Chapter 14 Chapter Fourteen
LILA
The pain wasn't a sharp scream anymore. It was a low, vibrating hum that seemed to originate from my very marrow. It felt as if someone had taken a tuning fork to my bones and struck it with all their might. My vision was a blurred mess of white laboratory lights and the dark, sweeping shadows of men moving around me.
I was strapped to a chair now, but it wasn't the wooden chair from the dungeon or the metallic cot from the boat. This was a piece of high-tech machinery, tilted back at an angle that made me feel like I was perpetually falling. My arm was extended, a series of transparent tubes snaking away from a needle buried deep in my vein.
The blood moving through those tubes didn't look like normal blood. Under the harsh, ultraviolet scanners they were passing through, it glowed with a faint, ghostly violet hue.
"Magnificent," a voice murmured.
I blinked, trying to clear the fog. Kaito was standing over a monitor, his face illuminated by the data streaming across the screen. Beside him, the old man... the Oyabun leaned on a cane made of dark, polished jade.
"The sequence is intact," the old man said, his voice trembling with a greedy sort of excitement. "Isabella Moreno was a genius. To hide a digital encryption key within a living mitochondrial strain... the Westerners never would have looked for it."
"How long until we have the full bypass?" Kaito asked.
"Another hour for the primary scan," the old man replied. "Then we begin the synthesis. Once we have the copy, the girl is no longer necessary."
No longer necessary. The words hit me like a bucket of ice water. I had survived the cliffs of Sicily and the bed of a mafia don, only to be turned into a biological hard drive in a skyscraper in Tokyo.
I tried to move my fingers. They felt heavy, like they were made of stone. The drug they had pumped into me wasn't just a sedative; it was a paralytic. I could see and hear, but my body belonged to the machines.
I looked at the tubes again. My blood. My mother’s legacy. She hadn't just given me her eyes or her grace as a dancer. She had turned me into a safe.
"You're awake again," Kaito noted, turning his cold, blue eyes toward me. He walked over and tapped the tube. "Don't look so horrified, Lila. Most people live their whole lives without ever being worth three million euros. You’re worth billions. You are the single most valuable piece of architecture in the global market."
"Kill... you," I managed to whisper. The word felt like it was being squeezed out of a dry sponge.
Kaito smiled. It was a thin, joyless expression. "With what? Your glare? You’re a dancer, Lila. You spin in circles for men with money. Now, you’re finally spinning for something that matters."
He leaned down, his face inches from mine. "Matteo Russo is dead. Vittorio Valenti’s men were sloppy, but they were numerous. No one survives a blast like the one that hit that study. Your 'husband' is a ghost, and your father is a coward. You have no one."
He was lying. I knew he was lying. I could feel it in the way the air in the room felt tight the same way it felt before a storm back in Palermo. Matteo wasn't a man who died in a blast. He was the blast.
I closed my eyes, searching for that spark inside me. The "flame" they all kept talking about. If my mother had put this code in my DNA, maybe she had put something else there too.
“Every mark. Every curve. Mine.” Matteo’s voice echoed in the back of my mind. It wasn't a comfort, but it was an anchor. He had claimed me like an empire, and empires didn't just crumble because a few Valentis showed up with guns.
I focused on the point where the needle entered my skin. I couldn't move my arm, but I could feel the cold fluid entering my system. I started to breathe, slow and rhythmic, the way I did before a performance at Club Nero.
In through the nose. Out through the mouth.
I imagined the blood flowing back into the tubes. I imagined the violet light turning into a fire.
Suddenly, a red light began to flash on the monitor. A high-pitched alarm started to wail, cutting through the sterile silence of the lab.
"What is happening?" the old man shouted, gripping his cane.
"The sequence is fragmenting," Kaito said, his voice tight with panic. He hammered at the keyboard. "The stress levels in the host are spiking. Her heart rate is hitting two hundred. If we don't stabilize her, the code will corrupt."
"Do whatever it takes!" the old man roared. "Inject the stabilizer!"
Kaito grabbed a second syringe, this one filled with a thick, milky-white fluid. He moved toward the port in my IV line.
This was it.
I didn't try to fight the paralytic. I leaned into it. I let my heart race even faster, pushing my body to the absolute limit of its endurance. My vision began to swim with black spots, but I didn't stop. I thought about Sofia. I thought about the way the sea looked from the cliffside villa. I thought about the ring on my finger.
The alarm grew louder.
"Her blood pressure is critical!" a technician shouted. "She’s going into cardiac arrest!"
Kaito hesitated, the syringe hovering over the tube. He looked at me, and for the first time, I saw a flicker of doubt in those cold blue eyes. He didn't want to kill the asset.
In that moment of hesitation, the doors to the laboratory didn't just open. They vanished.
A massive explosion tore through the reinforced steel entrance. The shockwave knocked Kaito off his feet and sent the technician flying across the room. Glass shattered, and the blue LED lights flickered and died, leaving only the red emergency strobes.
Smoke poured into the room, thick and black.
Through the haze, I heard the sound of suppressed gunfire. Phut. Phut. Phut.
The guards at the back of the room dropped before they could even draw their weapons.
I felt the restraints on my wrists snap. Not because the machine broke, but because someone had sliced through the leather straps with a blade.
A pair of strong, familiar hands grabbed my shoulders, pulling me upright. The tubes ripped out of my arm, and I felt a sharp sting, but the paralytic was already beginning to fade as the adrenaline took over.
"I told you," a voice growled in my ear. "You were supposed to ruin me."
I blinked, the smoke clearing just enough for me to see his face.
Matteo.
He looked like he had stepped out of a nightmare. His suit was gone, replaced by tactical gear that was stained with soot and blood. His face was a mask of grime, except for his eyes, those dark, obsessive eyes that were currently burning with a terrifying light.
"You're alive," I whispered, my voice returning in a rush.
"I'm a Russo," he said, his voice a low rumble. "We don't die until the bill is paid."
He scooped me up in his arms, his strength a solid, grounding presence in the chaos. He didn't look at the old man or Kaito, who was struggling to get to his feet. He just turned and headed for the exit.
"Wait," I said, pointing to the monitor. "The code... they have a partial scan."
Matteo didn't stop. He pulled a small, black device from his belt and tossed it over his shoulder onto the main server bank.
"Not anymore," he said.
A second later, a brilliant white light engulfed the back of the room as the servers melted into a heap of useless slag.
"The Moreno Loyalists?" I asked as we ran through the hallway. "Kaito said they saved you."
"They didn't save me," Matteo said, firing his handgun over my shoulder at a guard who appeared around a corner. "They joined me. Your father has been paying a private army for twenty years to wait for this day. It seems Enzo Moreno isn't as much of a coward as I thought."
We reached the elevator bank, but instead of the doors opening, the entire floor shook.
"They’re cutting the power," Matteo hissed. He looked at the emergency stairs. "Seventy floors. Can you walk?"
"I'm a dancer," I said, finding my feet as he set me down. "I can move."