“You bite me like that,” he snapped coldly, “and I’ll take more than a finger.”
I swallowed hard, shaking, blood dripping down my chin.
But I stared him dead in the eye.Because fear was useless now.
And he saw it - the defiance, the fire - and his lip curled before he turned and walked out of the room.
Men rushed in to drag the corpse out.
And I sat there, drenched in blood that wasn’t mine, choking on metallic heat, with a severed piece of a dead man’s penis still in my mouth.
The realization hit me like a second injury - almost worse than the first.
My mind rejected it, then circled back, then rejected it again.
I didn’t spit it out right away.I couldn’t.I was too stunned.Too horrified.Too damaged in ways I didn’t even have names for.
My hands shook so violently that they blurred in front of me.My breath came in broken, uneven bursts that scraped my lungs raw.Every instinct in my body screamed for me to cry, gag, collapse,fall apart.
But I didn’t.
Because through the shock - through the shaking, the nausea, the part of me that was slipping toward empty, I felt something cold settle in.
A razor’s edge of clarity.
If I was going to survive this, I had be willing to do anything.Anything.There was nothing I wouldn’t do, and no line I wouldn’t cross.
23
Atlas
The second we were back in Siena, Gianni vanished into his phone like a man opening a vein in slow motion.He didn’t pace or curse.He just stood there, eyes hard, scrolling, dialing, hanging up, dialing again—number after number until he hit something that we could latch onto.
If anyone in our world could shake loose a ghost, it was him.Siena was his city in ways the rest of Italy wasn’t.Every crooked banker.Every fixer.Every off-book doctor.Every Russian middleman.They all owed Giannisomething.
And Russians mattered.Because the corpse in that alley had worn the look of one.
And now we had a photo.Sure, he was dead and cold in it—but it was a start.It was theonlystart.
I drifted to the window of the penthouse, the glass cold under my palm as rain smeared Siena into a blur of gold and shadow below.Cars crawled through the streets like glowing veins.Somewhere down there, people were eating dinner, arguing, falling in love.Living small, safe lives.
I wasn’t in that world anymore.
Neve’s face kept bleeding into the reflection—those eyes in the alley, bright and wild, the way she hadn’t hesitated when she cut that man open.She had no fear, no doubt, just the pure instinctual will to live.
Gianni’s voice cut through the room, low and tense as he spoke into the phone.I didn’t turn around as he called in a hundred favors for a woman he didn’t even know.For me.This was Gianni opening doors that stayed locked for a reason.
Because somewhere out there, the man Neve killed had people.
And I had a feeling they were the ones who had her.
“That was Martin Volkov,” he explained, coming to stand beside me.“Odessa-born.He runs logistics for three different Bratva factions.I saved his twin brother from a bullet a few years back, so he owes me.”
“Is he discreet?”
“Very.”
“Will he know the face?”