Chapter 16
“You think this is a game? You think ghosts post themselves in Ferrante safehouses?” I shoved the photo in their faces, voice like razors. “You all got one job. To find the leak, track the enemy, and protect what’s mine. And now I’m the one piecing the puzzle while you stand here with your cocks in your hands and nothing but excuses.”
I made them go over every report. Every CCTV location. Every whisper from the streets. Repeated until their voices cracked and their nerves bled out on the floor. When I was done, I walked out like the devil himself was breathing down my back.
I changed into a black coat and headed out alone.
I went to the lowest corners of this fucking city–places where the air stinks of rot and bullets, and the rats are smarter than most men. I found one of my old informants hiding under a tarp behind a butcher stall, and the second he saw me, he tried to run.
I pinned him to the wall by his collar and he didn’t even fight. He just stared, terrified, then croaked, “I saw her. Two nights ago. Black curls. Big eyes. Didn’t look lost, boss… looked like she came back to burn the city.”
That sentence fucked me sideways.
went quiet. She faked it.
She faked her death and left me to grieve her ashes like a fool.
Then I left.
Didn’t say a word to Elodie when I passed through the house again. She was in bed, pretending to be sick, and coughed real sweet when she saw me walk by, but I didn’t even blink. Didn’t touch her. Didn’t ask. She called my name like she was dying and I kept walking.
My phone rang–Lara.
let it ring four times before I answered.
‘Your wife is pregnant,” she spat, “She’s sick and weak and you’re out chasing shadows.”
‘She’s not my wife,” I said, slow and brutal. “She’s a placeholder. And I’m done playing house.”
hung up before she could curse again.
ordered my men to meet me at the cemetery. Midnight. Rain already pouring like a curse, thick and heavy like the guilt I kept trying to kill.
We dug the grave with our own hands.
Mud soaked through my sleeves. I didn’t stop.
The stench hit first–death, rot, and lies. Maggots writhed in the fabric of the corpse when we opened the casket, but I didn’t flinch.
I looked at the body long and hard, and I said, “Take it to my guy. Underground. I want the truth in
an hour.”
We drove in silence. Only the sound of my rage humming under the rain.
At the lab, my pathologist waited–the only man I trusted enough to work in shadows.
He peeled gloves on and examined everything. Teeth, ribs, skull markers.
4:50 pm DDD
Thirty minutes passed in dead silence. Then he looked at me and said what I already knew deep down.
“It’s not her. This body isn’t Danica Monroe.”
I stood there. My hands open. My heart still.
Then I started laughing.
Low at first. Then louder. Broken and dangerous.
“She’s alive? She fucking played me!”
And God help anyone in my way… because I will find her. And when I do–there won’t be a secon funeral.
2
I took a shower and let the water scald my skin raw like it could burn the ghosts out of me, but it didn’t. The water couldn’t wash her voice out of my head or erase the scent of her from the back of my lungs. Every time I closed my eyes, it was Danica I saw not Elodie, not the fucking empire just her. Laughing on that beach in Amalfi, barefoot and free, her head tilted back while she said “I’m done begging.”
She wasn’t bluffing. She was warning me. And I didn’t listen.
I gripped the sink after and looked at my reflection like I was staring down the devil himself. The bastard in the mirror wasn’t a brother, wasn’t a fiancé, wasn’t a Don. He was just a man who los the one woman who made him forget what blood felt like.
I opened the drawer in my study and pulled out the letter–the one she left behind that’s burned into my brain.
“I know you’re my fiancé, Harvick. You’re not Jeremiah, no matter how many times you lie to my
face.
I heard you and your mother. I heard everything. You chose Elodie over me. You didn’t even blink.
I feel sorry for the child I aborted. But I feel more sorry for myself–for believing you. For giving everything to someone who never planned to stay.”
Her handwriting used to be soft, feminine, like it smiled when it spoke. But that letter? It cut like a blade dipped in gasoline.
I sat back, closed my eyes, and whispered under my breath, “You thought you could disappear from me, baby? Nah. You’re mine.”
Then my burner buzzed.
One vibration in the coat pocket. One message that ripped the room in half.
“How does it feel to fake your own death?”
-Silenc3r
My hands went still. My chest burned like a pipe bomb went off beneath my ribs. My eyes scanned the screen twice, and all I could do was whisper, “You’re not just alive… you’re at war
with me.”
I stood up. Walked to my office. The air around me turned colder with every step. My men were waiting outside the door, and when I stepped out, their spines straightened like they knew the
storm was coming.
“Activate Shadow Protocol,” I said without blinking. “I want heat signatures from Nerona to Rovetta traced. I want every satellite live. I want every flagged bank transaction, every black–market whisper, and every fucking voice that’s ever mentioned her name cross–checked with my deadlist.”
They nodded, too afraid to breathe wrong.
“And find out who the fuck Silenc3r is. Because if he’s touching my woman…”
I lit a cigar, stared through the smoke, and bared my teeth like a wolf..
“…I’m killing him last.”
