Chapter 89 Rocco
The air in the room smelled of old leather and black coffee; the air itself was charged, like the house had jumped aboard the same wave that now ran through my veins. Rafael never wasted a breath. He walked to the old bureau, opened a drawer and flipped through it, and pulled out the secure phone we used for the things the rest of the world didn't need to know. His fingers were calm, professional, the face of a man who had weathered a hundred crises before this one.
"I want Killan," he said. Two words which would rally the tech staff like a swarm. Killan had cut his teeth on military contracts, built networks which didn't exist on any public ledger, and hated to lose time on sentiment. He was perfect for tonight.
The line clicked. Within twenty minutes, Killan arrived, panting from driving as if the city itself conspired against him. He was younger than his résumé suggested, but his eyes were constantly alert. Behind him came the rest of them: Ana with her backpack and a coffee stain on her arm; Elvis carrying a backpack that always seemed to be full of something; Toni, who only cracked a smile when there was a drone in the sky. They fanned out across the study like a special forces team taking over a new battlefield.
"Read it to me again," Killan commanded without warning, already opening up a screen on his laptop. Rafael had handed him the phone, and Killan’s thumb followed the message over until the words were as sharp as a knife. He did not blink.
“This sender used a registered burner that was serviced by three shell providers,” Killan informed him, his fingers a blur on the keyboard. "They threaded through VPN nodes in three nations. Someone was attempting to anonymise this." He gazed at him levelly. "But whoever did it used a pattern. Old-school tradecraft. A signature."
Patterns were words. I had learned it the hard way. You did not catch men like that with raw power; you caught them with patience and reading mistakes. "Signature?" I said.
Ana stood up, sliding a photograph down the table, a still shot from a traffic camera months before, grainy but telling. "He likes to play before he kills. Same rhythm, same sneering inflection in all his insults. We cross-checked message timing with CCTV in the area of the old warehouse. There are three discrepancies, vans they shouldn't have had in the area, a bike with temporary plates, and a courier route that doesn't match any registered business.".
Elvis was already spreading a map across the wall screen, tracing circles and lines with a fingertip as if a surgeon charting arteries. "We can triangulate his comms trail, but he's careful. He does air-gapped transfers, throwaway gear. He leaves trails in the world and disappears. If we try to follow him directly, he'll get us into an ambush."
Rafael's jaw twisted. "Then we don't chase him in the open." He looked at me, and I saw steel in his eyes. "We bait him."
Killan’s fingers froze. "Bait?" he repeated. The word was full of a thousand shades of peril.
Yes. I could sense the cold form of the plan taking form. "We make him believe he's got us rattled. We provide him with a morsel , something sufficiently teasing to get him moving, but on our agenda. When he moves, Toni's drones intercept the route. Ana follows the communications, Killan has an ear for the dark net whispers for his handlers, Elvis silences off-pattern payment streams. We follow the money and the messages. He will leave breadcrumbs."
A silence, and then a murmur of agreement. Killan snapped his knuckles. "We can do it. But we do it my way: in isolated compartments. Minimal overlap. If he's the kind of ghost you say he is, we can't risk letting any one’s ego, or any one’s grief contaminate the feed."
Rafael nodded. "You'll have discretion. You'll have loyalty. We'll cut his channels one by one. No fireworks until we know where he sleeps." His voice lowered. "No one else dies because of this stunt."
Rosalia’s name hung between us unspoken for a moment, the air congealing. Elvis’s lips compressed. "We build the bait around her tonight," he said. "Not her, precisely. A scent that screams vulnerability. The kind of scent he'd kill to smell. Then we watch. He won't be able to resist. Narcissists can't."
Killan tapped on the laptop. "We'll plant a decoy trail, a dummied comp, a burner signal, a fake transfer that's as real as it can be. Toni'll have a drone ready to follow any car that responds. Ana and I'll echo the comms. Elvis lock down routes in case he tries to ghost through a dead node.".
“Who's the front?" I insisted. It was always the weak link where the strongest men fell. Whoever led the charge would take the heat. Whoever filled in as decoy had to be made of iron.
Rafael's eyes met mine, and there was that old, unspoken understanding, the one that had kept this family intact through worse storms. "Riccardo and I will be the backstop. You'll be the bait if needed, or we'll deploy Fiorella as our decoy from the property if she's willing. Killan nothing but the core team until we acquire him. Toni, you have drone corridors organised, keep an eye on the skies. Ana , ghost-scan everyone. Elvis, handle payments and dark web scrubs.
Toni nodded, thumbs already sketching flight paths. “I’ll have two drones over the north bridges and one shadowing the old shipyards within twenty minutes of a trigger.” He smiled then, small and ruthless. “He’ll hate the sky.”
The strategy entwined itself into something clean and deadly. No frantic charges, no heavy weapons . We would make him think he was the predator, and when he struck, he'd get caught in a net. That was the only way to beat a ghost who thrived on annihilation.
I had something release in my chest, not relief, but hunger that levelled out the adrenaline. This was what I was made for. This was where I was lethal. The thought didn't make me any less tender with Fiorella; if anything it sliced closer to the need to keep her away from the impending storm.
Killan put the safe phone away into his pocket and turned face-up. "We'll seed probes into the dark web too. He negotiates with handlers. He wants to be noticed. We provide him with a witness."
Rafael took a deep breath, rigid and unyielding. "Then let him look. Let him taunt. We'll show him what becomes of men who believe they can peck at our family like an open wound."
In the study, there was a new rhythm that had started: the slow clicks of keyboards, the constant hum of drones winding up , the subdued, ominous dance of a family set to settle a score.
I stood there, the weight of the moment on my shoulders like armour. "Make it clean," I instructed him. "Make it final."
Killan lip twisted, a cold one. "We'll follow his footprints. We'll leave him with nothing to hide under.".
And as the men dispersed, merging into their darkened and ready positions, the house was no longer home but a war machine waking to fight , all of us gears, ready and pointed. The hunter had returned, but he had chosen the wrong quarry. We would create the map, set the snares, and when he struck, we would cinch the trap.
They fuelled him bait like a monarch unfurling a feast, careful, expensive, immaculate. We grooved to the rhythm of Killan : burners blazing, drones echoing in the night. All of the elements of the trap had been laid out with the type of patience that hardens a man's pride into steel.
When the first ping hit Toni’s feed, everyone leaned in. The drone saw the sedan, engine humming like a heartbeat, tires whispering over wet asphalt. Ana’s fingers flew, pulling the comms thread, triangulating a route. Elvis traced a money trail like a hound catching scent. F
I sat with my back to the window, watching their screens illuminate the room in cold light. Rafael's jaw was a blade. Riccardo slumped over a laptop, coals burning in his eyes. Rosalia sat pale but firm-handed; she'd learned to shrink in this life and frighteningly resilient behind closed doors.
“Move,” Marco said into the secure line. Toni flicked a switch. Drone one swept closer. The sedan turned where the map said it would, into the old industrial strip, the route we’d watched a dozen times, the lane where our cameras had been planted.
For a second the trap was stretched tight. For a second I had let myself believe the ghost would walk into the web we'd created.
Then the message arrived.
Not on any phone we'd been expecting, not on a camera stream. It arrived on Rafael's burner first, a single line of text that glowed on the screen.
Prompt. Impressive response. You won’t catch me though—G.
Rafael’s knuckles whitened on the handset. The room stuttered like an engine misfiring. Killan’s fingers froze. Toni cursed under his breath as the drones tracked the sedan turning away, not toward the trap, but away, slipping down a service alley no camera could see.
"Where had he—" Riccardo started and then stopped, because the response was clear: he'd never been where we'd thought he'd been. He'd been watching us watch him, planning his steps in advance. .
The screens filled with white noise where a clean image should have been. Marco threw protocol after protocol at the pipes, but the ghost had emptied his pockets of anything traceable. Burner to burner, node to node, he’d covered his steps so thoroughly it felt like chasing smoke through a storm drain.
Anger coursed through me, fierce and absolute. I might have pulled the phone from Rafael's grip and tossed it out of the window. The humiliation of being on the verge of being caught, of the trap being sprung at the last gasp, was bitter. "Damn him," I cursed, and my words fell short of what I intended.
Rafael didn't look at me. He folded his hands and let out slow breath, a sigh almost like grief. "He wanted us to notice him," he breathed. "He wanted to remind us he's still here. That he gets to call the shots on when we play along." His voice was laced with something almost respect, the way men sometimes respected tactics even as they criticised the man who used them against them.
I should have been seething with the flash of fury, the hot desire to drag this man out into the light and scorch him to a cinder. But a strand of something colder ran through my chest: the keen, naked thrill of a hunt that had not been finished. He'd provoked us, yes. But he hadn't folded . He'd teased the threat of capture, and then he escaped.
Riccardo slammed his hand into the table. "He played us," he snarled. "We were ready, and he still managed to get past us. That isn't luck. That's skill."
"Or pride," I said. I tasted the word like blood. "He knows our fear. Or wants us to think he does. Either, he decided he'd take tonight to use for his stage."
Rafael's fist came down on the desk in a muffled crash. "We reboot." The command was an ice-glazed thing. "I need to know everything there is to know about this stalker. I need a face and a name.”
There was purpose in the room again. The sting of defeat became something considered. We would be methodical. We would be ruthless in the calculated, efficient way that broke men. The ghost had chosen to play. We would demonstrate to him how badly that decision played.
But as fury curled within me, I sensed something else unfold, a thin, deadly smile that I did not attempt to conceal. He'd attempted something that flashed his arrogance: showing a needle and pulling it back. That's a mistake you can capitalise on. He'd led us to dangle on the edge of being captured; now he'd left his acts on the table for us to dissect.
"It would've been too easy if he'd gotten caught tonight," I said a bit louder than I meant to. "Let him think he outsmarted us. Let him sleep on that pride. Tonight we didn't catch him. But we saw where he wanted us to look. That counts."
Riccardo's eyes caught mine. There was a hungrier look there that I knew all too well. "You're enjoying this," he accused, as sharp as a thrown dagger.
I let out a short laugh. “I’m alive, brother. I’m angry and I’m alive. I’ve wanted him dead for a year. Watching him toy with us like a rat makes me keener.” My fingers curled on the desk, nails biting into the wood. “He wanted to be seen. He’ll be seen again. Only next time, he won’t be the one leaving the message.”
Rafael's gaze was cold and calculating. "We close the net. We make sure there is nowhere for him to go. And when he breathes out in a space we have under our command? We don't watch. We move."
I was thinking two steps ahead; the ghost’s arrogance had given me the angle. If he wanted spectacle, we’d give him darkness. If he wanted to be dramatic, we’d make his funeral a befitting drama.
Before I walked out of the room to get my jacket, I walked over and gazed out at the city that we both had fought to shape with blood. Somewhere among those million windows, he might be gazing back at us looking at him, or he might be a shadow under a bridge, or he might be nowhere.
The thought thrilled me. The thought scared me. The thought made me grin.
We weren’t done. Not by a long measure.