By the time I boarded the jet the next morning, engines vibrating under my feet, the warehouse and the bodies left inside it already felt like old news.Irrelevant.A task completed.A problem removed.
All I could think about was her.
Where had she learned to fight like that?
Who had trained her?
And why had a man like that gone after her in the first place?
Neve Trimboli didn’t drift through life by accident.Trouble found her.Or she walked straight into it.Either way, death kept reaching for her and missing, over and over again, like she was some feral little thing with nine lives and claws sharp enough to rip fate apart.
A cat, landing on her feet every time.
And I couldn’t decide if that made her dangerous… or irresistible.
My mind went straight back to Tuscany.To the alley.And the way the girl had moved — fast, precise, ruthless.She had had no hesitation, no fear.And definitely no mercy.
I couldn’t unsee what had happened, no matter how I tried.
I had watched her slit a man’s throat like she’d been born knowing how, with only direct, efficient violence.
And I had underestimated her.
I’d spent days assuming she had no real sense of danger.That she lived in that tiny house because she didn’t care what happened to her.That she walked around Tuscany oblivious, naïve, still that scared girl I’d found hiding in a pantry.
But she wasn’t careless.And she wasn’t oblivious.
She was prepared.
Prepared in a way I hadn’t seen coming, in a way that only fifteen years of surviving alone could carve into a person.
She didn’t wait for rescue.She rescued herself.And the truth hit me hard: her instincts outclassed half the men I commanded.Her reflexes were more defined than soldiers twice her size.Her will to live was brutal, relentless, unbreakable.
Where the hell had she learned that?What had happened between the night I spared her and the moment she carved open a man’s throat in an alley?Because whatever had shaped her… hadn’t created a victim.It had created a monster.
I leaned back in the leather seat, staring at the dim cabin lights while the jet cut through the night.
The mess I’d left behind in Genoa faded the farther we flew.The blood.The bodies.The betrayal.All of it shrank into background noise.None of it held my attention.
All I could think about was her.
Neve Trimboli.
Fate had stepped in to save her more than once.First when I hadn’t pulled the trigger.Then again yesterday, when the bastard who grabbed her had failed to finish what I hadn’t fifteen years ago.
Twice she’d slipped through death’s hands.
And both times, I’d been there to witness it.
Maybe she wasn’t meant to die.
Or maybe — and the thought sat heavy and unwelcome at the base of my spine — she was only meant to die by my hand.
I didn’t know which possibility I hated more.
But one thing was clear: she was no longer the easy kill I’d convinced myself she’d be.She wasn’t the fragile girl I’d left on a convent doorstep.She wasn’t helpless.She wasn’t innocent.She wasn’t a loose thread waiting to be cut.
She could be a problem.