Drake is less subtle. He corners me in the hallway at Redthorne two days later, his broad frame blocking the path to my office with the deliberate positioning of a man who has decided this conversation is happening whether I want it or not.
"You look like shit, man. So what plan have you come up with to get our girl back? Or are you still wallowing in self-pity like a dumbass?" His gray eyes hold mine with an intensity that reminds me why the Syndicate's enemies learn to fear his attention. "How long are you going to let this go on?"
I don't answer because I don't have one. Every scenario I've run ends the same way: Ilona's face in that hospital bed and the sound of a door closing behind her.
Drake reads my silence the way he reads everything, with a precision that borders on invasive.
"She's not the kind of woman who comes back to a man who waits. She comes back to a man who changes. That’s all the advice I have, brother." His jaw tightens and his hand lands on my shoulder heavier than Kon's had. The gesture carries more frustration and less patience but the same bedrock of brotherhood underneath. "Figure it out, Luca. Before you lose more than your wife."
Drake's words follow me home that evening with the pain of a bruise to my ego. I pour a bourbon I won't drink, light a fire that won't warm me and sink into the armchair where I've spent every night since she left staring at the empty sofa across from me.
That's when the wish finally makes sense.
One minute it's Drake's voice in my head and the next the answer is just there, obvious and brutal and waiting for me to stop being too stubborn to see it.
My fingers go still on the arm of the chair. The fire pops once in the silence and the truth I've been circling finally sinks in.
I've been turning it over for weeks, examining every possible angle. Her words burning against my chest from the jacket pocket where I've carried them since the day I found her red letter wish.
I wish someone would make my mistake disappear.
The answer clicks into place with cold clarity, earned by every wrong interpretation that came before.
The mistake wasn't the baby. The baby was never a mistake, not to her, not from the first moment she pressed her palm against her belly and whispered a promise to protect the life growing inside her.
The mistake wasn't me. Not entirely.
The mistake was trusting me. Giving everything she had to a stranger who turned out to be exactly the kind of man she'd spent her life trying to escape. She didn't want me to disappear. She wanted to undo her own judgment for believing I was worth the risk.
The realization reshapes everything with a simplicity that makes me sick. The truth was always there. I just kept looking at it from the angle that protected my ego. It’s what she was telling me in the hospital and I was too blinded by my own embarrassment and shame to hear her words.
I can't undo what I did. The file exists. The wordsHIGH VALUE as leverageexist in my handwriting. That man is a version of me I want to disown, but pretending he isn't me would be one more lie. And I'm done lying.
But I can give her the one thing I've never given anyone in my entire life.
Total vulnerability.
The meeting happens the next morning in Rafael's office rather than mine.
What I'm about to ask affects every man in this brotherhood, and it deserves neutral ground. Drake leans near the window with his arms crossed. Kon occupies the leather sofa, still as stone. Massimo sits in the chair nearest the door, one ankle crossed over the opposite knee, his whiskey-colored eyes already calculating. Rowan stands against the far wall, his ice-blue gaze sharp beneath the dirty blond hair that never quite behaves. Rafael sits behind his desk, fingers steepled beneath his chin, waiting.
"I need to tell you what I'm planning." I stand rather than sit because sitting feels too comfortable for what I'm about to propose. "And you're not going to like it."
I lay it out the way I'd deliver an intelligence briefing. Flat. Clinical. Facts without emotion. The USB drive. Every file I've ever compiled. Every password, every access code, every piece ofleverage I've gathered over years of operating as the Syndicate's intelligence officer. The Marchetti dossier. The Syndicate's internal operations. The networks spanning Chicago, New York, and New Orleans. Everything I am and everything I've built, compressed onto a device the size of my thumb and handed to a woman who has every reason to use it as a weapon against us.
Drake's reaction is immediate and exactly what I expected. "You're insane." He pushes off the window and crosses his arms tighter, the muscles in his forearms bunching beneath his rolled sleeves. "That drive contains enough to dismantle everything we've built. Every operation. Every asset. Every brother's name and face. You're handing a loaded weapon to a woman who might hate you enough to pull the trigger."
"She won't." The words come out with a certainty I feel in my marrow even though I can't prove it with evidence, which is ironic for a man who has built his life on the doctrine that evidence is the only truth worth trusting.
Kon says nothing. Just holds my gaze long enough for Drake to shift impatiently and Rafael's fingers to tap once against the desk. Then he nods. One nod.
Massimo uncrosses his legs and leans forward, his fingers steepled the way they do when he's drafting worst-case scenarios in his head. "You realize if that drive ends up in the wrong hands, every NDA and contract I've ever drafted becomes toilet paper."
"It won't," I repeat. “That is how much I trust her. She doesn’t trust me, but I put all my faith in her.”
He studies me for a beat, then straightens his cuffs and settles back. "Your funeral. But I want it on record that I objected."
Rowan hasn't moved from the wall. His ice-blue eyes track the conversation the way they track everything, missing nothing, revealing less. When the room goes quiet he finally speaks, his voice low and unhurried.