Page 92 of Break For Me
The assassin was already inside.
"We need to get to Alessandro," Adrian says, his voice perfectly controlled.
I look at our heavy oak bedroom door. The closed door. The locked door. The door that opens directly onto a corridor currently patrolled by Falcone soldiers who nod and sayDocand carry loaded weapons from our armory and have the override codes to every room in this building. The long corridor that leads to Alessandro’s quarters, to Killian’s, to the infirmary.
To Elena’s room down the hall, where a twenty-two-year-old girl sleeps deeply behind a wooden door that any inner perimeter guard can open with a swipe card.
"We can’t trust the corridor," I say, my voice tight. "We can’t trust the guards. We can’t trust anyone in this entire building until we know exactly who sent him and how deep the rot goes."
Adrian’s hand tightens forcefully on my shoulder. His fingers press deep into the trapezius muscle. The same exact grip, the same five points of contact. The same hand that held my wounded arm on a dirty motel bed, picked a heavy padlock with a bent pen clip, and threw a brass lamp at an assassin’s head in the pitch dark.
"We’re trapped," I say.
The white feathers settle silently on the floor around us. The unconscious man breathes his ragged breaths. The compound is quiet—the exact same quiet it held five minutes ago. The same quiet it held when I fell asleep with Adrian’s hand resting securely on my chest and believed, for the very first time in my entire life, that the wordsafeapplied to me.
The word was wrong. The massive stone walls we built face outward. The threat is already inside.
And the man bleeding on the floor is wearing our uniform.
Chapter Twenty-Six
ROCCO
I zip-tieMarco Bellini’s wrists behind his back with a strip I pull from the go-bag under the bed.
The go-bag was Adrian’s idea. He packed it three weeks ago—first aid supplies, a change of clothes, two spare magazines, zip ties, a flashlight, a burner phone.
I told him he was being paranoid. He told me that paranoia was a clinical term for a pattern-recognition system operating at elevated sensitivity, and that given our history, elevated sensitivity was the baseline.
The bag sits under the bed. Marco Bellini lies on the floor. Adrian is right about everything, always. I’m never going to tell him that.
I gag Bellini with a strip of torn bedsheet. His eyes are open now. The concussion is clearing. He sees me above him. He sees the Glock in my hand. He sees Adrian standing by the door with the suppressed Sig.
Bellini’s eyes are defiant. Not afraid. Defiant. Practiced. He believes in what he’s doing.
I pull the gag down.
"Who sent you?"
He spits. The saliva hits my bare chest and runs down the Madonna. I don’t wipe it away. The contempt is personal. This isn’t a hired gun—this is a believer.
"The old ways are coming back," he says. His voice is steady. Rehearsed. The words have the polished surface of a phrase said in whispered circles, in back rooms. "Your brother made the family weak. The marriage. The Irish. The faggot surgeon playing doctor in our house. Salvatore understood what the family needed. Salvatore?—"
I push the gag back in. I’ve heard enough.
The name is a detonation charge buried in the foundation of everything I’ve built.
Salvatore. Our father. The man who ran the family into the ground with brutality and short-sightedness. The man whose exit—quiet, clinical, administered by the family council with Alessandro’s blessing—was supposed to end the old regime and begin a new one. The man who is supposed to be dead.
Or exiled. Or contained. Or whatever sanitized verb Alessandro used when he told me the problem had been handled.
The old guard. The soldiers who served under Salvatore before Alessandro took the chair. The men who watched a young Don restructure their world—alliances with the Irish, a marriage to a Kavanagh, tolerance of things the old regime would have punished with pliers. They decided that the new ways were a cancer and the cure was a bullet in the bedroom.
I look at Adrian. He’s processing the same data I am. His face is the clinical mask—but the eyes behind the lenses are doing the rapid, lateral computation of a man who has just realized that the house he lives in is a body riddled with tumors he can’t see.
"How many?" he asks. How many soldiers in the compound are Salvatore loyalists. How many nods in the corridor weregenuine. How many “Doc”s were spoken by men who were planning to kill the Doc’s lover in his sleep.
"I don’t know," I say. "And that’s the problem."
