Page 71 of The Rook’s Obsession

Vincenzo’s eyes haven’t left Ivy. He hasn’t blinked. He looks like a man watching his own house burn down from across the street.

“Everything that happened in that room tonight is on video,” I tell him. “Every second. Every detail. It’s been uploaded to a secure server that neither you nor anyone in your organization will ever find. The footage is tied to a dead man’s switch linked to both of our names. If anything happens to either of us—and I mean anything at all, at any point, for the rest of our lives—the footage goes live. Every news outlet in Italy, every associate in your family’s network. Every law enforcement agency with an interest in your operation. All of it, everywhere, all at once.”

The street is very quiet. One of the guards looks to Vincenzo, waiting for instructions. The other is looking at me, obviously calculating the distance between us, the angle, the odds. I’ve already run through all of it. If he moves, I’ll be faster. I have to be.

“Your best option,” I continue, “is to walk away. Let us live in peace. Let Ivy live in peace. No more surveillance or kill orders, no more men sent to track her down. It’s over. She’s done. In exchange, the world never has to see Vincenzo Russo on all fours with a tail shoved up his ass, getting his nose rubbed in his own piss.”

The words land like I hit him. I watch it. His jaw clenches, his nostrils flare, his hands curl into fists at his sides. For a long, terrible moment, I see something in his eyes that goes beyond anger. It’s the look of a man confronting the end of everything he’s built, every wall he’s erected, every carefully maintained fiction about who he is. It’s the look of a man who understands with absolute clarity that he has lost.

“You—” His voice comes out rough, broken. He clears his throat and tries again, and when he speaks, his accent is thicker than I expected, the English strained. “You were in my room.”

It isn’t directed at me. It’s directed at Ivy.

She doesn’t answer. She doesn’t need to. She stands there with her arms at her sides and lets him look at her. She lets him see the face he trained and molded and controlled all those years. The weapon he built.

I watch the recognition settle into him. Not only that she was in the room, that she saw everything. It’s that the girl he raised, the assassin he created, stood over him while he crawled on his hands and knees and begged to be degraded, and he never for a single second knew it was her.

His hand moves to his jacket.

I step in front of Ivy. My weapon is in my hand before I’ve finished the thought. Behind me, I feel her move, feel her hand close around my arm—not pulling me back, just there. Steady. Ready.

Vincenzo pulls a gun.

Time stretches. Every detail sharpens. The streetlight reflecting off the barrel. The mist on the cobblestones. The sound of Ivy’s breath behind me. The guard to Vincenzo’s left reaching for his own weapon.

I’m ready to take the bullet. I’ve made peace with it in the space between one heartbeat and the next, the way I’ve been trained to. If it means she walks away from this alive, I’ll take whatever he gives me.

Then Vincenzo turns the gun to his left and fires twice.

The first guard drops. The second guard has half a second to register what’s happening before the third shot takes him down. Both men hit the cobblestones with the heavy, final sound of bodies that won’t be getting up.

The street echoes, then silence.

Vincenzo stands over them with the gun still in his hand, the barrel smoking in the damp air. His face is blank, expressionless. Empty. The mask is back—not the one Ivy wore, but the one he’s worn his entire life. The iron hand. The man who eliminates problems with the efficiency of someone crossing items off a list.

He just killed two of his own men. Not because they threatened him, but because they heard what I said. Because they knew what he does on Thursday nights, and Vincenzo Russo does not leave witnesses.

He looks at me, then Ivy, before turning back to me again.

He doesn’t say a word. He only tucks the gun back into his jacket, buttons it with steady hands, then walks to the black sedan waiting at the curb. The driver doesn’t get out. Vincenzo opens his own door, gets in, and closes it behind him. The engine is already running. The car pulls away from the curb, moves down the street, then turns a corner.

My heart is hammering so hard I feel it in my fingertips.

I holster my weapon before turning to Ivy. She’s standing exactly where she was, half in shadow. Her face is blank. Not calm, but completely blank. Whatever she’s processing, it’s happening somewhere I can’t see. “Are you hurt?” I ask.

“No.”

“Are you⁠—”

“I’m fine.”

She’s not fine. I know she’s not. But she’s alive, and I’m alive, and Vincenzo just drove away from us instead of putting bullets in our heads. Right now, that’s going to have to be enough.

I pull out my phone and text Liam’s team. Stand down. Target departed. Two casualties, not ours. Seconds later, they let me know they’re on their way.

These two men woke up this morning thinking they’d go home tonight. They did their jobs, stood where they were told to stand, and died because the man they worked for couldn’t afford to let them live with what they had heard.

I’ve seen worse. I’ve done worse. But something about the casual efficiency of it—the way Vincenzo didn’t flinch or even look at their faces—sits in my stomach like ice.