apter 140
Jake looked up from his bank of screens, face pale under the glow. “We’ve traced Russian chatter–they’re rattled. Swearing up and down they didn’t take her. But…” His fingers flew across keys, pulling up a second feed. “There’s movement from Bellandi’s crew, too. Not just territory flexing. Strategic. Tight. Like they’re covering something.”
Enzo stilled. His jaw flexed.
Bellandi.
The name alone was a blade in his chest.
If it was Rafael Bellandi–if his hands were anywhere near Lola–then tonight would mark the start of a war Vegas hadn’t seen in a generation.
Enzo leaned over the maps, palms braced on the steel. His reflection stared back in the glossy surface–eyes red, jaw bloodied, a man clawing against the edge of breaking.
“She’s out there,” he rasped, voice cracking like thunder. “No body means alive. Alive means findable. And if Bellandi’s crew so much as breathed on her…” His throat locked, teeth grinding. “I’ll make them choke on it.”
The room was silent but for the hum of servers, the click of keys.
Inside, his mind looped the same litany: She can’t be dead. She can’t be dead. She can’t be dead.
He forced air in, out. Forced his voice steady. “We keep burning through the Russians. Every warehouse, every shipment, every front they’ve got. Then we move to Bellandi’s. We don’t stop. Not until she’s back in my arms.”
He straightened, blood drying stiff on his knuckles, chest aching with every breath.
Hold it together. Don’t break. Not until she’s safe.
Rafael
Rafael leaned back against the sterile wall, dark shirt pressed, jacket crisp. Still, he swore he could feel the weight of her blood in his hands, soaking through to his skin, no matter how many times he’d scrubbed it off. The memory clung, sticky and relentless, refusing to wash away.
The monitors hummed soft in the dim light, steady beeps marking the proof she was still here. Lola lay pale against white sheets, silver hair spilling across the pillow, machines tethered to her like lifelines. Not fragile–never that–but thinner now, as though the blast had carved something out of her.
He’d read the doctors‘ reports already. Internal bleeding stopped. A concussion. Shrapnel stitched. Burns along her side and arm. Not fatal -barely–but only because luck or fate or whatever devil watched over her refused to let go. She should have died twice over. She hadn’t.
He studied her face, every sharp angle of it. The woman who’d tattooed him at the expo with a tongue as sharp as her needle, throwing out facts about squid nerve bundles like it was small talk. The fiancée of Enzo Marchesi, claimed but not contained. The girl bleeding across his lap, lips still curved like she’d won the last word. The stripper the Russians called Cinnamon, dancing like sin under lights that should’ve burned her alive.
Too many lives. Too many masks.
1/3
11:00 Wed, Oct 8 M
F
$65
Fluent in Italian, Mandarin, Spanish, Russian–hell, even a line item noting she’d once studied a “constructed language” of elves.
And buried in it all, a single note: missing since the age of nine, reported as Lolana Witmore. Parents bankrupt soon after, fortune gone, case still open.
Verify captcha to read the content
Comments
The readers' comments on the novel: Accidentally Yours (Merffy Kizzmet)