ruined stage.
A dead man’s kingdom.
A perfect place for revenge.
Luca released Marco and turned toward the door.
Then Marco said one more thing.
“She told me to tell you something.”
Luca stopped.
Marco’s voice fell.
“She said, ‘Bring no army. Bring the husband. Not the king.’”
Luca looked back.
For a moment, something almost human passed across his face.
Then it vanished.
“Enzo,” Luca said.
“Yes?”
“Put Marco in the car.”
Marco looked up sharply.
Luca’s eyes were dark. “He’s coming.”
The Teatro San Aurelio stood at the edge of the west district like a burned crown.
Its grand entrance was boarded, its posters faded behind cracked glass, its stone angels blackened by smoke and time. Rain slid down their carved faces, making them look as if they had been weeping for years.
Luca arrived with no army visible.
Only Enzo drove him.
But five blocks away, men waited in dark cars with weapons hidden beneath coats and orders to move only if Luca did not return.
He knew he was disobeying the instruction.
He also knew he had no intention of walking into hell without a rope tied to the living.
Marco sat in the back seat, wrists bound, face pale.
Luca stepped out.
May you like
The street was empty.
Too empty.
