"Mr. Falcone, it's time to choose again." Rocco Greco's voice carried the bored cadence of a man running an auction where the merchandise meant nothing to him. He rubbed one knuckle along the seam of his scar, slow, deliberate, as though recalculating the price of everything in the room. "Who should we pick this time?"
The warehouse was vast and cold, the kind of place where shipping crates had once been stacked floor to ceiling before the Morettis lost their hold on the eastern docks. Now it held only silence, two iron cages bolted to the concrete, a row of overhead lights buzzing with the particular drone that made every second feel longer than the last, and the sharp smell of rust and damp stone. Two of Rocco's men stood near the loading door, arms folded, utterly still. A third leaned against a support column, cleaning his fingernails with the tip of a folding knife. None of them looked at me.
Dante's eyes flicked to Serafina. Her face was pale, drained of color the way old linen goes white when you hold it to sunlight, but her eyes fixed on him and they were full of hope. She knew what she had bought. She knew the script. And still she played the trembling captive with a conviction that could have earned applause, her lower lashes fluttering once too quickly, the way they always did whenever the lie mattered most.
"I choose Serafina!" he shouted firmly.
The words struck the concrete walls and came back as echo. They struck me and stayed.
Rocco smirked, a slow pull at the corner of his mouth that made the scar tissue bunch. He unlocked one of the cages with a key he wore on a chain around his wrist and shoved me inside instead. The iron door slammed shut with a loud clang that rang through the warehouse like a gunshot, vibrating up through the soles of my feet and into my teeth. The dark, cramped space closed in around me, pressing against my shoulders, against my chest, making it hard to breathe. The bars were cold enough to burn where they touched bare skin.
I curled up in the corner, my whole body shaking. Not from the cold. Not entirely. From the specific, crystalline understanding that I had watched every exit seal itself shut in the span of a single name.
My voice cracked as I called out softly, "Dante…"
But outside, there was only Serafina's sobbing and Dante's gentle words as he comforted her. Murmured reassurances I couldn't quite make out, delivered in the low tone he had once used with me after late Sunday dinners at the Falcone estate, back when I still believed that voice meant something. The sobbing rose and fell, theatrical, perfectly timed, and I pressed my thumbnail into the inside of my wrist until a pale crescent appeared, the small pain steadying the larger one.
Only after a long time did he remember me. His voice turned impatient as he spoke. "Name your price. Don't hurt Bianca again."
Rocco laughed mockingly before he responded. "Wonderful! One hundred million. That's enough to buy one life." He paused, let the number settle over the warehouse the way smoke settles over a card table. "So, Mr. Falcone… who do you want to save?"
Dante's answer was sharp and quick.
"Don't touch her. Redeem Serafina."
He practically shouted the words. They echoed the same way the cage door had, ringing off concrete and steel, and the three men by the loading door didn't so much as shift their weight. They had heard this kind of arithmetic before. One life weighed against another, and the lighter one left in the cage.
Meanwhile, I leaned weakly against the cold bars as Serafina was untied. The rope fell away from her wrists and she threw herself into his arms, crying dramatically, her fingers clutching the lapels of his coat as though she might drown without him. I was too exhausted even to curse. The blood in my mouth tasted like copper and something older, something that might have been the last remnant of loyalty finally dissolving.
Dante lifted her carefully, one arm beneath her knees, the other around her shoulders, and looked at me with a complicated expression. Something moved behind his eyes, guilt perhaps, or the faint discomfort of a man who understood the optics of what he was doing but not the weight.
"Bianca, your sister is fragile. I'll take her first. Wait here. I'll transfer the money and come back for you."
He didn't wait for me to reply. Without another glance, he turned and carried Serafina toward the loading door, her face pressed into his neck, her eyes open and dry above his shoulder. She looked directly at me as they passed. The tears had already stopped.
He didn't see that. He never did.
The loading door groaned shut behind them and the warehouse went quiet except for the buzzing lights and the distant sound of an engine turning over outside. Rocco Greco crouched in front of my cage, his leather jacket creaking, and kicked my leg casually through the bars. The toe of his boot caught my shin and a dull flare of pain ran up to my knee.
"Your promised groom is really devoted to her, huh?"
I realized that I was coughing blood, a thin line of it warm on my chin, but I forced myself to sit up straighter. My spine found the bars behind me and I used them the way a soldier uses a wall, as structure when the body wants to fold. I looked at Rocco coldly, directly, the way I had watched my father's men look at each other across sit-down tables when the talking was done and only the numbers remained.
My voice was steady as I asked him. "How much would it cost to save my life? I'll pay you double whatever Serafina gave."
Rocco froze for a moment. The smirk stalled on his face. His hand, which had been resting on his knee, rose slowly, and he rubbed his knuckle along the seam of his scar again, but the rhythm was different now. Faster. The price on a life was changing in his head, and I could see the recalculation happening behind his eyes like tumblers falling in a lock. Then his lips curled into a grin, wide and unguarded, the grin of a man who had just discovered the merchandise was worth more than the buyer.
As I suspected, these men were indeed people ordered by Serafina. Rocco stopped with his act immediately. The pretense of random violence fell away from him like a coat shrugged off, and what remained was simpler and more honest: a freelance enforcer who answered to cash and nothing else.
"Your sister wants you dead," he said boldly, the words carrying no particular malice, just the flat clarity of a business statement. "But we only care about the money."
The warehouse lights hummed overhead. One of his men by the column folded his knife shut with a click and looked at Rocco with the expression of someone waiting for new instructions. The hierarchy in the room had shifted, not dramatically, not with any announcement, but the way a scale tips when someone adds a single coin to the lighter side. Rocco's men could feel it. I could feel it. The woman in the cage was no longer the discarded one. She was the one writing the check.
My hands shook as I pulled out my cracked phone. The screen was spiderwebbed from the abduction, a fracture running diagonally across the glass, but it still responded to my thumb. I called Sofia. She picked up on the second ring, the way she always did when the hour was wrong and the silence before the call was too long. I gave her the account number and the figure. Two hundred million. Wired on the spot.
Sofia didn't ask why. She didn't ask where I was, or what had happened, or whether I was safe. She had been holding evidence for me for months, recordings and footage and documents tucked beyond Moretti reach, and she understood that the moment I called with a number instead of a greeting, the plan had entered its final phase. I heard her touch the screen edge without pressing it, that habitual pause, feeling for whether the truth was intact, and then the transfer initiated.
Rocco's phone buzzed against his thigh. He checked the transfer confirmation, scrolled once, and his eyebrows rose half an inch. He looked at me the way men in this world look at someone they have just reclassified, not with respect, exactly, but with the wariness that comes from realizing you have been underestimating the wrong person.
He jerked his chin at one of his men. The cage was unlocked. The ropes around my wrists were cut with a blade that smelled faintly of gun oil.
I walked out without looking back. My legs were unsteady but I kept them straight, kept my shoulders level, kept my breathing controlled the way I had learned to do in every room where showing weakness meant losing ground. The warehouse door opened onto a stretch of industrial road lined with chain-link fencing and the distant orange glow of dock lights. The night air hit my face, cold and laced with salt from the river, and for the first time in hours I could breathe without tasting iron.
I hailed the first taxi I saw and headed straight to the airport. The driver glanced at me in the rearview mirror, at the blood on my chin and the bruises already darkening on my wrists, and said nothing. London taught its taxi drivers that silence was a service.
Right before boarding, my phone buzzed. One billion appeared in my account. The number sat on the cracked screen like a verdict. A message from Sofia followed.
Dante was fooled. Two days later, their stocks would crash and they would lose their critical technologies.
I stared at my phone screen. The departure gate hummed with the low murmur of passengers and rolling luggage and the distant chime of a boarding announcement. The fluorescent light caught the crescent mark still pressed into the inside of my wrist, pale against the bruises.
A faint smile tugged at my lips.
My revenge had officially begun.
