Page 16 of Betrayal of the Mafia Rebel
But down here, in the dark, locked safely away from the world, I finally found my home.
6
Fabio
The iron door stays sealed.The freezing damp of the stone means nothing to me anymore. Heat radiates from the woman sleeping on the narrow cot. My body takes up most of the cot. My muscles ache from the cramped angle. I don't care. She's tangled against my chest.
Her warmth is the only counterweight to the violence in mine. The rough woolen blanket covers us both. She breathes deep and even. Her scent sinks into my blood. Ripe figs. Dark honey. Mine. It's the only thing keeping me on the ground.
She's a Bellanti. The enemy. The blood my family has warred against for two decades. None of that matters. She belongs to me. The claim is final. It's bone-deep, blood-deep, louder than every tactical protocol Dominic ever drilled into my head.
The burner phone vibrates on the wooden crate beside the cot.
The mechanical buzz is loud in the silence. It grates against the dripping water echoing from the far corner of the tunnel. My jaw tightens. The same sharp line I inherited from my mother locks down hard when the outside world threatens this sanctuary. I don't want to answer it. I want to smash the device into dust and keep us buried in this hole forever.
The vibration persists. It's the encrypted Costa intel channel. Emergency override.
I carefully untangle my limbs from hers. The cold air bites at my sweat-slicked back. I shift my weight off the protesting springs of the cot. She murmurs in her sleep. Her hand reaches out, fingers brushing the empty space where my chest just was. My chest aches with a phantom pressure. I pull the blanket up over her bare shoulders. I step away. The stone is freezing against my bare feet.
I grab the phone from the crate. The screen glow is blinding in the pitch black. I turn my back to the cot to shield her from the harsh blue light.
The message is a raw packet. It's flagged red from the Costa compound server. I open the text string. The words form a blade in the dark.
It's a broadcast intercept. A blast sent across the Bellanti secure network.
The text is short. Clinical. Lethal.
"Asset Catalina Bellanti successfully deployed. Infiltration of Costa territory proceeding according to protocol. She is a loyal soldier of the family. Do not engage. Allow the Trojan horse to breach the gates."
My blood turns to molten iron.
The air in my lungs evaporates. The damp tunnel shrinks. The stone walls bear down on me. The iron door sits there like a verdict. They're claiming her defection is a lie. They're telling the entire syndicate she's a plant. A fake defector sent to infiltrate my family. A weapon aimed directly at our throats.
The rage is instant. It doesn't ignite. It detonates.
Every muscle in my back strings tight as steel wire. My fist clenches around the plastic casing of the phone. I am twenty seconds away from crushing the device into shrapnel.
I force my eyes to scan the rest of the data. I need tactical clarity. I need to know how much danger she is in.
I scroll down to the raw packet metadata. The routing information blinks in harsh white text against the black background.
The timestamp catches my attention.
The numbers are wrong.
I stare at the digits. I run the chronological sequence in my head. The math is broken.
The packet registered on the main Costa intel stream at nine. It hit our internal servers hours before Catalina even walked out of the shadows and made contact with me. Before she ever stood across from me in the dark and offered me her life.
That is impossible.
If the Bellantis were broadcasting a reactionary cover story for her disappearance, they would have sent it after they realized she was gone. If it was a real-time recovery operation, the timeline would match her flight from the South Side. But this data hit our servers before she even breached the perimeter.
The data moved faster than reality.
The broadcast was sitting inside our stream before any of this should have been possible.
The implication lands with the force of a round between my ribs. There is a breach in the channel. The intel arrived too early. It bypassed the normal filtration protocols. Either the Bellantis have a backdoor into our servers, or something on our end is wrong.
