LOGINMarco was the first to move, he pulled up a second monitor, cross-referencing the timeline Sofia had built weeks earlier; the resignations, the forged signature, the pattern of infiltration stretching back two years before Dante had even died. "If he's a handler," Marco said, "that means he doesn't just watch. He reports back to someone and he's carrying information right now. Names. Locations and whatever intelligence he's gathered on this house since the day he first showed up at that fence line." "Which means he's worth more to us than any of the men in Sofia's files," Lorenzo said slowly, his voice cutting straight through the air in the room. "The traitor inside the company. Moretti. Ricci and whoever else. We've been chasing paperwork and forged signatures for weeks. While this man has actually stood in a room with them." Marco's mouth curved into a smile either, the same expression Lorenzo remembered from years ago, the look he always wore right when his plan started coming t
They dragged him through the vineyard rows with his hands bound behind him and mud smeared up one side of his jaw where Lorenzo had put him down, and not once through the entire walk did the man stop wearing that same faint, satisfied expression, like a guest arriving fashionably late to a party he'd already decided he was going to enjoy and it unsettled Lorenzo.Marco walked half a step behind the prisoner the entire way, close enough to grab him if he tried anything funny but just far enough to study him without it being too obvious. Lorenzo caught the exact moment his old friend's expression shifted, Marco's jaw had tightened in a way that had nothing to do with anger."Do you know him?" Lorenzo asked quietly, falling into step beside him."No." Marco's eyes never left the back of the man's head. "But I know what he is.""What do you mean?""Take a good look at his hands." Marco nodded toward the prisoner's bound wrists, where the man's fingers hung loose, unbothered, there was not
By nine that evening the property had gone completely dark. Marco had ordered half the perimeter lights killed, leaving only the essential ones that were burning near the house itself, turning the eastern treeline into a wall of shadows. To anyone watching from a distance, it would look like carelessness, like a family that was finally letting its guard down after a long week of tightened security.Lorenzo stayed crouched in the brush forty meters from where the figure had stood twice now, his earpiece silent and the radio traffic minimal by design. Then, Marco's voice came through low and even."Team two in position on the access road. There's nothing yet.""Copy."The wait stretched past twenty minutes and just long enough that Lorenzo's knee began to ache against the cold ground and he'd began running through the possibility that tonight would be the night the pattern finally broke and that whoever this was had sensed the shift in the house and simply stayed back home.He used the
The salute replayed in Lorenzo’s mind, long after the screen had gone blank. He sat with it all through that night and never stopped turning it over in his head, to him, a mock salute wasn't fear, it was contempt. Early the next morning, Lorenzo was in the security office before Marco arrived, he'd showered, dressed, and eaten nothing, and when Marco walked in still rubbing sleep from one eye, he stopped in the doorway when he saw him. "You're up early." "I'm done watching a screen wait for him to show up again," Lorenzo said. "So we're going to go find him instead." "You want to hunt him." Marco's eyes shut open as the exhaustion faded away. "Exactly, I'm done being the one standing behind glass." Marco stared at him for a long moment, like he used to do during the earlier years when Lorenzo would come to him with plans that were crazy enough to get them both killed. "Finally," he said, satisfaction settling on his face. They spent the entire morning by the map table. Marco
Sofia found Lorenzo still hunched over the security footage, in the study again that evening, as his eyes also scrutinized the folder from the day before that had Dante's man, the traitor, still sitting untouched beside Adrian Moretti's photograph which has been pushed to the corner of the desk like it could wait. "You should eat something," she said. "I already did.” "Ohh…right." His eyes stayed fixed on the monitor as it cycled silently through the feeds from the gate, the garden and the long gravel drive. "Marco's spiraling," Sofia said, taking the seat across from him and folding her hands. " He's not, he's just thorough." "I know, Lorenzo but then there's a difference between thorough and obsessed." Her voice had an edge to it now. "I watched him send four separate messages to a contact in Milan this morning requesting satellite coverage of the estate. Satellite coverage! Lorenzo, for just one man who stood near a tree line for ninety seconds." "Would you rather he did no
By morning, the villa had taken on a completely new face. There were new cameras everywhere on the outer wall in places that hadn't held cameras the day before, they were mounted at sharper angles that previously held blind spots nobody saw angles until last night. Two additional guards were stationed on the perimeter as they walked in slow, overlapping steps instead of one. The main gate, which had once opened for family cars without as much as a glance from the men stationed there, now required a code, radio call, and visual confirmation from two separate posts before it was allowed to move an inch.Lorenzo stood at the study window with an untouched cup of coffee as he watched the tree line where the figure had vanished the night before over and over again. It remained green and still exactly the way it always had been and the sight of it alone made the back of his neck prickle.Marco entered without knocking, he was clutching an ipad in one hand while dark circles carved deep u
The metallic click did not echo. It didn’t need to. In a confined passage like this, where every breath already felt too loud, the tiniest sound was sharp enough to cut straight through instinct and land somewhere that recognized danger before the mind could name it. Lorenzo stopped. Not a gradua
The walked into the passage and it closed behind them with a quiet, final click. And just like that, the noise of the mansion was cut off though not completely but now reduced and distant, muted into something less immediate, yet somehow more dangerous… like a storm you could no longer see, only fe
The sound hit Isabella like a physical blow; everything stopped, not the gunfire or movement or even the chaos tearing through the corridor. Just her. And her body locked in place, her breath catching painfully in her throat as her mind struggled to process what she had just heard. That voice…
The sound of that voice didn’t just fill the corridor, it settled deep into Lorenzo’s bones.Familiar.Too familiar.The man began to take slow, controlled steps forward towards Lorenzo. The dim light caught the side of his face first, displaying his sharp jaw, composed expression and eyes that hel







