Chapter 91
Enzo
The SUV slid into the private garage, headlights knifing through concrete and steel. Enzo was already there–jacket off over his forearm, tie gone, sleeves rolled, every line of him wound tight.
The engine cut. Silence took the room.
The rear door swung. Lola hopped out–and then she didn’t walk. She launched. He caught her midair without a wobble, her legs cinched around his waist, arms locked behind his neck like gravity had chosen sides.
“I’m sorry if I stink,” she blurted, breath warm against his jaw, half–laughing. “And I’m mad nobody warned me, and I hate everybody a little-” a quick kiss to his cheek, “–but I love that you’re here after my minor accident.”
He didn’t let her slide even an inch. “You’re here,” he said, voice rougher than he meant. That was all that mattered.
Twenty seven hours of air without her.
Now–lungs back, heart back.
Up close, she carried heat and something sweet under it–scorched sugar, adrenaline, relief. It hit him like a vow.
Metal popped behind them. Nico’s men cracked the trunk. A whimper crawled into the quiet.
Lola twisted in his arms just enough to see. She smiled–bright, lethal. “See ya later, bestie.”
The man’s eyes rolled; his knees went to water. He folded back into the trunk with a thud.
A breath edged out of Enzo–too brief to be a laugh. “What did you do to him?”
“We just talked,” she said, unbothered.
His mouth flattened. “Later doesn’t exist for him.”
She tipped her face to his, wicked and soft at once. “We’ll discuss it in the shower.”
Not here. Fine. In steam and tile, then.
Enzo didn’t look away from her. “Take him down,” he told Nico, voice going cold. “Whole. Quiet.”
“Copy,” Nico replied, already moving.
He pressed two fingers to a blank slice of cinderblock beside the vault. A steel plate slid aside with a hydraulic sigh, revealing the real door–matte, thick as a bank. Inside, Nico keyed a second control hidden under a false shelf. The vault’s floor split along hairline seams and lifted, opening a square of black and the first rungs of a stainless ladder.
The man was hauled toward the hatch and vanished into the sublevel–the room Enzo never put on paper: poured in midnight concrete beneath the safe, beneath suspicion; acoustic baffles, independent power, drains that didn’t touch the city. No permits. No blueprints. No echoes.
Only when the hatch sealed did Enzo set Lola back on her feet. His hand slid from her cheek to the soft notch beneath her jaw, thumb fitting like it had been cut for it. “Anything hurt?”
“Just my pride,” she said. “And maybe my hair’s feelings.”
He bent, rested his brow to hers for a long, steady beat. “Shower. Now. Then we’ll talk.“”
1/2
Her mouth tugged. “Deal.”
He flipped the jacket off his forearm and settled it over her shoulders–heavy, warm, proprietary–then turned her toward the elevator with his palm at her waist.
“Boss- Gino started.
Enzo didn’t look back. “Good work.”
Dom added, low, “She kept him busy the whole drive.”
“I noticed,” Enzo said. He could read four hours of her voice right off his face–raw around the eyes, sanded down to nerve.
The elevator doors slid open. Enzo drew her in, close as breath, and the doors sealed on the garage, the men, the hatch.
Second chances. Vengeance. Sweetness at the edge of smoke.
She’s here.
The rest is mine.
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